Karasuk languages
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Karasuk | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution: |
Central Siberia and northern Pakistan |
| Genetic classification: |
— Karasuk |
| Subdivisions: |
|
Karasuk is a language family proposed by George van Driem[1] of the University of Leiden that links the Yeniseian languages of central Siberia with the Burushaski language of northern Pakistan.
The family is named after the Karasuk culture, which existed in Central Asia during the Bronze Age in second millennium BCE. Van Driem postulates the Burusho people took part in the Indo-Aryan migration out of Central Asia that resulted in the Indo-European conquest of the Indian sub-continent, while other Karasuk peoples migrated northwards to become the Yenisei. These claims have recently been picked up by linguist Roger Blench.[citation needed]
The evidence for Karasuk is mostly morphological. For example, the second-person singular prefixes on intransitive verbs are [gu-, gó-] in Burushaski and [ku-, gu-] in Ket.
Although van Driem apparently does not endorse the Dené-Caucasian proposal, which traditionally includes both Yeniseian and Burushaski, his Karasuk proposal will need to be considered when evaluating such claims.
