Проблемы китайского и общего языкознания. К 90-летию С. Е. Яхонтова

 503  The Eastern Himalayan Corridor in Prehistory   verbal agreement morphology raised the question in my mind whether Ku- sunda might be the remnant of the same ancient Greater Yenisseian migration into the Himalayas. Subsequently, evidence was adduced to argue that the Yenisseian lan- guages are genetically connected to the Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit a.k.a. Na- Dené languages of North America [Vajda 2010]. Vajda called his hypothesis ‘Dene-Yeniseic’. I introduced the term ‘Dene-Yenisseian’ to refer to the puta- tive linguistic phylum comprising Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit, Yenisseian, Ku- sunda and Burushaski, with no explicit hypothesis at present for the structure of the phylogenetic tree connecting these four branches [van Driem 2014]. In this context, the Y chromosomal lineages of the Kusunda tell us an illuminat- ing story of immediate relevance to the Greater Yenisseian hypothesis and to Himalayan ethnolinguistic prehistory, but these data have yet to be published in the population genetic literature. In a methodologically rigorous appraisal, [Gerber 2013] challenges the idea that a linguistic relationship can even ever be reconstructed at the pu- tative time depth assumed for such a distant genetic relationship. In other words, entities such as Greater Yenisseian or Dene-Yenisseian may very well lie beyond the linguistic event horizon. At the same time, Gerber’s critical and detailed discussion of possible correspondences provides ample food for thought and numerous leads for further research. Recently, [Gerber forth- coming] has adduced additional data and analyses, which justify him in re- placing my name ‘Dene-Yenisseian’with his own coinage Dene-Kusunda for the putative linguistic phylum. South of the great Himalayan divide, the paternal haplogroup H appears to be associated with the indigenous populations of the Indian subcontinent, and this paternal lineage remains preponderant in today’s tribal population, scheduled castes and the gypsies [Rai et al . 2012]. The Indian origins of the the gypsies or Rroma was already argued in 1783 by Grellmann on the basis of their language, culture and physical appearance. The veracity of this thesis was linguistically demonstrated by August Friedrich Pott in 1844, who nar- rowed the provenance down to North India. This linguistic proof was popu- larised in Prosper Merimée’s 1846 novella Carmen . Subsequent linguistic analysis yielded specific inferences about the Rroma route of migration. [Grierson 1922] propagated the idea that the ‘Gipsy languages’ were of ‘Dardic origin’, but [Turner 1926] demonstrated that the Romani languages were not Dardic, but belonged to the same central Indo-Aryan subgroup as Hindi. The presence of Burushaski loans in Romani [Berger 1959], the lack of Arabic loans and the presence of Dardic, Georgian, Ossetian, Armenian and mediaeval Greek loans [Hancock 1995] indicated that the Rroma migrated