The diffusion of Chukchi “magic words” in Chukotkan and St. Lawrence Island Yupik folklore texts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The languages of the Siberian Yupik region, including Chukotka in the Russian Far East and St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, have been heavily influenced by Chukchi, a genetically unrelated language. In this paper, I focus on Chukchi influences on Yupik folklore. Apparently meaningless “magic words” or formulae used in Yupik tales often appear to be of Chukchi origin. In Chukotka, their Chukchi origin is sometimes recognized by speakers of Yupik, but on St. Lawrence Island, the origin and meaning of the “magic words” is not recognized. The existence of “magic words” provides us with information about the sociolinguistic relationship between Siberian Yupik speakers and Chukchi. The Chukchi were in a position of power with respect to the Siberian Yupiget since they were more numerous, and since the Yupiget depended on them for trade. As a result, the Yupiget saw their Chukchi neighbours and their language as threatening and mysterious, and expressed this feeling by having the foreign protagonists of their tales talk in this strange language.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".