How far west into Asia have Eskimo languages been spoken, and which ones?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has long been suggested by archaeologists that Eskimo-speaking groups were present along the coasts of northeastern Asia much further west than their present confinement to the tip of the Chukotkan Peninsula suggests. However, little linguistic evidence confirming this has been adduced. The pitfalls of misinterpretation of early word-list materials is illustrated with an examination of the facts and non-facts concerning the so-called Anadyr Eskimos supposed to have been met in the early 19th century far to the west, speaking what looks like the Naukanski language of East Cape. With the availability of new data on recently extinct Kerek, it is possible to put together from the hitherto sparse phonological and lexical data a plausible hypothesis that explains, among other things, certain prosodic features of coastal Chukotian languages in terms of a relatively recent Yupik Eskimo substratum all the way to the Kamchatkan isthmus. These features largely coincide with the areas where the original Chukotian vowel harmony system has broken down, in an almost contiguous coastal strip cutting across major language boundaries. This is set within a broader scenario for the spread of successive waves of Eskimo languages on the Asian side, back from their focal area around Bering Strait during successive phases of Neo-Eskimo culture. An explanation of the origin of Yupik rhythmical stress—and its relationship to peculiarities of the highly aberrant Sirenikski language and to the nature of adjacent Chukotian prosodies—will fall out from this scenario.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".