ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses several important historical-linguistic insights gleaned from years documenting the critically endangered Ket language, the only surviving member of Siberia’s Yeniseian family. Framed within the broader picture of language loss throughout northern Asia, it describes how data from the last generation of fully fluent speakers have shed light on the origin of uncommon typological traits such as ditropic clitics, which can surface either preposed or postposed to their host, and what Harris (2017) calls “exuberant multiple exponence” – expressions of one and the same meaning several times by distinct morphemes in a single word form. The diachrony of Yeniseian verb formation reveals the unexpected prevalence of metathesis and semantic reanalysis in how the family’s templatic verb structure evolved, offering valuable insights into the nature of multiple exponence cross-linguistically. Had Ket vanished without adequate documentation, investigating how these uncommon morphological features developed over time would not have been possible.
