Disappointing article on Dene-Yeniseian

Just over a month ago we enjoyed a visit from Prof Edward Vajda of Western Washington University as part of the 2012 Dene-Yeniseian Workshop. Compared to the inaugural DY workshop in February 2008, this follow-up workshop garnered relatively little media attention. This week I finally stumbled across an article by UAF science writer Ned Rozell which appeared in both the Anchorage Daily News and the Alaska Dispatch on April 28. While it's great to see DY in the press, the article unfortunately contains numerous errors and misrepresentations. To begin with, the piece opens with the assertion that:

"a language uttered in river villages 3,000 miles from Alaska is related to Tlingit, Eyak and Athabaskan."

This statement seems to imply that the genealogical connection between Na-Dene and Yeniseian languages has been firmly established, when in fact most scholars remain cautiously optimistic, choosing to refer to the putative linguistic connection as the Dene-Yeniseian Hypothesis. Vajda himself is a leading proponent of the hypothesis, but he would not claim the connection to be definitively proven. Rather, he continually stresses the need for more research in order to validate the hypothesis.

Another strange assertion in the article is that Vajda "is the person who perhaps knows most about Ket." Anyone who has meet Prof Vajda will of course be struck by his humility and know that he would never make such a claim. He may well be the first American to speak with a Ket person, but Vajda is well aware of the many scholars (mostly Russians) who have worked with Ket and other Yeniseian languages previously. Vajda attributes the first claim of a genealogical connection between Yeniseian and Na-Dene languages to Alfredo Trombetti in 1923. The distinctive linguistic and cultural characteristics of Yeniseian have been recognized for at least two centuries.

The article goes on to imply that current world-wide interest in the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis was started by Vajda's field trip to Kellog village. In fact, that visit took place after the 2008 DY workshops in Fairbanks and Anchorage.

I could point out several more quibbles, but they all serve to reinforce the article's characterization of a swashbuckling linguist going it alone in the Siberian wilderness. Maybe science is easier to understand if we can attribute it all to a single character. But Vajda is no Indian Jones. The incredible progress on the DY hypothesis over the past few years has been made possible not because Vajda has blazed out on his own, but rather because he has had the patience and humility to work carefully with scholars on both sides of Bering Strait to help unite two heretofore distinct research traditions. The image of the lone wolf linguist might sell newspapers, but the real work of science is done by brilliant scholars like Vajda methodically building on previous research while collaborating with experts across a wide range of disciplines.