Why ostikan?
These days, if you are not an internet pioneer, whose web-presence has been around for at least a decade, it is not easy to find a free web-domain. While I couldn't lay my hands on a more readily identifyable domain (such as my name) and thought it a bit unwise to be too forthcoming with the truth about me (by, say, "really-smart-linguist.de") up-front, I chose this enigmatic name, which is, incidentally, the native designation of the language I'm currently working on. This is the
Ket
language, spoken by now less than 500 people in Krasnoyarsk province, North-Central Siberia. More exactly, this self-designation should be written with an IPA "barred-i", designating a high back unrounded vowel. The /k/ is, in intervocalic position such as here, to be pronounced as a voiced velar fricative (IPA "gamma").
I
am currently finishing a full-length descriptive grammar of this language, to
be published in 2005. I hope to be able to insert more information on Ket, its
enigmatic grammar and its speakers on these pages soon.
The
pronunciation of ostikan (.wav)