Orientation Systems of the North Pacific Rim by Michael Fortescue (review)

This pioneering study compares directional vocabulary across the genealogically and typologically diverse indigenous languages of northeastern Asia and northwestern North America. Its scope extends considerably beyond the northern half of the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” taking in also the Arctic on both sides of the Bering Strait as well as languages farther inland that show historical or typological connections to the orientation systems of coastal peoples. The North American side covers inland territory occupied by Athabaskan peoples in addition to the maritime zone from the Bering Strait south to Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula. The Asian side includes East Siberia’s interior reindeer-breeding groups, as well as the coastal areas from the Bering Strait to Sakhalin and Hokkaido. The book also discusses directionals used thousands of miles inland along the Yenisei River by the Ket people, as this system, too, shows clear parallels of semantic organization with North Pacific languages.

Orientation systems across this vast region pivot upon the expression of core spatial dimensions relative to bodies of water through the use of adverbials that Leer, in describing Na-Dene languages (1989), called “directionals.” The same term would be felicitous for all of the morphologically diverse systems on the North Pacific Rim, as these words often form tight semantic interrelationships that interact with the grammar in ways specific to this lexical category. Fortescue identifies five basic geographic types of orientation systems (p. 12) that underlie the use of directionals in the region under consideration. The three most widespread are coastal, riverine, and inland nomadic, followed by the “archipelagoan” system of Aleut and the large-island system of Haida. Semantic idiosyncrasies in the use of directionals in these different geographic settings demonstrate historical shifts from one type to another, thus helping to trace prehistoric population movements. For example, Fortescue, following Leer (1989), demonstrates that a riverine system was clearly adapted to the seacoast in the case of the Alaskan Athabaskan language Dena’ina and its Na-Dene relative Eyak. He also shows how certain Alaskan Eskimoan groups reoriented an originally coastal system toward inland rivers.

Directionals often show distinct patterns of polysemy, and much of the book is devoted to exploring the possible origins of certain recurring conflations of meaning. The meanings of ‘toward the water’ and ‘downhill’ are typically opposed to ‘away from the water’ and ‘uphill’ or ‘into the forest’. More noteworthy is that a number of languages conflate ‘toward open space’ or ‘toward/onto the fire’ with ‘toward/out onto the water’, and conflate ‘uphill’, ‘away from open space’ with ‘back from/off of the fire’. At least some aspects of this fire-water conflation occurs in Na-Dene languages of Alaska, in Nivkh on the Amur and Sakhalin Island, and also in Ket and two geographically contiguous languages, Selkup and Eastern Khanty; see Pevnov and Urmančieva (2010) for a convincing argument that this unusual polysemy in directional terms (though not the actual morphological forms themselves) most likely spread originally from Yeniseian to the adjacent Uralic languages.

Fortescue proposes the idea that this conflation between water and fire might have derived from the fact that in ancient semisubterranean dwellings found along the Amur and in parts of the North Pacific Rim, entrances were configured to conserve heat so that one needed to descend into them; going downward and going toward the fire thus were indeed logically connected (pp. 102–7). Another plausible explanation, suggested by Enrico for Haida (1985:401–2), is that both fire and water equally served as conduit to the other world, so that the fire-water conflation of directionals might have its origin in cosmological concepts. While neither of these ingenious suggestions can be fully proven, Fortescue’s hypothesis would seem to explain best why the notions of downhill and uphill are involved in this polysemy; his suggestion of the Amur as the ancient source of both semisubterranean dwellings (as evident from archaeology) and of the fire-water conflation also gives a possible starting point...