Is there any evidence of connection between the languages spoken by our native Americans (north, south, and all) and those spoken in eastern-central Asia, where their ancestors are thought to have originally dwelled ? Their languages’ evolution since the people left the Old Continent may have occurred in a unique manner: since the new lands they started stepping into were uninhabited by man, their languages received no outer influence. Does this makes it reasonable to suppose it mustn’t be hard to trace down their true origins ? Has somebody done this ?
Is there, among those languages, one which stands out by some reason ?
If the entire original human population of America once came from Asia it must have happened a long time ago. There are no serious links between American and Asian languages. Of course, anyone with some scissors and glue can make some up at home, but this kind of evidence don’t give me satisfaction. Most of these pieces of ‘evidence’ are based on dodgy lexical similarities - like the one that proves the close relation between Welsh and Hebrew. I’m not entirely sure what we should be looking for, and, if we do look, that we are creating the evidence to fit our theories…
The earliest concrete evidence of human habitation in the new world places migration at about 13,000 years ago, although many people believe migrations occurred much earlier.
Migrations almost certainly occurred in several waves, which may correspond to different Asian populations and language groups.
Keep in mind that migration/invasion within Asia itself has been ongoing, and that if American languages are related to those of Asia, they may be related to small or extinct populations, rather than the better known language groups.
I don’t know of any specific language comparison studies, but this is not my area of expertise. However I begin to suspect that if Garzo doesn’t know, no one does!
For a one-stop overview of various first nations creation myths, look here. People from differing native tribes usually reject the Bering Strait migration theory, saying that they have no cultural memories of such an event.
gailr
Until recently, nearly all linguists denied any connections between old and new world languages. Edward Sapir broke the ice a little bit when he succesfully linked the Athabaskan Indian languages with Sino-Tibetan in the 1920’s. Sino-Tibetan includes Chinese, Tibetan and Burmese ( but not Vietnamese).
A growing number of linguists now think there are connections between American Indian languages and Eurasian languages. New discoveries have been found linking Basque and Navajo (also Athabaskan) involving words for "knee" and "elbow" as well as a few others.
The recent DNA analysis relating a Greek woman and a Cree Indian man certainly indicates that some of the American Indian languages are distantly akin to Indo-European. Greek is one of the oldest Indo-European languages around along with Celtic and Tocharian. English is an Indo-European language too but has diverged quite a bit from the original IE pattern.
In comapring words between languages and language families, linguists look for words that don’t change much over long periods of time like I, me, you, dog, wolf, crow, water and flea (because fleas have been pestering people for millions of years it seems to be a pretty stable word). OWL is another conservative-type word and if we look at Old English Ule , Old High German Uliwa, Irish Uchulbhain and Greek Kukuvaikos we see where the Cherokee Indian word for "owl" Uguku, for example, might be a remote relative.
Costello, I wonder if similarities between scattered words that have the same meaning may be considered a trustworthy evidence of kinship between languages.
It sounds to me that the words for ‘owl’ may be of onomatopoeic origin in a lot of languages. Even in the Portuguese ‘coruja’ there seems to exist a trace of ‘oo-ooo-oooo’ ...
Have you ever heard DNA talk? Your claim is as credible as saying that potsherds speaking IE invaded India.
The examples of "words that don’t change" is equallly remote from reality. Examples of IE "I" include jag, ich, me (nasal e), je ( palatal fricative j), ya, aham . How’s that for change?
The Swedish equivalents of the words purported to be resistant to change are: jag, mig, du, hund, varg, kråka, vatten and loppa. I am not impressed by the similarities comparing them to current English.
Speaking of change, it should be clear that it is useless to compare words used today, if we have no evidence of how they have evolved. It is difficult enough in the IE languages, in spite of written evidence for in some cases thousands of years. Even the Sino-Tibetan connections are debatable, as we have very meagre proof of old Burmese.
A standard example of misleading conjecture is comparing the American Potomac, which is supposed to mean river, to the Greek potamos (as in Mesopotamia). Both mean river, but what is the history of the words? No one can tell in the case of the Potomac, so we can draw no conclusions.
One of my favourite examples of change is the Sanskrit word agatah (not-gone), which in later Apabhramsha becomes aao (first and last vowels long). Supposing a language somewhere has a word for not-gone, today sounding like ao, we of course can draw no conclusions if we don’t know the history of that ao.
As for the crow, I suggest you search the Agora for Nostratic. My posts on that subject are not entirely crazy, but are among other things intended to show that many similarities can be traced to sound imitation. *kr- or *kh- are fairly obvious names for the crow, and I agree with wquinette’s comments on the owl.
There are just too many "linguists" trying to link isolated languages with others. There must be very few languages in the world, to which enthusiasts have not claimed a Basque connection. We will just have to accept that, lacking historical evidence, we’ll have to leave them isolated.
Historical linguists use what is known as "the Comparative Method" in making their comparisons. This minimizes the chances of attribuiting say, English bad and Persian bad "bad" to a common ancestor or Irish Costello(w) to a common ancestor with Italian castello.
Linguists are finding more evidence that some of the ways we form words is genetically influenced. Words like Dad, Daddy, Dah-Dah, Papa and Mama are fairly uniform throughout the world and the tendency to say these words this way probably goes back at least 200,000 years when our ancestors were living in Africa and human speech was first evolving. No onomatopoeism here.
The Portuguese word for "owl" coruja is another matter. It appears to derive from a Celtic word meaning "witch" or "sorceress" and is an example of what is known in linguistics as a "taboo word". It is related to Galician curuxa and Chouette, another French word for "owl". Welsh has the word Chweden meaning "sorceress’ owl" originating from the same root. But the basic Celtic word for owl is intact in the Irish word uchulbhain (prononounced oo-khool-whan).
Linguistics is not a static field. There are some smart people out there making new discoveries almost every year. It is imperative to always keep up with new information coming out.
My Welsh dictionary is by no means comprehensive, Brian, but the words it shows do not resemble Chweden for sorceress. The closest is chwedlonol, mythical. Can you quote your source, please?
How about the theory that the Cockney dialect is intimately connected with Mongolian? One might imagine that veterans of the horde settled in London’s East End. The proof of this theory is based on the evidence that almost half-a-dozen similar lexical items have some letters in common when written down in Roman script. I think I’ll publish these findings and become a famous philologist…
It was from a French etymological book discussing the origins of French chouette "owl" and Breton kouenn "owl". I have found that Welsh and Irish dictionaries sometimes don’t contain archaic words or dialectal words just the standard word. Yet, Welsh and Breton both have about six dialects. The same is true of Basque. Irish has at least three. The Leinster dialect of Irish is extinct. The standard Irish word for "witch" is bandraoi yet there is dialectal cailleach pis(r)eog usually not mentioned in the dictionaries.
Literary Welsh says tylluan for ‘owl’. We mostly say gwdihw, or goo-di-hoo. I’ve never heard of a Welsh word chweden. The various words that would translate ‘sorceress’ are swynwraig, or, less happily, dewines. As a long-shot, I might suggest that you mean chwedlonydd, which I would translate as ‘gossipper’, but my dictionary gives as ‘mythologist’! If you like, you could have cwydes - or ‘vomitting woman’. However, none of these words have anything to do with owls. I think we may be better off pursuing my Cockney-Mongolian theory…
I do remember reading somewhere that some of the 400 Hunnish prisoners taken by the Roman Army after the Battle of Chalon (451 A.D.) were resettled in Britain. That is the only British-Mongolian connection I can think of. Are their descendants still alive in England today? Possibly. But most of the Huns in Europe seem to have fallen victim to diseases which they had no immunity to.
