Here’s a nifty piece of detective work. The siberian - north american link is well established both in terms of artefacts (conventional archeology) and genetics. Now, some linguists are trying to find convincing evidence of an extant linguistic connection between peoples now 8,000 miles apart.
I’m not convinced, and I find the sceptic quoted in the article’s objection that the claimed similarities are all in words short enough to be chance to be a strong argument, but its still very interesting.
“All this” is Mr. Vajda’s announcement of a linguistic link between Asia and the Americas, a discovery that has sent a wave of celebration — and controversy — through his field.
In 1987, Mr. Vajda was a new professor of Slavic Studies at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, where he came across a book in Russian about a language called Ket, a nearly extinct language spoken by only 1,000 people in a remote area of central Siberia. It belonged to a language family called Yeneseic, of which Ket was the only survivor. One its siblings, Arin, is only known because a Cossack adventurer named Arzamas Loskutov wrote down words from the last Arin speaker in 1735.
Reading the book, Mr. Vajda noticed the Ket verbs, a complex string of particles attached to a root that make up almost an entire sentence. “It was intriguing,” Mr. Vajda says, “because the verb is completely different from anything else in Asia.” In fact, they reminded him of verbs in Navajo, a Na-Dene language that he had studied. That was enough to pique his interest to pursue evidence of a connection between Na-Dene and Yeniseian — a linguistic connection between Asia and the Americas.
Looks really cool, but like you I’m pretty skeptical. The polysynthetic structure is intriguing, but that could easily have happened by chance; some linguists claim that modern spoken French is becoming polysynthetic. Grammatical structures can also change pretty quickly in some substantial ways- look at the differences between Anglo-Saxon and modern English eg, and for a glimpse at what old Germanic was probably like, look at Latin. All three vary pretty substantially, but they’re all Indo-European. And on chance similarities between words… he’s absolutely right that the modern language family classifications were all found through word correspondences, BUT. First off, they were not a few chance correspondences, they were very widespread correspondences in a large chunk of each language’s vocabulary; also they were generally morphemic and not always word-for-word. Also, now I don’t think this article explores this, but the parallel words had generally consistent phonological correspondences (such as the Great Consonant Shift in Germanic languages, so that foot corresponds to latin pes, and what to quod, etc.). So if t@q and ts@q correspond in those languages, I would expect t@s and ts@s and t@m and ts@m, etc., to correspond as well (tho maybe in a more complex way than that).
Even so that’s pretty darned fascinating! I hope this is studied deeper, cause it looks like it could be real promising. Just right now, verdict’s still out.
The most telling difference lies in projectile point technology, which may, or may not, be indicative of influences from elsewhere than Siberia. In the American archeological record, one does not see projectile points of bone or antler armed with serial flakes of stone set into grooves to make the cutting edge, as is the overwhelming norm for ancient Siberian projectile points. I would be wary of those who ignore this.
An exception would seem to be the chopping weapons of Mesoamerica, but they appear to be unique so far as I can tell. But I’m no expert.
There may indeed be a linguistic connection to be found, but speaking as an ethnically non-Native American, I’m not convinced that the Sibero-American connection is sole and absolute. Not that I’m suggesting that you buy into the the idea that Siberia’s simply it, s1m0n.
I have to say the article is unusually well-written, given the usual ignorant rubbish about linguistics in the popular press and ahem some internet boards. But without looking at the cited research, I’m not sure there’s much to see here. Linguists have noted apparent similarities between Amerindian and and Asian languages for years, especially if you don’t completely discount the phylogenetic validity of polysynthetic / agglutinating typologies. When I was studying Quechua, I was struck by the superficial structural similarities to Japanese and Turkic. This fellow wouldn’t be the first language area specialist (Slavics) to “rediscover” historical comparative linguistics, and mistake a personal insight for a breakthrough.
That said, this work does seem potentially interesting. Ideas about prehistoric language and population have been changing rapidly in recent years, and one more data point is not a bad thing. So long as the political crap about “a kinship that is just like, you feel it, it’s a feeling. It’s a brotherhood feeling” is kept far away. That sort of neo-romantic drivel is poisonous, and has no place in the mix.
To suggest that there could be a linguistic connection between an Asian language and a North American language comes as no surprise.
I’ve been working on one of the Uralic languages, in this case a Western Siberian language, and in the course of doing so I have become aware of how that language could likely be related to other, Eastern Siberian languages. In turn, moreover, it has been suggested that these Siberian languages could be distantly related to such an Asian language as Korean, and to perhaps others of that region of the East. In addition, apparently some ten or fifteen thousand years ago, there apparently was some form of bridge, perhaps in the form of frozen sea ice, in and around the Bering Straight, between what is now far North-Eastern Russia and Alaska, USA, which could have allowed for human migration, from one continent to another.
