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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Dear Crpora colleagues,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>In 1938 a Russian ethnographer and archeologist
Prof.Dr. Aleksey P. <BR>Okladnikov published an article on the rehistory of the
Siberian tribes, in <BR>which he put forward a theory that Neolitic tribes of
Siberia crossed the <BR>Bering ice or earth bridge to Noethern America. In the
Americas there <BR>were found no ape remnants, this is why the origin of man was
not <BR>possible. A.P. Okladnikov believed that the settlement of the Northern
<BR>America had at least two waves in the Paleolitic times. Some linguists
<BR>after that tried to find the similarities between the languages of the
tribes <BR>of Siberia and the Indians of America. I'd like to compare the sound
<BR>chains of the languages of the Siberian aboriginal peoples and the sound
<BR>chains of the languages of the American Indians. I failed to find any data
<BR>on the frequency of occurrence of the speech sounds in the languages of
<BR>American Indians. There were no publications on the frequencies of
<BR>occurrence of speech sounds in the aboriginal Siberian languages either.
<BR>This is why, in 1973 I started the project of counting the frequency of
<BR>occurrence of speech sounds in Siberian languages. Then in 1986 <BR>Prof.Dr.
William Cowan of Carleton university (Canada) sent me <BR>"Eastern
Ojibwa-Chippewa-Ottawa Dictionary by Richard A. Rhodes" <BR>to start the
investigation of the frequency of occurrence of speech sound <BR>in the
AmerIndian language of Ojibwa. We have computed several <BR>AmerIndian
languages, among them Cree, Ojibwa, Totonac, etc. Now <BR>we've got data on the
frequency of occurrence of speech sound chains of <BR>some 30 AmerIndian
languages. We are trying to compare their data to <BR>the other languages of
Siberia and the world. The total number of the <BR>computed languages is 176. We
are looking for co-operation with those <BR>American linguists who would like to
compute some more languages of <BR>the Americas to obtain the frequency of
occurrence of speech sounds. <BR>We'd be thankful to those colleagues who could
advise us on where to <BR>publish the article on the typological closeness
(distances) of <BR>AmerIndian languages. Looking forward to hearing from those
who can <BR>co-operate with us soon to <A
href="mailto:yutamb@hotmail.com">yutamb@hotmail.com</A> Remain yours sincerely
<BR>Yuri Tambovtsev, Novosibirsk, Russia
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