A 10,000-year-old word puzzle (fwd link)

[phil cash cash]

A 10,000-year-old word puzzle

A linguistic adventurer chases down an ancient language in Siberia and discovers
a surprising connection to modern languages in North America

MICHAEL ERARD
Globe and Mail Update
April 14, 2008 at 1:48 PM EDT

"The verb," Edward Mr. Vajda, linguistic adventurer, says. "The key to all this
is the verbs."

"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

Access full article below:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080414.wlang0414/BNStory/National/home