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

[Ngukurr Language Centre]

There is an interesting book (author name is not stored in my memory)  
The Secen Daughters of Eve.  It traces all Caucasian people back to  
seven ancestors in Europe through the mitochondrial DNA.  One of the  
ancestral mothers has descendants among American Indian groups, and  
that DNA thread is ancestral to 1% of American Indians.  An interesting  
thought - if people migrated, then language may have gone with them.
Margaret Sharpe
Ngukurr Language Centre
CMB 6
via Katherine  NT  0852
Ph/Fax: 08 8975 4362, Mob. 0428 711 123
Email: margaret.sharpe at kathlangcentre.org.au
On 16/04/2008, at 1:43 AM, phil cash cash wrote:

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

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