Mongolians first to discover America claims professor (fwd)

[Scott DeLancey]

On Fri, 11 Jan 2008, Bernadette Santamaria wrote:

> Deloria, it is not proven scientific fact that it occurred.  Also, where is
> the linguistic evidence that any Indigenous languages of the Americas are,
> in any way, similar to Asian or Mongolian languages?  It would seem that the
> issue of parallels in language has not been proven although there have been
> comparisons done.

Fairly recently a Danish linguist, Michael Fortescu, presented some good 
evidence that the Eskimo-Aleut languages of Alaska and the Chukchee-Koryak
languages of far eastern Siberia (just across the Bering Strait, there's 
even a Yupik language spoken there) are related.  Even more recently, Ed
Vadja has found evidence that the Na-Dene languages (Tlingit, Eyak, and 
Athabaskan) are related to the Yeniseian languages (Ket and a few close 
relatives) in central Siberia.  This is an old idea, and a Russian 
linguist, Sergei Starostin, and some others did find some evidence, but
not enough to convince most linguists.  Vajda has a stronger case now.
Neither of these is sufficiently proven yet, but I suspect they're right.

Otherwise, you're right--there's no respectable evidence to suggest that
any New World language is related to any Old World language.  That's not
proof of anything, though--the old Bering Strait hypothesis had people 
coming across no earlier than about 12,000 years ago, but I don't think
anybody (or at least anybody under the age of 50) believes that anymore--
it would more likely be 15-20,000 or more.  We (meaning linguists) have no
concept at all of how to identify relationships that old, or what evidence
for a relationship that old would look like, so not finding it isn't 
surprising no matter what you believe about the origins of Native people.

Anyway, to bring this back to the original topic, my professional opinion
(admitting that I don't know much about Mongolian, or most of the 1,000 or
so New World languages) is that the idea of finding obvious evidence of
relationship between Mongolian and any American language is impossible.
If you just take a map of North America and take all the place names that
come from Native languages--which sounds like what this fellow did--some 
of them will probably sound sorta like words in whatever language you 
happen to speak.  It doesn't prove anything.

Sorry, I just went into lecture mode ...

Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics 
1290 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-1290, USA

delancey at uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html