Isolated languages and language families

[Yuri Tambovtsev]

Dear lingtyp colleagues,
on the basis of our phonetic corpora we measured the
phonological distances between Ainu and the other 158 languages in our corpora.
Ainu is an isolated language of Japan. It is not similar to Japanese. The
closest distance happens to be 5.451 to an American Indian language Quechua.
The next closest language is Inga 7.388 which is also an American Indian
language. The mean distance to Finno-Ugric languages -16.95; to Samoyedic -
16.31; to Turkic- 18.08; to Mongolian - 23.66; to Chookchi and other
Paleo-Asiatic languages - 15.41, etc. The results are published in: Yuri
Tambovtsev. The phono-typological distances between Ainu and the other world
languages as a clue for closeness of languages. - In: Asian and African studies,
Volume 17, #1, 2008, p.40-62. Our typological distances make us believe that
the forefathers of Ainu moved to America in the prehistorical times.
 Phonological features are the result of the articulation basis which is preserved
 by the people for a long time if not forever. I have prepared another long
 article on the distances between the American Indian languages and
 Siberian languages, but I do not know where to publish it. Can you advise me any
 journal? Looking forward to hearing from you soon to yutamb at mail.ru Remain
yours sincerely Yuri Tambovtsev, Novosibirsk, Russia. 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20080809/05c5a1fd/attachment.htm>