LL-L: "East meets West?" [E] LOWLANDS-L, 07.AUG.1999 (03)

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From: Joseph W. C. Carson [samizdata at earthlink.net]
Subject: Melungeon And Ainu Origins

Hello, All:

          The thread dealing with Turkic languages has revived a couple of
questions
that seemed too far afield to broach in this forum, but now, methinks...why
not!?!

First of all, there are the controversial Melungeon clans of the Appalachians,
who
claim to be descended from Turkish tribes (as discussed in N. Brent Kennedy's
book, "The Melungeons: The Resurrection Of A Proud People"), who support this
claim partially on linguistic evidence derived from similarities in family and
place
names between their settlements in Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee and their
primordial homelands in the Anatolian highlands and elsewhere in the Caucasus
and Mediterranean regions.  Is their any merit in what on the face of it seem to
be
such mythic  "Out of Atlantis" claims?  Second, there is the occassional
ascription
of a link between the Altaic languages of central Asia, derived from Turkmen and

Uyghur, and early-to-medieval Japanese, possibly by way of the language spoken
by the aboriginal Ainu clanspeople (of Caucasian racial stock) that were
displaced
as the Japanese kingdom grew northward into Hokkaido from ancestral lowlands
(!) centering on Kyoto and Edo (Tokyo) sometime by or before c. 900 A.D.  Again,

is that plausible/possible/what have you?  This latter scenario seems less
fantastic
than the first, but how does one judge?  On the basis of verifiable, documented
evidence, presumably, but is there any?  Anyway, the connection between Turkic
and Lowland language root-stems may be expandable beyond the geographical
boundaries considered by our forum hitherto.  Or then again, maybe not...you
tell me.  Either way, thanks for your recent explorations of what seemed at
first to
be an unwarrantedly exotic subject of inquiry for this list.

Regards, Joseph Carson

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