SOS Forests

Ancient Siberia-America Connection

A linguistic link [here] has been confirmed between New and Old World language groups. The Athabaskan language group, which includes Navajo, Apache, and Coquille in Oregon, is related to the language spoken by the Ket people of Western Siberia [here] despite 10,000 years of separation.

Words for ‘canoe’ point to long-lost family ties

Canwest News Service, July 8, 2010 [here]

An obscure language in Siberia has similarities to languages in North America, which might reshape history, writes Randy Boswell.

A new book by leading linguists has bolstered a controversial theory that the language of Canada’s Dene Nation is rooted in an ancient Asian tongue spoken today by only a few hundred people in Western Siberia.

The landmark discovery, initially proposed two years ago by U.S. researcher Edward Vajda, represents the only known link between any Old World language and the hundreds of speech systems among First Nations in the Western Hemisphere.

The collection of articles by Vajda and other experts details a multitude of clear connections — nouns, verbs and key grammatical structures — between the language spoken by the Ket people of Russia’s Yenisei River region and dozens of languages used by North American aboriginal groups.

The newly recognized link has prompted the Yukon-based Arctic Athabaskan Council to begin forging cultural and political ties with Russia’s tiny population of Ket speakers. They live 8,000 kilometres west of Whitehorse and are separated from their linguistic cousins in North America by some 10,000 years of history. …

A special issue of the Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska (APUA) is devoted to The Dene-Yeniseian Connection [here]. Papers cover three related topics:

* The Evidence for Dene-Yeniseian
* The Interdisciplinary Context for Dene-Yeniseian
* Commentaries on the Dene-Yeniseian Hypothesis

The Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska focuses on research in the circumpolar north and consists of original papers on a variety of topics related to arctic or subarctic anthropology. Produced by the University of Alaska Fairbanks Department of Anthropology since 1951, APUA offers a collection of scholarly, often rare papers written by noted authorities in the field.

Thanks and kudos for this history news (oxymoron?) tip go to Dr. Victor H. Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, and curator of the amazing and esoteric-knowledge-laden website, the Sino-Platonic Papers [here], which is worth a visit just to read the titles of the scholarly works archived there.