why indigenous languages are similar to Asian languages?

Because the indigenous peoples of America come from Siberia. While it is a widely accepted fact, for some reason it is still a controversial connection for linguists. The common Siberian ancestor communities lived too many years ago to leave linguistic traces, and the commonalities found in both language groups are attributed to coincidence. The Colombian scholar Ezequial Uricoechea wrote a book about the connections between the Mwiska language (a Chibcha language spoken in the Colombian mountains) and Japanese. Yet, today no one takes such work seriously, as if it were due to the feverish mind of a 19th-century philologist.

During the 19th century, the European philologists took seriously the commonalities between seemingly unrelated languages such as Romance languages, Germanic languages, Slavic languages, and Sanskrit, leading to the Indo-European hypothesis, the idea that most European languages had a common ancestor connected to Sanskrit. In the line of Indo-Europeanism, Uricoechea proposed the genetic connection between Mwiska and Japanese.

I studied a little Japanese around 15 years ago, and now I’m studying Navajo. The similarities are so apparent that I wonder why Uricoechea’s ideas never developed into a Proto-Siberian hypothesis where indigenous languages are connected.

East Asian languages are by themselves widely debated in terms of kinship, especially to whether Korean and Japanese are related, and if they are, what is their common ancestor. This kind of research needs to dissect exotic languages spoken in the Siberia, as well as Korean and Japanese, and go even further to find connections with indigenous languages would require an unusual expert in Asian lesser-spoken languages and languages of the Americas. Artificial Intelligence would show those connections, but the writing systems may pose an extra layer of difficulty in processing those kinds of corpora.

There are also multiple similarities between indigenous languages coming from distant language families. What is a language family? A set of languages that share a close common origin. For example, Mwiska was a language spoken around the Bogota central region of Colombia, with commonalities with certain languages in Costa Rica and Panama, which belong to the Chibcha family. Each family is hypothesized to be spoken by a community that migrated to distant territories. The Caribe family was spoken among the exterminated indigenous people of Puerto Rico, Española and Cuba, but also among indigenous from today’s territories of Colombia, Venezuela, Guyanas and North Brazil. Among the Caribes, today’s languages such as Wayunaiki (North of Colombia) and Nasa-kiwe (Southwest of Colombia) are still spoken, among a number of Amazonic languages. Connections may be found in words such as “Tota”, which is the name for a city in New Mexico named Farmington, which means “place where the three waters go together”. In the Colombian Mwiska area, there is a lake whose name is Tota.

The Uto-Azteca left traces in today’s Ute spoken in Southwest Colorado (near the Dinés, but as a distinct family), and from that common group the Nahuatl and other Mexican indigenous languages were derived. That means, from that community departed the people who founded Tenochtitlán following orders of Huitzilopochtli, the god of Sun. Migrations were connected to the quest of the Sun to reach warmer places probably guided by a Sun-oriented belief system.

How is that related to the Yeti?

One prominent “coincidence” is the legend of the “Yeti,” referring to a humanoid animal with hairy skin that populates the Himalayan, also known as the abominable snowman. The word comes from Tibetan language spoken by the sherpas, Ye (rocky) – Teh (animal). In the Americans, the sightings of Yeti are also common, and it refers also to a hairy, large humanoid creature whose preference for snow is shared both in Sherpa and Navajo cultures. It’s been called “Big Foot” in North America.

In Navajo the word “Ye’iitsoh” that means “big monster”: ye’ii = monster, tsoh = big. While it’s been translated just as monster, whenever “ye’ii” appears in narratives mainly refers to the same characteristics: humanoid, large, hairy, big foot, beasty-like behavior. There are other words for different monsters, but “ye’ii” refers to the same kind of monster. The “ye-ti” and “ye-‘i” brings an occlusive sound that is quite variable, but both /t/ and /’/ are pronounced a sound of similar quality. Emery (1996, 2003) translates yé’iiłbahí as “gray giant”, where “yé’ii” means “giant” and “łbáhí” means “gray”.The illustrations portray Yé’ii as a large man, wearing only a covering over his pubic area, with a robust build and a hairy appearance.

The Navajo story of the emergence (hajiné’ in Navajo, probably connected to Japanese hajime’ = beginning) tells how the People were coming up through four worlds until arriving in the fifth world, always looking for a warmer place. Every world was destroyed by a flood that made people migrate at an upper-eastward direction, probably looking for the sun. Traces of that migration coming through Alaska are left in the Na-Dené, an distant language connected to the Athabaskan languages. Among Athabaskan languages there is Navajo, Hopi, Apache, and other languages in Canada.

Structural similarities are also vague, but may be a vestige of their common origin: the order Subject – Object – Verb, the productivity of postpositions, the scarcity in pronoun usage, the glottal stops marking vowels at the end of a lexical unit, the long and short vowels, and the existence of intra-vowel tonal patterns.

Mircea Eliade thought about the origins of Shamanism in a place in Siberia with continuity in Alaska and from there down to the rest of the American territories. One particular aspect of the Shaman is the ability to travel to the underworld to collect knowledge or power. In the Diné cosmology, there are four overlapping worlds beneath our world. The dead go through the giant reed into the fourth world. When Coyote tricked the People into creating the Death, the first dead person was one of the hermaphrodite twins. The People did not know of their whereabouts, until one brave men decided to travel to the underworld. He found the twin, and went back to upper Earth.

References:

Wayuunaiki

Ye’ii

Yeti

Yeti

Wikipedia Entries

• Indo-European Languages
• Paleo-Siberian Languages
• Uto-Aztecan Languages
• Yeti

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