RG Diglot Newbie Brazil Joined 4879 days ago 7 posts - 12 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, EnglishC1 Studies: Mandarin, Arabic (Levantine)
| Message 1 of 26 25 August 2012 at 11:13pm | IP Logged |
I would like to share this crazy and interesting hypothesis with you guys:
AMERINDIAN languages and JAPANESE are RELATED!
You may heard about it... if not, here it is:
Determining Japanese presence in Pre-columbian America
Estudo Comparativo Do Japones com Linguas Amerindias <----this
link contains a few pages from a book (in Portuguese) written by a Brazilian Tupi linguist, Luiz Caldas Tibirica.
It also has a comparative vocabulary showing the similarities between Japanese and Tupi. Furthermore, it has archaeological, anthropological and biological data that
corroborates to the linguistic argument.
Hope you enjoy it!
Edited by RG on 26 August 2012 at 7:43am
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Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6660 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin
| Message 2 of 26 26 August 2012 at 12:15pm | IP Logged |
Seems very anecdotal. Besides, related words usually do not look as related as the examples given... Was ame in
Japanese really ame 1000 years ago? Methinks not.
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Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German
| Message 3 of 26 26 August 2012 at 5:02pm | IP Logged |
Required reading: How likely are chance resemblances between
languages?
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hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5131 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe
| Message 4 of 26 26 August 2012 at 5:38pm | IP Logged |
Sorry for my crotchety reply, but the first sentence is the takeaway I get from the
entire article:
"When tracing back history with a certain agenda, evidence found here and there
slowly begins to add up, taking shape and supporting certain suppositions of daring
scholars who, in visionary fashion, create hypotheses almost bordering on fantasy."
Emphasis is mine.
A while back I'd also stumbled upon an article claiming that Turkish and Ojibwe were
related. It's really pretty easy to make data fit with whatever it is we're trying to
convince ourselves and others to believe.
I'm always sceptical of hypotheses such as these.
Ari's link is a good read.
R.
==
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a3 Triglot Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5257 days ago 273 posts - 370 votes Speaks: Bulgarian*, English, Russian Studies: Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Finnish
| Message 5 of 26 26 August 2012 at 5:40pm | IP Logged |
even a better example: http://www.zompist.com/proto.html
scroll down to the bottom of the page to see a list of English and Chinese false friends, which could have been taken as cognates.
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emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map
| Message 6 of 26 26 August 2012 at 6:06pm | IP Logged |
My favorite example is desert in English, and dšr.t in Egyptian. There's
only one problem: desert can be traced back to an Indo-European root *ser-,
"to plant".
The Egyptian word, on the other hand, is simply a noun formed from dšr, "red",
because the sands outside the Nile Valley are often red.
Edited by emk on 26 August 2012 at 6:06pm
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RG Diglot Newbie Brazil Joined 4879 days ago 7 posts - 12 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, EnglishC1 Studies: Mandarin, Arabic (Levantine)
| Message 7 of 26 28 August 2012 at 8:05am | IP Logged |
To tell you guys the truth I didn't have time to give a through reading in the hypothetical "archaeological,
anthropological and biological" data Tibica is claiming. As one of my philosophy professor would say
"Isso me cheira a borracha queimada" (This smells like burned rubber!),
meaning it's a weird thing to state; an unlikely idea.
It seems there is a trend of claiming things such as this.
In one of 2010's Steve Kaufmann's videos
( "Too Asian" and freedom of expression; around 09:35),
he says the Canadian Federal government gave Henry Yu CN$900,000 for a
"Chinese-Canadian History Portal"
and in accepting the money he said "We have to reassess how we look at the History of Canada because afterall a 100 years
before Confederation there were two Chinese sailors on a ship that arrived on the West-cost of Canada, and so really, the
Chinese were interacting with the aboriginals here at the same time as the Europeans, and so the Chinese were also the
founding people".
This resembles the ideas behind the 2002 Gavin Menzies' first
publication "1421: The Year China Discovered the World" that caused tongues to wag.
Well, all this is food for thought.
Nice contributions there guys
PS.: Sorry about the messy layout... I'm quite new to forum posting.
Edited by RG on 28 August 2012 at 8:10am
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paleolitik Newbie Turkey Joined 4514 days ago 8 posts - 11 votes
| Message 8 of 26 07 September 2012 at 4:37pm | IP Logged |
Turkish and Japanese are related languages. Assoc. Prof. Dr. İsmail DOĞAN says Turkish and Mayan languages have more than 400 common words. Perhaps some Altaic language speakers landed on America before Indo-Europeans did.
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