Indigenous Americans, illustrated here during a mammoth hunt, developed their diverse languages from 4 different population waves that came over from Siberia, a new study suggests.Image credit: Dorling Kindersley ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
Posted on 05/18/2024 10:30:28 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Nearly half of the world's language families are found in the Americas. Although many of them are now thought extinct, historical linguistics analysis can survey and compare living languages and trace them back in time to better understand the groups that first populated the continent.
In a study published March 30 in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, Johanna Nichols, a historical linguist at the University of California Berkeley, analyzed structural features of 60 languages from across the U.S. and Canada, which revealed they come from two main language groups that entered North America in at least four distinct waves.
Nichols surveyed 16 features of these languages, including syllable structure, the gender of nouns and the way consonants are produced when speaking. The languages split into two main groups: an early one where the first-person pronoun has an "n" sound while the second-person pronoun has an "m" sound, and a later group with languages that incorporate a sentence's worth of information in just one word.
Further linguistic analysis indicated that people arrived in the Americas in four distinct waves. The first occurred around 24,000 years ago, when massive glaciers covered much of North America. Nichols found no unique language features, suggesting a diverse set of people and languages entered North America at that time. A second wave of people around 15,000 years ago brought languages with n-m pronouns, while a third wave 1,000 years later brought languages with simple consonants. A fourth wave around 12,000 years ago then brought complex consonants.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
Indigenous Americans, illustrated here during a mammoth hunt, developed their diverse languages from 4 different population waves that came over from Siberia, a new study suggests.Image credit: Dorling Kindersley ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
Clovis-1st-and-Only dies hard, but it is dying.
But, but, but they say they’ve always been here.
Great. Now Putin will claim that America belongs to Russia.
It was thoughtful of Ogg and his family to leave tape recordings of their language 15,000 years ago.
With each contact they threw bon-bons at each other and had drum circle competition!
They arrived about 12-13 thousand years ago.
Grizzly bears are essentially an exotic species to North America south of Canada, and the glaciers kept them from most of Canada until about 13,000 years ago as well.
Humans were here long before the grizzly bear.
There will be a lot more waves coming over from Siberia if Biden is reelected.
And which language did these long dead people tell this linguist about their migrations?
Guessing again ?
The Short Faced bear laughs as he makes a light snack of a Grizzly
Since, most if not all, humans were wiped out in the catastrophe that killed off the megafauna, how do the “linguists” know what languages they spoke. Just ask a member of the Clovis peoples what language they spoke before they all died.
This kind of work has already been done with the languages of Europe and other parts of the world. That’s how we know that Spanish, Greek, Hindi, English, Irish, Russian and Armenian are all part of one language family and probably had some common ancestors. Things aren’t so clear when it comes to the Americas, but it’s as good a guess as any.
Most scientific reports identify entry and settlement from northeast Asia at about 13,000 years ago plus or minus. Is there evidence for a24000 year entry?
If you’re in Siberia and end up in America, you must have lost your Bering.
And if it takes 12,000 years, the one thing you cannot be accused of is Russian.
Serious question: Since there was no writing, how can the linguists be sure that the language spoken 12,000 or 24,000 years ago bears any resemblance to today’s indigenous languages?
a cunning linguist
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/the-oldest-archaeological-sites-in-the-americas
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/tracking-humans-first-foootsteps-north-america-180984292/
Exactly... They wrote nothing down and their languages were pretty much gibberish. So as far as linguistics go, modern generations are essentially making most of it up as they go along. They were stone age people when Europeans arrived with no horses, no metal work and they were essentially hunter gatherers... Without permanent residences and with no concept of ownership, wondering about the land and eating and existing on whatever they found. Writing wasn’t part of their existence until Europeans arrived.
And very little more than a guess.
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