Supposedly everybody hates America but it would seem that everyone also wants to take credit for finding it. Hmmm.
Space Aliens, the first?
I forgot how the Mormon story goes.
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Many may have stumbled upon the new continent, tripped over it, visited it, dreamt about it in a dug-induced dream, whatever, but...
Columbus not only visited it, documented in painful detail, not once, not twice, but four times; mapped it, reported on it and shared it with the rest of the known world which mattered in the significant stream of history.
Everything else is curiousity BS.
On the other hand, Admiral He's map does not show that he circumnavigated the world. Rather, it assembles materials known from Mongol (Ming) sources as well as his own discoveries made by parts of his vast fleet that sailed far to the West, and the other parts that sailed far to the East. Several of McWallace's officers continue to share the honor of being the first to circumnavigate the globe.
The Chinese ships were very large and were able to sail anywhere.
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There is a common myth that the Mandan people of North Dakota are in fact the decendants of Welsh colonists who sailed form Wales under Prince Madog. Do a web-search for “Mandan” with “Welsh” and you will find a plethora of pages promoting this story. Various pieces of evidence have led to this claim, most notably: Fair-skin/blue-eyes, Welsh style boats, and of course, that Welsh and Mandan speakers understand each other. There have been word lists published that apparently show evidence that Welsh and Mandan are one and the same language (or at least Mandan is a product of Welsh). I would like to use this space to claim that these theories are patently incorrect (mae’n drwg iawn ’da fi). Welsh is an Indo-European language, Mandan belongs to the Siouan family. The two language’s sound systems couldn’t be more different. Welsh has about 21 consonant sounds, Mandan has at most 11. Welsh has a lavish vowel inventory numbering 23 (including diphthongs), Mandan has 9 (including 3 nasal vowels not found in Welsh). Welsh uses 4 liquids: /l/, /ll/, /r/, /rh/, but Mandan has only /r/. I could go on and on, e.g. Mandan has a glottal stop, Welsh does not. Mandan grammar is charactaristically North American, with long sequences of prefixes and suffixes on the verb, while Welsh is very European, marking tense and subject agreement only using portmanteaux suffixes. Welsh, like other Celtic languages, is famous for its system of mutations (changing the sound of the first letter of a word in certain lexical and grammatical environments). Mandan certainly does not do this, but instead, rotates between /s/, /š/, and /x/ for semantic reasons (e.g. /š/ being more intense than /x/, as in ‘pušak’ – ‘course grained’ vs puxak – ‘fine grained’). I hope the vocabulary examples below magnify the differences. |
| Welsh | Mandan | English |
| iâ | xo: | ice |
| troed | ši | foot |
| cwningen | wa:xtik | rabbit |
| dannedd | hiʔ | teeth |
| du | psioʔš | be black |
| gwraig | wį:h | woman |
| melyn | ši:re | yellow |
| mellt | kšįkše | lighnting |
| melys | skųh | be sweet |
| cau | šowok | hollow |
| ceg | i:h | mouth |
| dyn | ruwąʔk | man |
| dw i’n rhedeg | wapte:hoʔš | I’m running |
| mae e’n dweud wrtho i | wąkirąoʔš | he tells me |
| tŷ | ti | house |
| Welsh | Mandan | English |
| un | wxa | one |
| dau | rųp | two |
| tri | rą:wrį | three |
| pedwar | to:p | four |
| pump | kixu: | five |
| chwech | kiwą: | six |
| saith | ku:pa | seven |
| wyth | te:toki | eight |
| nau | wąxpe | nine |
| deg | pirak | ten |
| Welsh | Aeth y dyn tu ôl y tŷ |
| Mandan | Rųwąʔk ti irąÃƒÂ‚šita re:hoʔš |
| English | The man went behind the house |
| Welsh | Maen nhw’n gallu ei fwyta e’n gyflym |
| Mandan | Orutrį:te ahkakreoʔš |
| English | They can eat it quickly |
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Of all these examples, the two languages share only one word in common, ‘house’. Statistically, there is bound to be at least one or two common words between languages, this does not imply they are related. That the word for ‘many’ in Korean is [mani], and ‘two’ is [tu(l)] does not imply a Korean colonisation of England in the distant past. Nor does the fact that the Mohawk pronominal affixes for 1st and 2nd person—/k/ and /s/— match the Hungarian affixes make it reasonable that the early Iroquois settled Hungary. These sorts of similarities are bound to happen. Historically, Mandan ‘ti’ would be related to /tʰipi/ in Dakota, while Welsh ‘tŷ’ is derived from Indo-European *tegos meaning cover/roof (English thatch). So these two words, although superficially the same, stem from different sources. To be fair, I will present some data which people have used to show Mandan to be Welsh. The information below is from a letter by George Catlin (in North American Indians, Peter Matthiessen ed., Penguin 1989), an early American explorer of the interior of North America. Along with cultural evidence that I won’t speak about, he gives the following word list. The modern Welsh and Mandan words are given in [square brackets], proper translations are given in (parentheses). |
| Welsh | Mandan | English |
| Mi [fi] | Me [wį-] | I |
| Chwi [chi] | Ne [rį-] | You |
| A [e, o] | E [i-] | He |
| E [hi] | Ea [i-] | She |
| Hwynt (they) | Ount [ąʔt] | It |
| Ni | Noo [rųšak] | We |
| Hwna, hona (these) | Eonah [?] | They |
| Hyna | Yrhai [ąʔt e: wą:kahe] | Those ones |
| Nag oes | Megosh [wįkoʔš] | There is not |
| Pen | pan [paʔ] | Head |
| Mawr penaethir (Big principal) | Maho peneta [?] | The Great Spirit |
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As can be seen, the correct Mandan words (where I have been able to find them) are somewhat similar to what Catlin recorded – assuming a sound change from ‘r’ to ‘n’. However, Mandan uses pronouns (the majority of the list) vanishingly rarely. These are not in fact pronouns, but pronominal prefixes, which almost always have to be placed at the beginning of a verb root, so that a better translation of English ‘I’ or Welsh ‘fi’ is ‘wįoʔra’ – ‘it is me, that being me’. By taking a Mandan pronominal prefix and identifying it with a Welsh pronoun—which occurs after the verb, Catlin made a huge mistake in judgement. In any case, Mandan is what is called an active-stative language (common to several North American Native language families). This system of organising nouns in relation to the verb is quite different from the nominative-accusative model of Welsh. What is a sentence in Welsh or English is a single word in Mandan:
Is the fact that the Mandan word begins with ‘wa:’ and the Welsh with ‘wei’ a clue to their common heritage? ‘Wa:’ in Mandan is a negative prefix, whicle the ‘wei’ in Welsh is a mutation of ‘gwei’ which is the first part of the root ‘work’. No match. Great care has to be taken in historical linguistics, not to see cognates where there are none. The only examples from Catlin that I see as similar are possibly: ‘head’ and ‘there is not’. Unfortunately for the latter, the morpheme analysis shows otherwise: in Mandan, ‘wįk’ is the verbal element, while in Welsh it is ‘oes’. The pronouns are extremely dodgy (as are grammatical affixes) because they tend to simplify themselves over time due to frequent use. It is unlikely that one will find a language with a common first person singular pronoun like ‘txwirpwyl’. As an example, the Welsh nominative 1st sg. pronoun is ‘i’, and the English is ‘I’. A match? The pattern of evolutin for these pronouns is: Welsh ‘i’ is from ‘mi’ > ‘fi’ > ‘i’, whereas the English ‘I’ is from ‘ic’ > ‘i’. A better match is Welsh ‘i’ with English ‘me’, but this would not be obvious by simply comparing the two words without a full philological study. This is moot as the Welsh and Mandan pronouns don’t match anyway, and contrary to Catlin, Mandan does not have separate pronominal prefixes for masculine and feminine. If you are a firm believer of Madog’s voyage to North Dakota, please do not email me with additional proofs or complaints. I am a Welsh speaker, I have met a Mandan learner, we could not communicate even a little bit. It is my hope that the history of the Mandan people can be respected for what it is, I don’t imagine they appreciate their oral history being relegated to second class by a European myth. There have been enough prejudicial theories against Native history: from the foreign builders of Cahokia to Egyptian influence in Maya writing. At least (in my opinion) the Welsh-Mandan story can be dispelled by solid linguistic evidence. This is not to say that Madog did not make it to North America in the twelfth century, but simply that the Mandan language is not in any way Welsh. Many historians believed that the Norse never made it to North America, and that their stories were just that, stories. Now that archæologists have dug up L’anse aux Meadows, we can be sure that the Vikings were not just making up amusing tales. Perhaps real evidence will surface, showing that Madog did in fact land in North America; that evidence has not and will not be found in the Mandan language. Still not convinced? My advice is learn to speak Welsh, and then try and read this. |
Don't forget the Africans in the 1100s. Since the Native Americans, all others just visited and left, or got stranded and died out. Only Columbus started a constant communication and trade between the Americas and the rest of the world. That's why he matters and the others are just interesting historical footnotes.
Were not Viking artifacts found in Vineland?
I'm funin' y'all but if you believe this, I gotsa bridge in Biloxi that you can have!
The article sure says "we know for a fact" a lot to describe a lot of theories. For instance, we certainly do not know for a fact that King Arthur was a conbination of two people. Geoffrey Ashe disputes this.
Just goes to show that those who figure out how to make a profit...Columbus...get the credit, and those that figure out how to market it...Amerigo Vespucci...get to name it.
What matters on the political scene today is not who discovered America, but who forgot it. ;)
The Turkish Admiral Piri Reis was responsible for the first map to correctly portray the eastern coast of North and South America. When I visited the Naval Museum in Istanbul there was an entire room devoted to his maps. I asked if I could see the original "Piri Reis" map of North America. I was told no, it's not there, it's in Topkapi Palace. Later, when I was touring Topkapi Palace, I asked to see the map. I was told no, it's in the Naval Museum. I hope somebody knows where it is. Anyway, the Naval Museum had a copy of the original, which I was able to see.
Is this why Indian's were found, I believe in NC, with blue eyes and blond hair?
The Chinese came very close, though. They were on the verge of doing it in the early 15th century, when a new set of rulers, when a change of rulers ended the age of Chinese exploration and expansion.
I'm just glad that someone discovered America.
OK, how do we explain the Melundgeons? Shipwrecked Portuguese sailors? Gypsies?