kirjoitti:
Jack wrote:

One of the most amazing bits of linguistic detective work ever is
the recent demonstration that the Na-Dene language group of North
America (which includes Navaho and many of the languages of northern
California, where Joyce is) is descended from the same ancestor as
Ket, a dying language spoken by a few hundred people in the middle
of Siberia which was once thought to have no relation to any other
known language

One more piece of evidence pointing to the theory that the Americas
were initially populated by humans coming over the Bering land bridge
from Asia.

Given the timescale, Na-Dene/Yeniseian is not going to have a native
word for "cat".

I don't even think domesticated cats existed in the Americas until
Europeans brought them in the 15th century. So Natives living here
wouldn't have had a word for them. Don't know about Yeniseian, though
(that's the Siberian language?).


Psst, Yenisei is a big river (fifth longest in the world) in Siberia, so
it sounds logical that people live near it and that the language was
named after it...

--
Christine in Finland, butting in as usual...
christal63 (at) gmail (dot) com