this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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I've seen worse. Like:
If both are correct the Huns spoke a language from the same family as some North American languages. That's way, way weirder than Roman descendants in Liqian.
The evidence in the first paper is a bit thin (to say the least), but a cool hypothesis I hadn't heard before.
Well... it is. Something like k→x~h→Ø isn't weird at all, so the correspondence set isn't weird. But it's still too small to rule out alternate hypotheses, like coincidence and borrowing; specially because only a few of those words are core vocab, and those families (Yeniseian, Mongolic, Turkic, Tungusic) interacted so much that there's a lot of noise there.
Still tempting though; specially given localisation.
I thought the theory was that people spread from Siberia to North America when the Bearing Straight had a land bridge. So having a common language root isn't weird at all.
That is the theory, but the cool thing is that we're able to use the Comparative Method to prove relatedness between these two language groups at all.
The Comparative Method is usually considered to only work to a time depth of around 10,000 years, past which regular sound change, analogy, and borrowing pile on top of each other to the point where any remaining regular correspondences become unrecognizable.
The "pop" idea has usually been that the "land bridge" was crossed around 40,000 years ago, but that's waaaaay past where we would be able to prove any relatedness in the languages spoken in the Americas and Asia. The linguistic evidence indicates that the most recent migration must have happened not too far past 10k years ago.
I believe the current thought is that there were at least three different major migrations from Asia to the Americas, with the oldest happening around 40k years ago, and the most recent being Dene speakers and occurring no longer than 15k years ago, though others may be able to better speak to this. Either way, this is a great example of how linguistic evidence can securely inform and complement archaeological work.