h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hey Possum:

Just a quick not to let you know that I really enjoyed your entry. If memory serves, historical linguists have a theory out there that Japanese is perhaps related to Finnish, of all things. My Japanese friends *hate* this theory, so I delight in expounding it.

An interesting (geographic) isolate is Navajo, which is part of the Athapaskan family. What they did with their snow-related vocabulary I can't say. Fun to think of, though.

craving Carver,
Miao Hongzhi

Because of the Navajo language being semi isolated as you say the US Army used Navajo as radio operators during WW2. Speaking in Navajo and using certain code terms for things they were able to have a code which is probably the only code used that wasn't broken at some point.

Interestingly, Japanese has actually had postulated links with Navajo. Eerie coincidence, huh? Actually, Japanese has been linked with virtually every language on earth, though, so...

It's also interesting how the US Army suddenly found the Navajos to have such an important role in radio signals when only fifty or so years previously they were starving them to death in desert ravines. Ah well.

Navajo is actually one hell of a language. Just looking at the words makes your head want to cave in.

Hey Poss:

Another eerie Navajo fact: like Chinese (and many Southeast Asian languages), Navajo is a tonal language, as are many (indigenous) American languages. It's fun to speculate about possible connections, though most Native Americans I've met tend to, well...completely and utterly dismiss such theorizing.

Centuries of contact with "pioneers", evangelists, Social Darwinists, poius good samaritans of every stripe, and especially Scientists rummaging through their burial grounds filling brainpans with bbs might have left a bad impression of Euros and Anglos in general.

I wonder what the Navajo word for "archaeologist" is??

Miao

I suppose it's possible. Finnish, like Hungarian, is related distantly to the languages of northern Russia and Siberia. how closely is Japanese related to them?

The RAF used Welsh and Scots Gaelic speakers in planes to maintain communication between members of bombing raids so that the Luftwaffe couldn't infiltrate the squadron. I believe that the USAAF also used Navajo speakers for the same purpose.

Well, if Japanese is related to Finnish, then it would be through other languages of the Uralic family (which stretches from Hungary to Korea) because obviously there is a bit of distance between Japan and Finland! Actually, though, there's no concrete evidence to suggest any link at all - it's all just theory. Actually, I've heard it said that Japanese looks like a mixture of languages from five different families - Dravidian (in Southern India) Uralic, Altaic, Sino-Tibetan and Austronesian. Which makes no sense for what is really an obscure island group with very little contact with the outside world.

Have either of you heard of the Ainu? These people were indigenous to the North of Japan and are now almost extinct, but their language has no links with Japanese and seems to be an isolate as well!

On the subject of Tonal languages - it's strange that only languages from Asia and North America use this system - it suggest a link, possibly? Apparently Chinese and Amerindian people are ethnically quite similar - maybe the Native Americans came from the same genetic stock as the Chinese and when they migrated over the Bering Straits to America they retained some traces of the language...Cherokee is interesting because originally it wasn't a tonal language but when the Cherokees were forces to a reservation in Oklahoma it became tonal...

Some African languages, most notably Yoruba, are tonal as well.

I remember an interview with King Sunny Ade where he mentioned that the drums actually intone additional lyrics and he's able to signal the crew to adjust the sound or lighting or bring them a drink with only a subtle change to the tone.

The language of the talking drums is a small subset of the spoken language. Stock phrases are used. The language has essentially been stripped of all elements but the tonal.

Navajo is closely related to Apache. It succeded as a code-talker language for two reasons

A) they used code like phrases such that even native Navajo speakers said they didn't understand what was being talked about

and

2) Although the Germans had considerable knowledge of Native American languages, which they freely shared with the Japanese, they had never studied Navajo.

Finally, I doubt if any living languages are isolates in the sense that they are unrelated to any other language, but merely in the sense that we don't know the relations. The relations may be so far lost in time that they are unrecoverable.

Am I wrong in believing that I have heard the Ainu also referred to as 'the Hairy Ainu', and that they differ from other Japanese by being 'whiter' and hairier?

You are not wrong in believing that. Insofar as there is such a thing as race the Ainu are not of the same race as the Nihonjin. The Ainu are classified as Caucasian if I remember correctly and do have relatively more body hair than do the Japanese although how much compared to other Caucasians I do not know.

This being the case, it is not hard to imagine that Japanese language could be related more closely to European than Far Eastern Languages. If Caucasion people could get there, than surely one of their languages could, too.

I think the Caucs were aboriginal in Japan and the Mongoloids (if that's the term these days) moved in on them. Any attempts to relate Japanese to other languages has, at best made some tentative links with Korean as I remember it. I also have a note appended to that memory that says that the connection with Korean is pretty much discredited these days. I've got a book at home which makes some fairly up to date comments; I'll see can I check it out.

Still, languages do occasionally cross ethnic boundaries. Most of the speakers of Romance languages are not descended from the Romans.

The last I heard the "Ainu is not a linguistic isolate" brigade reckoned it was Altaic. Its about 6 years since I stopped following Japanese (archipelago) linguistics, but at that time the Ainu/proto-Turkic links were considered at least as strong as the proto-Korean/proto-Japanese ones (although there was a fair amount of research about possible Austronesian links for both IIRC). And since there is supposed to be a lot of Uralic-Altaic (Finno-Ugric / Turkic) linkage Ainu as Altaic would link nicely with Japanese as Finno-Ugric and have them related again

On the other hand, things about languages are difficult either to prove or disprove when there are less than 10 surviving native speakers all of whom speak different dialects, and the literary tradition is entirely oral. The only sensible research done when there was any sizable body of Ainu native speakers still around 100 years or so ago concentrated on Japanese place-name etymology.

BTW, about the hairy thing: Ainu men grow full beards (and I mean full), of a kind that Chinese/Japanese/Koreans just can't pull off. To complement this, Ainu women used to have blue tatoos round their mouths (think the Joker in Batman) to make them look "pirka" (beautiful).

Amazing, intellegent conversation on the web ^_^

The talk about the seemingly absurdly wide-spread language relationships reminded me
of an interesting correlation. I ran across a great map of genetic similiarity by ethnic and
geographic group, and it follows the language groups well in some of the most surprising
cases. As it turns out, many groups that one thinks are closely related from geography
and physical similarity are really not closely related genetically. This implies that there are
are physical or _social_ boundries, which are what are really important when you are
figuring out who will mate with who (or who will adopt a language or who).

One example, Northern Asians and Southern Asians are (in general) less related to
each other genetically than African Europeans. There are also some nifty genetic similarites
between Hugarians and some Asian groups that give weight to common origin for their
languages and social structures. In terms of family structure and legal tradition, Eastern
Europeans were much more similar to the "traditional" Asian values than Western European
until pretty recently.

My apologies for not having references at hand. I think the genetic similarity map was in
the LA Times, but I'm sure that there are better sources.

The linguists I know all love Hungarian, since it is such a screwed up language it breaks all
the computational "complexity" measures.

Since Japanese and Korean are the only two natural languages I've ever really tried to learn
(other than English) , and I failed horribly, knowing that they are screwy makes me feel
a bit better.

Hmm. I've never really had a sensible explanation for why I found Japanese so easy to learn (I was hopeless at French and classics at school). Wouldn't it be fun if I was somehow genetically predisposed at some deep sub-linguistic level (I can't speak a word of Hungarian, by the way, but my mother's cousins still do) to languages that are related to it

[There, that should take the conversation down an academic level or two; we can't be having with this intelligence on the web after all. ]