Four Waves of Migration From Siberia. Very similar to what we have seen before.
Edward Sapir noted the n-, m- pronoun sequence over a century ago, but it fell out of favor because the "splitters" among linguists wanted there to be 150+ Native American language families and did not like seeing unifying similarities.
Even when they hit you in the face. The theory was that all the tribes were borrowing and influencing each other's pronouns in the interest of trade and communication. Except pronouns are among the most stable, long-lasting words in a language. Sapir and Joseph Greenberg believed their were three groups: Amerind, by far the largest and comprising most native languages, Na-Dene, which includes Navajo, Hopi, and the Athabaskan languages, and Eskimo-Aleut, arriving last and confined to the Arctic. The linguists who reject Greenberg most frequently do so because they (loudly and sometimes angrily) reject his technique of multilateral comparison in favor of the more traditional bilateral comparison used to identify language similarities and groups.
But the genetic evidence keeps building up year after year. So now it's up to four waves, but the first one does not seem to have clear influence. The drums are beating.
I admit that I have some nagging memory of Johanna Nichols and some controversy, which didn't show up in her Wikipedia page. Also, timelines for language relationship have been bouncing around a fair bit lately, so the sequence may matter more than the numbers.
1 comment:
This is tangential to the topic of your post, but I think anthropologists exaggerate the extent of Indian trade. Maybe they don't study economics. There was some trade in preciosities that had limited local source regions--things like copper or flint. But there was otherwise very little division of labor between tribes. There will not be much trade where everyone hunts deer and raises corn, squash and beans.
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