Q: I was Just wondering if you have ever found a connection between the Inuit and the Shoshone. If so where could I find the information? I am in a college anthropology
class, and my instructor who is an anthropologist has linked the Shoshone and the Aztec. Any information you could help me with would be greatly appreciated.
A: Thank you for writing. I'm afraid I'm a little confused by your
question, though. The title of your email talks about the Inuit, but the
body talks about the Aztecs. Those are two completely different
civilizations. The Aztecs are indigenous people of south-central Mexico.
The Inuit, also known as the Eskimos, live in the Arctic.
Your
professor is correct, the Shoshone are distant relatives of the Aztecs
and speak a related language. Their shared language family is known as
"Uto-Aztecan" and you can learn more about it here. A good book on Native American language families in general is The Languages of Native North America.
The Inuit languages are completely unrelated to the Uto-Aztecan languages.
Hope that helps, have a good day!
Native Languages of the Americas
Further reading:
Shoshone
Aztec/Nahuatl
Inuit
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
How similar are Native American languages?
Q: Hello from Denmark.
A: Thanks for writing. There are multiple different language families of Native American languages. People who speak languages within the same language family can understand each other to varying degrees. So, a Sioux person could probably understand an Assiniboine person. Those two languages are very closely related. Maybe it could be compared to Danish and Swedish-- some words and pronunciations are different, but speakers can mostly follow each other. For a more distantly related Siouan language, such as Osage, maybe it could be compared to Danish and English-- it's easy to see how a lot of words are related if you look, even though people can't automatically understand each other. But for other languages that don't belong to the Siouan language family at all, such as Navajo, there is no relation and Sioux people couldn't understand those languages at all unless they studied them and learned them-- more like Danish and Japanese.
Hope that helps, have a good day!
Native Languages of the Americas
Further reading:
Siouan language family
Amerindian language families
I wonder: How similar are the different native languages? Could a Sioux understand a member of another band?
A: Thanks for writing. There are multiple different language families of Native American languages. People who speak languages within the same language family can understand each other to varying degrees. So, a Sioux person could probably understand an Assiniboine person. Those two languages are very closely related. Maybe it could be compared to Danish and Swedish-- some words and pronunciations are different, but speakers can mostly follow each other. For a more distantly related Siouan language, such as Osage, maybe it could be compared to Danish and English-- it's easy to see how a lot of words are related if you look, even though people can't automatically understand each other. But for other languages that don't belong to the Siouan language family at all, such as Navajo, there is no relation and Sioux people couldn't understand those languages at all unless they studied them and learned them-- more like Danish and Japanese.
Hope that helps, have a good day!
Native Languages of the Americas
Further reading:
Siouan language family
Amerindian language families
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)