Saturday 11 August 2012

THE SANSKRIT CONNECTION - NATIVE AMERICAN LANGUAGES OF NORTH AMERICA

India recognizes Sanskrit as the mother of all Indian languages. In Europe, Proto-Indo-European (PIE) was constructed with the assumption that there must have been a common language which was spoken in antiquity in the European region. Given the closeness that they found between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, and enamored by the richness of Sanskrit and its extremely refined grammar, they also threw in Sanskrit into the same group.

Cognates with similar meanings from European languages and Sanskrit were clubbed into PIE, grammatically re-arranged in a pattern similar to Sanskrit ('root word' and 'derivatives'), and named Proto-Indo-European (PIE).

Then a theory was put forth that PIE was the mother of all Indo-European languages. Including Sanskrit!

Like Proto-Indo-European (PIE), Proto-Amerind, a reconstructed mother language of a group of Native American languages (of North America) has also been constructed.

Now take a look at this. In their paper "Linguistic Origins of Native American Languages"* in the Scientific American Journal dated November 1992, Joseph H. Greenberg and Meritt Ruhlen write about Proto-Amerind and say , "...... the root word "tana" (son) and "tuna" (daughter) ...not only ties Amerind together but also distinguishes Amerind from other language families. It (the root word 'tana' & 'tuna'), as linguists say, is an exclusive innovation of the Amerind language".

Not so. A glance at basic Sanskrit tells us that 'tana' and 'tuna' are not at all exclusive to Proto-Amerind. In fact they are identical with Sanskrit. In Sanskrit 'tana' is body. Everything that is related to the 'body' starts with the prefix 'tana'. For example:

1. tana     (तन)     body
2. tanay   (तनय)   son, child, propagated from the     body, offspring, race, posterity
3. tanuja (तनूजा)  daughter, born of the body,
    {Ja'as in 'Janma'}.

This in-fact proves the reverse. That Sanskrit is not only closely related if not the mother of all European Languages, it might also be related to at least a group of Native American Languages. After all historians do say that Asians & Siberians migrated into America 30,000 years back via the Bering Strait. 

In his paper, Similarities between the Asiatic and American Indian Languages, published in October 1960 in the International Journal of American Linguistics author Tadeusz Milewski pointed out similarities between the cultures of the American peoples before the coming of the whites and that of Asia and Oceania. He states, "It results from either mutual contacts or independent but parallel evolution....Moreover it may be interesting to note the same coincidences are found in the sphere of linguistic facts. Striking structural similarities whose origin may be conceived in different ways occur between some Asiatic and American Indian Languages."

He further states, "According to generally accepted hypothesis ancestors of the American Indians was Asia and they reached America by crossing the narrow and often frozen Bering Straits. As the sheet retreated different nomadic hunting tribes moved from Central Asia to the north, came to Bering Straights and having crossed over the ice and reached the coast of Alaska.... These facts prove that the primitive peoples of America brought with them the languages they had spoken earlier in Asia. .". The author adds, "The similarities between the languages are too complex and too numerous to be the result of parallel and independent development."


Did the ancient Asian immigrants take Sanskrit along with them to the Americas? Where does that leave PIE?



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