LINGUIST List 15.1027

Sun Mar 28 2004

Disc: Re: How China discovered America...?

Editor for this issue: Sarah Murray <sarahlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Ken_Decker, Re: How China discovered America
2. R�my Viredaz, Disc: Re: 15.986: How China discovered America...?
3. Mike_Cahill, Re: 15.986, Disc: How China discovered America...?

Several years ago, in Belize, I met a lady that was doing research
comparing possible cognates between Chinese and Mayan varieties. What
I saw of the data looked like coincidental similarities, but there was
a large number of comparisons.

A search on the Internet led me to an article from Harvard reviewing
the evidence for Chinese contact with the Americas:
http://hussle.harvard.edu/~zhang/docs/Pre-Columbian%20Contact.pdf

It seems there is room for more research, and linguistics may provide
valuable clues.


- Ken Decker

Message 2: Disc: Re: 15.986: How China discovered America...?

Re: Linguist 15.986

Menzies' statements look very suspicious indeed.

sanpan means "three planks" in Chinese, thus a small boat, not a
sailing ship. palso 'raft' does not look Chinese. balsa means
basically a kind of tree (with a very light wood, used among others
for making rafts).


R�my Viredaz
1, rue Chandieu
1202 Gen�ve
remy.viredazbluewin.ch

Message 3: Re: 15.986, Disc: How China discovered America...?

Very interesting indeed! But such resemblances are not terribly
unlikely, even by pure chance. Mark Rosenfelder has put together a
website "How likely are chance resemblances between languages?" which
takes you through the math to show this, at
http://www.zompist.com/chance.htm .

As a matter of fact, very much to the point of your query, he even has
a list of Chinese and Quechua words which resemble each other, but
which he contends are NOT real cognates. This is at
http://www.zompist.com/proto.html#chinesequechua .

-Mike Cahill