Researchers suggest another ancestry for Native Americans (Boston Globe)

[eppur_se_muova]

12. That was quite a mini-lesson in linguistic origins. :)

I've always found the topic interesting, despite being a mediocre language learner. I wish comparative linguistics were offered as a college course as commonly as introductory foreign languages were ! Do courses in French I-II etc. do as much good as a course providing an overview of all the languages of the world ? There's room for both, as they serve different purposes, but I wish the latter were more of a mainstream educational option.

I read this book in grad school (chemistry, not linguistics) and thought it fascinating, but didn't wed myself to any of its conclusions, as the field is obviously in a state of flux, and probably will be forever: https://archive.org/stream/189942876InSearchOfTheIndoEuropeansJPMallory/189942876-In-Search-of-the-Indo-Europeans-J-P-Mallory_djvu.txt It's kind of a blend of linguistics, history, and archaeology, as it attempts to locate the physical homeland of the first speakers of an Indo-European language.

I once read a book on the Chinese language which explained the process of change by which completely different monosyllabic Chinese words evolved from each other -- a vowel in the middle might change, a few centuries later a consonant might be dropped from the end, only to be replaced by a different consonant a few centuries later, and the consonant at the beginning dropped -- let such processes go on for a while, and pretty soon "Fred" becomes "Axlotl". All of this takes place at different, seemingly capricious times for different words, and so the language slowly shifts; there's no organized or systematic process involved. Add that most speakers of the language are illiterate AND that the writing system isn't phonetic anyway, and shift happens. So it's hardly surprising that NA languages would have diverged so widely, if they were only given time. It seems to me that languages of the Americas are somewhat unique in one respect: they may share a common origin at a common time, with no subsequent influence from other, outside language groups for millenia. Perhaps, say, the native languages of Australia are similar; I don't know. But that may mean some of the relationships among NA languages are less ramified than among Old World languages; perhaps we can "see farther back" in such a situation, and so we see phenomena that are obscured in Old World languages by the sheer number of various influences.

Now I'm going to look up "Italon" and "Nostratic" -- I'd never heard of either term before.

(BTW, is "Altatic" supposed to be "Altaic"?)