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They share grammatical peculiarities lost in intermediate languages. Navajo introduced to Ket elders say they are almost inter-intelligible.
I'll bet a keg of beer that they are not in fact mutually intelligible.
That's a name I haven't heard in a long, long time.
This website has the best guide (afaik) on how to create a conlang[1]. Or at least it was the best guide back in the 2000's, probably something better has been written since but I've been out of touch with the conlang subculture for over a decade now so I have no idea anymore.
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I'll bet a keg of beer that they are not in fact mutually intelligible.
No dog in this fight, but I was nerd sniped into doing some googling. I guess this is what they're referencing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9%E2%80%93Yeniseian_...
Well, it's remarkable if these languages are related, but even so, we're talking about two languages that diverged thousands of years ago, maybe 10k years. Probably in the same ballpark as Proto-Indo-European or even older.
That is, these two languages would be about as mutually intelligible as, say, English and Albanian, or less.
My favorite little cross-language coincidence is how lots of place names up north end in 'vik'. In the old Viking world, there's Reykjavík, Keflavík, Grindavík, etc in Iceland. Then over in Norway, you've got Larvik, Malvik, Rørvik, etc. In Sweden: Västervik, Valdemarsvik, Örnsköldsvik. Then in the new world, Greenland has Aasivik and Arsivik. The Eastern part of the Canadian north has has Aquiatulavik and Iqiattavik…
IANAL[1] but is it possible that "vik" meant "home" or something as long as 20,000 years ago, before people even populated the Americas, and that this word persisted throughout the development of American and North Germanic languages? [1] linguist :)
Secondly, the semantics of the two suffixes appear to be different, with the Inuit term being a fairly abstract place term, and the Germanic prefix being specifically a geographic location suffix.
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IANAL[1] but is it possible that "vik" meant "home" or something as long as 20,000 years ago, before people even populated the Americas, and that this word persisted throughout the development of American and North Germanic languages? [1] linguist :)
Unfortunately for your hypothesis, the etymology of the Norse or Icelandic suffix "-vik" in Reykjavik is known. It means "bay", originally through a sense of a twist or turn, like a turning in along the coast. It is related to English "wend", "wind (up)" or "way". ("Sideways" = "turned to the side".) The same Indo-European root, in a slightly different but related sense (think "turn over") via Latin gives "victor" an…
Yet, Ket in central Asia and Navajo in south-central North America are very closely related. Sadly, Ket is close to dead, with only dozens of mostly elderly still fluent. Some suspect it was carried in a migration from Alaska back to Asia. Languages used in British Columbia and Yukon are in the same family to those, but less similar. It is an example of a common phenomenon, where the extrema of a range retain older f…
(Hell, I'm not sure there's any genetic evidence of admixture between the expeditions of Erik the Red and Greenlanders despite clear cultural and material evidence of contact, though that's probably more of a testament to lack of continual trade than evidence it didn't occur at all.)
> Zompist That's a name I haven't heard in a long, long time. This website has the best guide (afaik) on how to create a conlang[1]. Or at least it was the best guide back in the 2000's, probably something better has been written since but I've been out of touch with the conlang subculture for over a decade now so I have no idea anymore. https://www.zompist.com/kit.html
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Consulting Wiktionary, it lists several words for ‘aunt’ in Mandarin: depending on the precise relation, it can be gūmǔ , bómǔ , shúmǔ , yímǔ , jiùmǔ , plus some other dialectal synonyms. None of these sound anything like ‘ah-yi’.
This is clearly referring to 阿姨, which is a vocative term of address for an aunt (in particular, on the mother's side). https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%98%BF%E5%A7%A8
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My favorite little coincidence is that ending a sentence in "ne" turns it into a question in both Japanese and colloquial German, with exactly the same sense ("isn't it?").
Also Portuguese, where "né?" is understood as a contraction of "não é?" ("isn't it?"). I don't mean to say that this is a coincidence as far as the European languages go; negation words with N are often a shared inheritance from Indo-European https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
Makes total sense now.