# Similarities between Native American and Turkic languages



## ancalimon

I've recently found out about someone named Haluk Berkmen showing similarities between these languages. I suspect there are some errors he made.

I'd like some expert advice before becoming suspicious of them.

http://www.astroset.com/bireysel_gelisim/ancient/a27.htm
http://www.astroset.com/bireysel_gelisim/ancient/a28.htm

you may need to read the whole 41 pages of the article to understand the way how he tries to make a connection.

These are the words he compared with Turkic

*Leader: Ahau (Agha), Ax: Baat (Balta), Servant, Low: Ashac (Uşak, Aşağı), A lot, Strong: Tchac (Çok), Pine tree: Tcha (Çam), Difficult: Tchetun (Çetin), Augment, Climb: Tchich (Çık), Left handed: Tchol (Çolak, Solak), Boulder: Kaa (Kaya), Bird: Kutz (Kuş), Inside: İçil (İçinde), Female: İş (Dişi), Belt: Kaşnak (Kasnak), Day: Kin (Gün), Sun: Kiniş (Güneş), Person: Kişe (Kişi), Old man: Koça (Koca), Slave: Kul (Kul), Mother: Naa (Ana), Be: Ol (Ol), Stay clean: Tamazkal (Temiz-kal), *

*[Quote too long, please read the rules. Other examples can be found on the websites, see links above -- Frank, moderator EHL] *


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## phosphore

I heard that some scientist had proven that God speaks Turkish. I find that's just a fantastic theory. Can you confirm on that too? I would love to hear some more on that.


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## itreius

> Since there have been no physical interaction in the last two millennia between Asiatic Turks and Central American Maya, these words cannot be loanwords. *They have to stem from a common root language*, which I have labeled as the Proto-language.


Yeah, because we all know that there can't be any random correspondences. Oh, wait.


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## ancalimon

phosphore said:


> I heard that some scientist had proven that God speaks Turkish. I find that's just a fantastic theory. Can you confirm on that too? I would love to hear some more on that.



I'd have no difficulty understanding him at all if he only spoke English.


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## Maroseika

Another interesting question: is it possible to find 2 languages - no matter how far its natives live from each other -  in which we'd fail to find at least 100 more or less similarly sounding words meaning more or less the same thing?
After all, with less than 100 phonems in any human language, we have good chances.


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## phosphore

I can provide you with a short list of Slavic words that all originate from the word Turk.

drag=dear, expensive (note that "d" and "g" are just voiced variants of "t" and "k")
trg=square (the same remark about "g")
tragati=to search (the same remark about "g")
drug=friend (the same remarks about "d" and "g")
trk=run (this one is obvious)
torokati=to speak (the same as the previous one)

These are just some of the words that obviously descend from the word Turk and they are all essential for the life of the Slavs. This just proves that Slavic languages descend from Turkish.


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## itreius

> The worldwide accepted OK (Okay) as an affirmation meaning “yes” has its roots in the Oc language. It was used to affirm the superiority of the Oc leader carrying a bow and an arrow and later on a spear. The large Oc territory is shown in the map below.


Wow, just wow...


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## Hulalessar

I once read that, statistically, strange coincidences must happen and are therefore not odd at all; what would be odd is if there were no strange coincidences.


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## sokol

There are serious speculations about some relations between Paleosiberian languages (which are _*not*_ a genetic group, but split into several groups) and Native American languages (which, again, too are not a genetic group, but split into several ones).

Paleosiberian languages were spoken all across Siberia before Mongolic, Tungusic and Turkic tribes settled there; so it is only logical to suggest connections between Paleosiberian and Native American languages (as the latter came from Siberia, obviously).
Still, such links have not been proven yet, to my knowledge.

However, to my knowledge there do _*not*_ exist any _*serious*_ speculations about a relation between Turkic and Native American languages.
I think we can safely discount the non-scientific ones as folk etymologies.


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> I once read that, statistically, strange coincidences must happen and are therefore not odd at all; what would be odd is if there were no strange coincidences.


Yes, this is a well known phenomenon in statistics. In undergraduate classes, professors regularly surprise students by telling them they are willing to bet that at lest two students in the class will have the same birthday; and this is practically always the case. The reason is the following: While the probability is very high that any two students in class have different birthdays, the probabilty that this will hold for all pairs (and there are n*(n+1)/2 of them!) is extremely low. Now, imagine two languages with (conservatively) 100,000 words each. You can build 10,000,000,000 pairs. The chance that you will find a a few dozen chance coincidences is practically 100%.


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## ancalimon

Hulalessar said:


> I once read that, statistically, strange coincidences must happen and are therefore not odd at all; what would be odd is if there were no strange coincidences.



This brings satiric fantasy writer Terry Pratchett (author of Discword series) to my mind. It's %100 possible for the one in a million odd to become reality, and that is always the case in his stories. Fortunately we live on a real word, living a real life.

These are not coincidences. What needs to argued is how come the similarities exist. and there must be theories, and arguments strong enough against these theories. Saying this is coincidence then saying "next one" doesn't sound like the right thing to do, in my opinion.


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## Frank06

ancalimon said:


> These are not coincidences. What needs to argued is how come the similarities exist. and there must be theories, and arguments strong enough against these theories. Saying this is coincidence then saying "next one" doesn't sound like the right thing to do, in my opinion.


Ignoring these statistical facts and merely repeating that it cannot be a coincidence doesn't sound like the right thing to do, in everybody else's opinion.
Do you have something else than these coincidential pairs? More structural, more fundamental data? Morphological data? Phonetical, phonological ones?  

Once again -- and I am getting slightly fed up with having to write this three time in two days in EHL, a place which was created to talk about genuine linguistics: What you present is yet another case of pseudo-linguistics. Once again.

Frank


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## Hulalessar

ancalimon said:


> These are not coincidences. What needs to argued is how come the similarities exist. and there must be theories, and arguments strong enough against these theories. Saying this is coincidence then saying "next one" doesn't sound like the right thing to do, in my opinion.



I think what we are saying is that if you compare any one language with another unrelated one that it is statistically predictable that there will be pairs like those cited. Since that will always be the case, you need something more than a few words that sound similar with the same meaning. What Haluk Berkmen ought to do as a control is to compare Maya (or indeed Turkish) with Icelandic, Swahili and Burushaski to see if it produces similar lists.

The trap he has fallen into is the one that many non-linguists fall into. He has noticed or been looking for similarities between words, when what linguists look for is correspondences of the type "where in language A you have /b/ in language B you have /f/" as in English _bear_, _brother _and _bloom _and Latin _fero, __frater _and _flos_. If he can produce a long list showing correspondences of this type people may sit up and take notice. Until then the simplest explanation is likely to be correct; the similarities are just coincidence.


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## clevermizo

You can always find "cognates" and similarities if you are looking for them. The OP seems to be out to show that all languages in the world are Turkic. Well fair enough. I would like to show that all languages are actually (Mandarin) Chinese, originally (whether content or function lexemes). Consider these similarities and true etymologies:


Bread (English)  包里豆 [bao li dou] "inside the steamed bun is a bean" - referring to the fact that all bread was originally steamed buns with a bean paste inside. This was corrupted to the sorts of grains and barbaric preparation methods we find in Europe, as well as the pronunciation.

Poder (Spanish - "to be able to") 迫得 [po dei] "a force or compulsion to get or be able to achieve something". The "r" is a corruption of the Romance accent.

Maintenant (French - "now") 忙的男 [mang de nan] "busy/occupied man" - Idiom used by the French mean "I'm busy right now" and then shortened to mean simply "(right) now".

شوكة [shawka] (Arabic - "fork") 小筷 [xiao kuai] "little chopsticks" - used as an eating utensil, especially for cold salads ( 撒拉都 [sa la dou] "sprinkle spicy bean" - referring to the hot sauce used with traditional cold salads), but corrupted ("corrupt" from 口萝卜的 [kou luobo de] "mouth is made of radish" - from a myth about a man who was punished by having his mouth changed into a radish)  in shape by those elsewhere in the world.

Then are many such examples from any language in the world. It is because leading scientists believe that the origin of humanity was actually China and not Africa as was previously thought.


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## jmx

sokol said:


> ... it is only logical to suggest connections between Paleosiberian and Native American languages (as the latter came from Siberia, obviously).
> 
> Still, such links have not been proven yet, to my knowledge.


But check this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dené-Yeniseian_languages


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## sokol

jmartins said:


> But check this:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dené-Yeniseian_languages


Ah, so they DID finally succeed in finding _*a*_ link  - I didn't know about this work, I only knew that several linguists were trying to establish a safe link, and now, thanks to you, there is one between a Paleosiberian and an Amerindian group. 

This could probably make a good new thread (as of course neither has to do anything with Turkic languages).


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## Angelo di fuoco

phosphore said:


> I can provide you with a short list of Slavic words that all originate from the word Turk.
> 
> drag=dear, expensive (note that "d" and "g" are just voiced variants of "t" and "k")
> trg=square (the same remark about "g")
> tragati=to search (the same remark about "g")
> drug=friend (the same remarks about "d" and "g")
> trk=run (this one is obvious)
> torokati=to speak (the same as the previous one)
> 
> These are just some of the words that obviously descend from the word Turk and they are all essential for the life of the Slavs. This just proves that Slavic languages descend from Turkish.



I'd like to have the Turkish counterparts of these words. It's all too funny.

"Trg" actually exists in Swedish in the form "torget" (part of the word is an article) and means "market". In Russian, although we have conserved all the word and the word "торг" (commerce, negotiation), the word for market (рынок - "rynok) comes from the Germanic "ring": it's am obvious squaring of the circle.


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## Alxmrphi

> "Trg" actually exists in Swedish in the form "torget" (part of the word  is an article) and means "market"


Also in Icelandic, *torgið* (with article) *torg *(without) with a meaning of (city) square / piazza.
It was the first thing I thought of when I first read that original list in phosphore's post.


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## ancalimon

sokol said:


> Ah, so they DID finally succeed in finding _*a*_ link  - I didn't know about this work, I only knew that several linguists were trying to establish a safe link, and now, thanks to you, there is one between a Paleosiberian and an Amerindian group.
> 
> This could probably make a good new thread (as of course neither has to do anything with Turkic languages).



I can't understand how you decided that Yenisei don't have anything to do with Turks. If we throw everything out just for the sake of it, we are still left with simply Yenisei


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## jazyk

> I heard that some scientist had proven that God speaks Turkish.


Wrong! If God is Brazilian, he obviously speaks Portuguese.


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## Lars H

Angelo di fuoco said:


> "Trg" actually exists in Swedish in the form "torget" (part of the word is an article) and means "market".



Yes, the Swedes have most probably borrowed the word from Russians in the period 800-1000 AD when there were tight connections in trade and politics between Swedish and Russian territories (ett torg = a square, torget = the square) and from here the word (I guess) spread to the other Scandianvian languages, including Icelandic.

There is little evidence that we knew what a market place was, until we stumbled upon them i Novgorod/Holmgård. Later on, we borrowed "marknad" from German "Markt" during the Hanseatic times, but the word for the market place didn't change.

"Torg" shows up also in the name of the German town "Torgau", orignially a slavic name.


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## Frank06

*Hi,*

*Now that we have established once again that there are "similarities" between every possible set of languages (which is a bit the same as pointing out that the world is round, rain is wet and fire hot) , I think we can safely close this thread and concentrate ourselves upon the real topic of EHL: general and historical linguistics.*


*Frank*
*Moderator EHL*


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