1289: Zuni and Japanese: Related? Jun 21, 2018

There is a great deal of genetic evidence to suggest that Native Americans are related to East Asians, but there is also some controversial evidence linking certain groups linguistically. The Zuni language spoken in the Pueblo area is a linguistic isolate, like Basque, and it is not considered related to any other American language, and even though most American ones are polysynthetic (leading to extremely long words) opposite to the analytic nature of most East Asian languages, there are some notable linguistic similarities between Zuni and Japanese. The linguistic data on its own was not enough to convince many people, but there were later genetic studies that claimed to support such a link. However, much of the explanation for this relates to the debunked theory of the Altaic language family.

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