Tantalizing connections between Chinese and Navajo

Navajo, a North American native language that is a member of the Athabaskan language family, is thought to have come over from Asia roughly 30,000 years ago. Put two identical texts rendered in Navajo and English side by side, and you will find no similarities beyond perhaps a few relatively recent loan words from Spanish/English. Read aloud the same two texts in Navajo and modern Mandarin, and you will most likely be pleasantly surprised by how many similarities there are in terms of: (1) tone structure (essentially the same four tones); (2) basic vocabulary (C: zui3 N: zéé’ (mouth)): (3) time markers (当 dang1: dą́ą́ (past time marker)); (4) final particles (le: marks completion or change in C, la: marks surprise or discovery in N); (5) elemental order (cardinal directions are given in the order ESWN in both languages); (6) question words (何地 he2 di4 in C, háadi in N (where)). While there are also substantal differences between the two, such as how verb constructs function, the similarities seem to go far beyond coincidence. Any ideas/insights into this mystery?

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(1) Of the tonal languages with 4 tones, how many are similar to Navajo? A tone set with high, low, rise, fall may not be uncommon. Also is the Navajo rising tone a low tone followed by a high tone of the same syllable (and likewise for the falling tone)? If so they are quite different than Mandarin. Personally I don’t find Navajo intonation similar to Mandarin.
(3), (4) The Chinese and the Navajo particles have very different meanings.
(5) How many of the world’s languages share this order? If many, then this may not be so special. My hunch is many languages start with E, and with that there are only 6 orders possible.
(6) 何地 is just one of many ways of saying “where”, and hardly a common one. Unless háa means what/which and di means place, this does not look like a strong similarity.

The bottom line is, it is very easy to cherry-pick words (especially with relaxed meanings) and features from any 2 languages to show that they are similar. I can also say Italian “pane” sounds like 饼, “cesso” sounds like 厕所 and “due” sound like 对 (as in “pair”), and I was able to come up with these without much thought. To prove that the similarities are more than coincidental you need evidence of contact (in case of borrowings) or regular sound correspondences in the older forms of the 2 languages or the reconstructed proto-languages of the 2 families.

That said, there is indeed a very small group of linguists who think Sino-Tibetan languages and Na Dené languages like Navajo are part of a macro family called Dené-Caucasian, which is based on some alleged similarities of the proto-languages. I think most linguists do not support this, since the methodology is not considered rigorous and reliable enough.

Henry:
Cool. I take your comments to heart, especially the part about not cherry picking. If you compare enough words, you can usually find some arbitrary words that are somewhat similar between two languages in sound (but much less rarely in both sound and meaning on a consistent basis across different parts of speech as in Navajo; see below). In this case, I would argue that the resemblances might be far more difficult to dismiss than one might think. Since you speak Cantonese and seem quite familiar with Mandarin, perhaps we could dig a little deeper into this.
(1) Tone structure: (a) Clearly, the fact that both languages share four tones is not overwhelming. Older Chinese dialects that are still spoken today, such as 閩南話 (and perhaps 粵語?) have much more complex tone structures with 7 or 8 tones, the 入聲,and other differences. And again, we have about 30,000 years of separation to account for. However, I find it extremely interesting that when I ask my nephew from Taiwan, who is not a linguist in any sense of the word, to repeat back sentences to me in Navajo, he is able to do so with perfect clarity and without having a clue as to what he is saying. My Navajo friends are also able to give me back sentences in Mandarin with nearly perfect pronunciation, again with no idea as to what they mean. Neither applies to monolingual English speakers. Clearly, regardless of how we define what a tone is or how many there are in either language, extremely similar underlying processes must be at work in the brain for this to be happening.
(b) The 入聲 is another interesting item to examine. One way of looking at the rusheng is to consider it as a syllable that ends in a glottal stop, so essentially c-v-’. Mandarin does not seem to allow this, but both Navajo and 閩南話 do. In fact, such words are quite common in both.
(3) No, I believe they are actually quite similar. They are both often combined with other words to create past time expressions. For example, take 當時 (at the time (in the past)) and ‘ałk’idą́ą́’ (at a time in the past). There is some difference, but the idea is strikingly similar.
(4) Again, I believe these to be quite similar. If I look out the window and see a thermometer registering 0 degrees (which you cannot see), and then turn to you and say “外面好冷了!” or “Tł’óodi deesk’aaz la!” (exact same word order in both), does it really matter whether the le/la signifies change or the fact that I have discovered the change? The immediate effect is the same.
(5) I do not know. It would be interesting to find out.
(6) 何人, 何时, 何地 are equivalent to háí, hádą́ą́, háadi, respectively . The reason for the extra “a” in “háadi” it to transition from the first high á to the low final i. Here, we thus have (1) an identical construction (word order) that is (2) identical in meaning and (3) virtually identical in sound in one case (háadi), tantalizing similar in another case (notice that our old friend dą́ą́ from above reappears in hádą́ą́; it is interesting that the form 何當 does not seem to have evolved in Chinese), and quite understandable in a third (háí: this literally means “which one” and could arguably be rendered as "何者” in Chinese). To my mind, this is starting to look like something more than just two words randomly sounding the same in two languages.
There are also myriad other examples I could have given in my original email.
For example, (7) Navajo has an elaborate system of classifying nouns. The meaning is not unlike the measure words used with numbers in Chinese (一支笔,一张桌子,一条歌). However, in Navajo, they have been incorporated directly into verbs as verb stems. You get the same meaning, but in a quite different way.
(8) A number of the pronouns are also similar. The first person singular pronoun in Navajo is shi or shí – no similarity that I can put my finger on there. However, the second person pronoun is ni in Navajo and 你 in Chinese (thus, 你妈 in Chinese and nimá in Navajo both mean “your mother”). In Navajo, the third person pronoun varies grammatically between bi and yi (modern Mandarin 他). However, if you look back just a few hundred years in Chinese, you can find bi being used as a third person pronoun (which lingers on in expressions such as 彼此 bi3ci3), and yi is still used as a third person pronoun in some Chinese dialects (for instance, 伊 yi1 meaning he or she in 閩南話). Thus, among the first through third person pronouns, two are quite similar.
Clearly, it may never be possible to prove that these two languages are related in any more than a peripheral way. However, based on the above, one cannot help but begin to perceive some underlying similarities. It is almost as if the same ingredients were put in two different pots, and then cooked with different spices and at different temperatures according to two different recipes. I find this truly tantalizing; what do you think?

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This is an interesting topic indeed! I’ve been learning Navajo morphology and phonology for years now out of personal interest - my own native language is a conservative Chinese dialect that preserves a lot of pronunciation and vocabulary from Old Chinese.

And yes while the connections between Chinese and Navajo are tenuous at best there are actually quite a lot of near-cognates. I’ll share them here later on when my internet connection is better!

Ahéhee’
Brian Loo

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Brian,
Great! I look forward to seeing more of those near-cognates (‘Ahéhee’ <=>謝謝 being the first!).
Matt

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Well for starters there’s 星 (“star”, pronounced “xing” in contemporary Mandarin) which was probably pronounced something like *seng in Old Chinese. This looks like a cognate with Navajo sǫʼ.
“I think” in Navajo is “nisin” where the root for “think/thought” is “-sin” or “-zin”. This seems quite close to 心 in Mandarin.
“It is dry” is “sigan”, where the root is “-gan”. This is probably related to 干 / 乾 (gan).

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(1) You mention the verb stem zin (as in nissin) in reference to “think” or “want”. I find it interesting that in Chinese, it is quite common to say “我想要…” meaning that I both think and want at the same time! This is extremely similar to Navajo usage.
Once you get into the verbs, there are a lot of potentially interesting connections.
(2) To follow up on your verb stem lead, there is the stem chxon as is “yíłchxon” (it stinks) in Navajo, which is not too far from 臭 (chou4) in Mandarin, also meaning to stink, with many similar variations in the other dialects.
(3) In terms of outer prefixes, there is the prefix ch’í (ch’é in prestem position) meaning ‘to go out’ as in “ch’éghááh” (s/he goes out, exits an enclosed space). For me, this calls to mind 出 in Chinese, as in 出去 (chu1qu4, to go out).
(4) Another good one is yá in Navajo, meaning “good,” as in the omnipresent yá’át’ééh, meaning “it is good” and doubling as hello (yá also occurs in many other combinations). The corresponding Chinese here would be 雅 as in 优雅 (you1ya3), meaning elegant or refined. This character is also used in many other combinations (such as 文雅). Both of these have extremely positive meanings in their respective languages.
And with this we have merely scratched the surface!

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Well, the issue is, as comparative linguists would like to point out, chance resemblances are way more common than most people think. Take a look at Mark Rosenfelder’s page: https://www.zompist.com/chance.htm. Obviously, the more semantic and phonetic leeway one applies, the more “matches” one will find. Without regular sound correspondences, we can’t convincingly demonstrate genetic relationship.

As for some of the words cited:

  1. 雅 in Middle Chinese started with ng
  2. 出 in Middle Chinese ended with -t
  3. 心 in Middle Chinese ended with -m

So just going back 1000-1500 years they are already less similar to the modern Navajo examples. What are the corresponding forms of the Navajo words in Proto Athabaskan? Proto Na-Dene? If they have been reconstructed and we could find similarities in Old Chinese or Proto-Sino-Tibetan that would be more interesting.

FYI here’s one version of Middle Chinese and reconstructed Old Chinese pronunciation, ordered by Mandarin pronunciation:
http://ocbaxtersagart.lsait.lsa.umich.edu/BaxterSagartOCbyMandarinMC2014-09-20.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3zXXRJHCaYePN48tFPUaYiKqZT8VJnzTM9eXq_Pfu6Z98nibLhCppJxXA

Also,

  1. Classifiers are not uncommon … they are seen in a few families. The way Navajo treats them seems very different than the ones I’ve read about (Malay, Swahili, Chinese).
  2. Using the same verb to mean “to think” and “to want” may be a modern Chinese phenomenon. In literary Chinese (文言) I think different verbs are used (e.g. 欲 vs 思).
  3. CVC structure … that’s very common in the world’s languages, isn’t it? Middle Chinese syllables can end in -m, -n, -ng, -p, -t, -k … which is quite different than Navajo I believe? The glottal stop in some Chinese dialects evolved from the -p, -t, -k in Middle Chinese (which is what 入聲 corresponded to).

Now … just to not spoil the party, here’s a list of proposed Proto-Dene-Caucasian roots I found. 星 seems to be indeed listed as a cognate between Sino-Tibetan and Na-Dene!

But as the page says, most linguists dispute the validity of the Dene-Caucasian family.

Henry,
Clearly you have your comparative linguistic toolbox fully packed with the equivalent of Makita-brand power tools and you know how to use them. I concede that, given that the separation of any common ancestor of Chinese and Navajo would probably have taken place 30,000 years or more ago, any attempt at reconstructing a shared proto-Sinádiné language (has a certain ring to it, you have to admit!) may be a futile exercise consigned to failure from the get-go. Add to that the incredible differences between the two (given the way verbs are constructed and used in the two languages, for example), and they might as well be from two different planets. And yet… The deeper one delves into the two, the harder it becomes to place each in its own neat little cubbyhole. Some very interesting forces are in play that defy description. There are just too many similarities that jump out. If I compare English to Navajo, the similarities are just not there. Nor are they with Arabic and Navajo. With Turkish, you start to get into vowel assimilation and harmony, as well as consonant harmony, and there are some similarities that crop up. With Japanese, there are also a few similarities (things like “ko” meaning here and “a(a)” meaning over there in both, “di” as a place marker, “to/dóó” meaning “and”). But with Chinese, there are just too many similarities to toss them aside as “chance resemblances.” The list that has been presented thus far is just a small sampling. You also have things like mósí, másí (and I have even seen máósí) for 猫 (mao1), meaning cat, as well as (łi)chíí and 赤 (chi4) meaning red (as in 赤壁之战 from Three Kingdoms). Perhaps what we are looking at is some form of parallel or convergent evolution.
Any thoughts?

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Actually I’ve been looking at reconstructions of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, a whole new ball game. Most linguists believe that Proto ST was non-tonal and so was Proto-Na-Dene. So we can’t link the tones from Chinese with Navajo as they developed independently.
That being said, the Proto ST verb (especially well-preserved in written Tibetan) has distinct imperfective, perfective, future and imperative stem forms which look at first glance rather like Athapaskan, complete with prefixes and suffixes.

Fascinating stuff! Could you give an example of a reconstructed Proto-Sino-Tibetan stem set? As those of us interested in Navajo can attest, it is a language of patterns within patterns within patterns. In addition to conjugation patterns (yi, ni, si, lv (=long vowel)), and conjugation combinations (a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h as per Faltz in The Navajo Verb), Navajo also appears to have three basic stem-set patterns (AABAA, ABBAB, ABBAA: see chapter on Inherent Patterns in Navajo Stem Sets in Fun With Navajo Verbs, Book 2, Perkins & Lyon), each with a number of sub-patterns. In the order FIPU/RO (future, imperfective, perfective, usitative/iterative, optative), an example of the ABBAB pattern as used in the verb na’ałchozh (to graze: see Young, Morgan, Midgette, 1992 p. 96) would be chosh, chozh, chozh, chosh, chozh, where A denotes a stem ending in an unvoiced consonant (here, sh) and B denotes a stem ending in a voiced consonant or a glottal (here zh). On this basis,
(1) Do such patterns appear to exist in Proto ST stem sets (or has the issue even been considered)?
(2) For anyone familiar with early Chinese forms (perhaps Henry?), could this have evolved in Chinese into something like the use of different tones on an identical character/stem to distinguish different parts of speech in ancient Chinese (a modern example being the pronunciation shu3 (as in 数钱)for the verb and the pronunciation shu4 (as in 数目) for the noun and shu4 when used as a modifier (as in 数百个人))?
It would be fun to know if these connections existed.

OK, I need a sip of coffee before I begin :slight_smile:

Like Modern Standard Arabic, Written Tibetan is extremely conservative and retains a lot of forms from Classical Tibetan despite having undergone extensive sound changes. And Classical Tibetan was highly conservative with regards to Proto Sino-Tibetan. I’m not an expert in Proto Sino-Tibetan but have some knowledge of Written Tibetan, here are a few paradigms:

Intransitive verbs are more simple:
Imperfective stems begin with a nasal (probably assimilates to the stem initial) and perfective ones end in “-s”
“arrive” Nbyon (imperfective) byons (perfective)

Transitive verbs have more patterns:
“to write” bri (future), Nbri (imperfective), bris (perfective), bris (imperative)
“to cook” btso (future), Ntsod (imperfective), btsos (perfective), tsos (imperative)
“to think” bsam (future), sems (imperfective), bsams (perfective) bsam (imperative)

Will add more later!

From what I have read, linguists have been noticing similarities between Na-Dene and what we now call Sino-Tibetan for at least 100 years (Edward Sapir was proposing
some relationship in 1920!). More recently, as mentioned earlier, there is the Dene Caucasian hypothesis, and one of the proponent’s son, George Starostin, is continuing his father’s work on this.
Apparently his latest position is Sino-Tibetan and Na-Dene are closer to each other than the others in the Dene Caucasian “family”. Check out his page: http://ehl.santafe.edu/denecauc.htm

But theirs is still a minority view.

On a related topic, Edward Vajda has been linking Yeniseian languages with Na-Dene recently, and his hypothesis has supposedly received quite a bit of support (e.g. because he was able to link the Ket tones to corresponding consonants in Na Dene). I find 2 of his recent videos on Ket and Na Dene (with examples from Navajo) very interesting… I highly recommend them:


Regarding Chinese words of related meanings that differ in tone … check out Laurent Sagart’s “The Origin of Chinese Tones”.

There are also words of similar meaning that differ by the initial (and perhaps the tone), e.g. 见 vs 现, 张 vs 长, and some believe they are due to disappeared prefixes.

Anyway, I’m just a language enthusiast … scholars have spent their whole life studying this type of stuff, and historical linguistics is also not exactly a hard science like physics … there’s often some kind of speculation going on. A significant factor in these comparisons is how accurate the reconstructions really are, and I’ve read that Proto-Sino-Tibetan reconstruction is still at a relatively early stage.

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