[Aztlan] Another Hitchiti/Itza Maya language connection

[Paul Troemner]

Nick,

"The bottom line is that if these similarities are the result of language contact and lexical borrowing, they would have to be rather recent."

Not necesssarily.  An ongoing or periodic renewal of contact would likewise result in similarities.  We do not have sufficient information to indicate (or deny) there may have been only a single contact or a short time period of contact.  SE tribal oral traditions point to their origins (or more correctly worded, their partial origins) being across the waters to the south in Central American regions.  The drive of commerce and of traditional origins probably fueled multi-generational contact between the coastal and island cultures.

Comparative linguistics and comparative philology are some of the many areas that could use far more study, particularly between N, C, and S America.

I also vaguely recall the discovery of a "birch bark" word in both a Siberian language and an Athabascan North American (perhaps Navajo?) language, that had been attributed to ancient contact.  The occasional "coincidental" similarities may indeed indicate ancient contact, or at least some seem to think so.

Paul