| ...the Hopi have been in Arizona for thousands of years, the Navajo have not.
| Some say the Navajo came about the time of the Spanish or shortly before as
| Athabascans from Northern Canada and/or Alaska. Anyway, it is clearly not
| Dine ancestral land. Athabascans, by the way, are a distinct racial group
| separate from Amerinds and came in a separate wave across the Bering Straits
| thousands of years after the Amerinds. Their languages are unrelated to
| those of the indigenous people they met here. A relationship to
| Sino-Tibetan languages has been postulated.
The idea that the Athapaskan language group (or the larger group that it
belongs to, Na-Dene) is related to Sino-Tibetan, was first proposed around
1920 by the American linguist Edward Sapir. Native-netters should be advised
that this was a highly speculative idea and that it has not been demonstrated
in the years since 1920. Probably most linguists would not accept it today.
It is in the nature of the problem that you can never demonstrate that two
languages are NOT related, since eventually the changes that all languages
undergo can move any two streams indefinitely far apart. Second point:
there are two separate questions about population (really: language)
movements and Na-Dene. One is the time depth back to a period when the
ancestor of the present day languages was spoken in one or a few relatively
homogeneous communities. Because of the relatively close similarities among
the Athapaskan languages, this time is supposed to be relatively recent, say
a thousand years or so, considerably earlier for Na-Dene (that means
Athapaskan plus Eyak and Tlingit, Haida (in my opinion, but not that of all
linguists) should not be included here. The second question is when the
speakers of the ancestor of Na-Dene reached the Western Hemisphere. Here a
lot more guesswork is involved and many linguists wouldn't even speculate.
There is an idea that Na-Dene was the next to last wave, followed only by
Eskimo-Aleut, but please remember that no concrete link to any Euro-Asian
language group has ever been established to the satisfaction to most
linguists, popular press stories to the contrary notwithstanding.
Emmon