The Tunitcha mountains of Arizona may be related to the word “Khan”
old.reddit.com
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> As far as I’m concerned, any credible prehistorical connection of any Native American utterance to any utterance not native to the Americas is in the “one small step for language, one giant leap for reconstructive linguistics” category.
I’m not an expert, but that was my first reaction too.
So at the end of the day, I have to agree with the assessment that the connection of the two utterances is too strong. And it even looks like the author of the first proposal linking Na-Dené to Yeniesian would agree with this assessment!
[1] See https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.31826/jlr-2012-080..., which is written by the main author of this hypothesis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9%E2%80%93Yeniseian_la...
The bit about "khan" seems less interesting and mostly unrelated. The Mongolian word happens to be a loan word from some ancestral Yenesian language, I guess?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeniseian_people
There is a theory that the Xiongnu are the ancestors of the Huns. So the Navajos might be related to the Huns!
That doesn't sound right. The peopling of the Americas from Siberia occurred on the order of 10k+ years ago, whereas the Xiongnu confederation collapsed in the 1st century CE.
That doesn't rule out a common ancestor language, but it does rule out the Xiongnu as linguistic ancestors of the Navajo.
There is already a known genetic ancestral link between Siberian peoples and the Navajo, though so a linguistic common ancestor is plausible, if not provable.
If I missed something and they mentioned a back migration contemporaneous with the Xiongnu, please point it out.
But the parent comment author (which I am not) didn't say there was direct ancestry either, just that they were related. I mean we're all related to a greater or lesser extent anyway, so what difference does a direct or back migration make? I think to me, what would be most interesting is that the proposed linguistic connection wasn't from a back-migration, because then we'd have more of a linear narrative. Oversimplifying, it would be: Africans became central Asians, who became Eastern Asians, who became Americans. And I kind of feel that's how everybody else wants it to be too, a neat little linear story. Which is what I assumed you read into the parent comment, that the Navajo and Hun share a narratively pleasing close connection. So I just wanted to point out that the Navajo and Hun could be related from a non-linear perspective, and for the parent comment to still be relevant. But I think you were already ahead of me anyway!
BTW, it does seem like the parent comment is implying that the Na-Dene migration occurred as a result of the collapse of the Xiongnu, which is obviously misleading, because the 2 events are something like 12,000 years apart.