Long-time readers of this blog may recall that I’m a fan of secret history. I get a kick out of all the Dan Brown-esque conspiracy theories that abound, from ancient astronauts to the Trilateral Commission.
One of the less whacked-out of these theorists is Gavin Menzies, who tackles an era not that remote from the present.
It is fairly well-established that around 1421 the Chinese emperor sent out a fleet of trading ships to collect tribute and information about the world. When the ships returned, they were burned and all records of their voyages suppressed.
In addition the fifteenth century saw the appearance in Europe of a curious series of maps (the Piri Reis map being only one example) apparently showing details of the Americas, Antartica and Australia that European explorers were only beginning to explore.
Followers of Graham Hancock and other more wild-eyed types insist these are the legacy of mysterious Ice Age maritime civilizations. Gavin Menzies stays a bit closer to consensus reality, and proposes that the charts are the fruits of the Chinese exploration fleets, which, he says, explored most of the world, including Australia, Antartica, both coasts of the Americas, and the northern coast of Eurasia!
Like most of these types, he weaves a seductive web of evidence, circumstantial though it may be. Now I’m not in a position to critique most of the historigraphic, archeological and genetic information he presents. But he does include some startling linguistic phenomena, which I am equipped to evaluate.
First of all, he claims that there is considerable Chinese influence in place-names and vocabulary all over Central and South America. He draws up several word lists showing such correspondences. To the uninitiated, these seem compelling. However, they really don’t mean a thing. The number of possible sounds in human language is limited, and very small compared to the average vocabulary of a language, so it is supremely unsurprising to find words that both sound and mean the same in any given pair of languages. You could do the same exercise with just about any pair of languages, and you could come up with dozens, if not hundreds, of such correspondences. So any such features of native American languages need to be the subject of very careful study and historical-linguistic analysis before any startling claims about Chinese influence can be made.
But Menzies doesn’t stop there. In his book 1421, he claims that the Navajo language of the American southwest and Chinese are mutually intelligable. This claim is startling, to say the least. And, unfortunately, is completely and utterly nonsense. Chinese is an isolating language with single-syllable words and a grammar based on word order. Navajo is an agglutinative language — words can be dozens of syllables long — with a grammar and semantic system that’s very different from anything in the Old World.
In addition, Menzies grouped Navajo together with a small number of languages around the world that are called “isolates”, in that they are not clearly related to any other languages (Korean, Japanese, Aymara and Basque are in this number). First of all, grouping language isolates together makes no sense — they are each as unrelated to each other as they are to any other language. And unfortunately, Navajo is a well-studied member of the Athabaskan language family, and furthermore, if there were anything about it similar to Chinese, people would have noticed long before.
As I said, I’m not equipped to judge the majority of Menzies’ evidence, but if it’s anything as reliable as his linguistic “facts”, he’s rapidly losing its credibility.
So I emailed the redoubtable Mr. Menzies, expressing some reservations about the linguistic aspects of his research. I received the following response:
Dear Mr Tisher,
Navajo is – to this day – easily understood by Japanese visitors to USA. In WW2, US submarines on patrol off Japan used Navajos as wireless operators as they understood Japanese. Japanese written language is a form of Chinese. In my submission you have muddled up written and spoken languages.
Hmm. In my email I had quoted the 1421 book, which talks about Chinese, not Japanese. And Mr. Menzies has his facts absolutely ass-backwards. The US employed Navajo speakers in WWII precisely because their language was so highly unrelated to Japanese. There’s a vast amount of scholarly and popular literature and media about this particular episode in history, so it was rather mind-boggling to see it got completely wrong.
So Mr Menzies claimed something completely wrong about Japanese to rebut a point I made about Chinese — note that Japanese and Chinese are also as unrelated as languages can be, even though Japanese uses Chinese logographs in its writing system. I can only conclude that if the rest of Mr. Menzies’ research is up to the standard of his linguistic study, there’s not much point in giving him any more credence or attention. Too bad, really.
But . . .
As I was doing a bit of research on southwestern native American languages, I came across the following tantalizing bits of information: in the 90’s anthropologist Nancy Yaw Davis presented evidence that the Zuni language, itself an isolate, has, in fact, telltale resemblances to Japanese, and that the Zuni people carry physical characteristics that are more Asian than American.
So what’s more likely? Vast Chinese treasure fleets roamed the entire globe for a few years in the 15th century, leaving behind only tantalizing glimmers of evidence, or that a few Japanese wanderers found their way not only across the Pacific — not really that hard, actually — but the great southwestern deserts to found their own tribe.
The jury must remain out, but the fact that there exists more than we can imagine in our past as well as our future must make us always humble and open to the wide vistas of the world.