Letter to Editor re “Earliest Americans”

Now and then, I feel compelled to write a letter to the editor of The New York Times. The Times never has responded, nor have they ever published one of my letters.

I’m going to start posting my unpublished New York Times letters on joelontheroad.

This is not my first unpublished Times letter, but it is the first to run on my blog:

TO THE EDITOR:

It’s fascinating to imagine waves of Siberian immigrants settling the Americas thousands of years ago as described July 12 in “Earliest Americans Arrived in Waves, DNA Study Finds.” But the conclusion by Harvard researchers that there was a single or perhaps two or three mother tongues among all of these travelers seems shaky. How do they reconcile the single mother tongue theory with the existence of 150,000 contemporary speakers of Tarascan, also known as Purepecha? The Tarascans’ ancestors had a state in what is now Michoacán in western México that was independent from and at war with the Aztecs at the time of Cortes. The problem for the single-mother-tongue theory is that Tarascan is a linguistic isolate. According to “One Thousand Languages,” ed. Peter K. Austin, University of California Press, 2008, Tarascan “has no proven genetic relationship to any other language.” How can there be one mother tongue for the Americas if there exists a New World language with no relationship to it?

Joel Thurtell

The author is studying name-giving traditions among colonial Tarascans