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Dispatch From Aztlantis: The Aztec-Turkish Connection? · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: You must excuse me.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I've grown quite a man.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: We interrupt this program for a special news bullet.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Hello dear listeners, welcome to another dispatch from Aslantes.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Ruben Ariano Tlacatecat, and in this dispatch, we're going to take a quick look at an old idea that appears to be making the rounds on the socials, and that is the supposed linguistic connection between the Turkic language and Nahuatl.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: One of our Discord channel members posted a screencap of someone stating that the Nahuat term atlatl is somehow Turkic in origin.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't know, an Atlat is a type of spear thrower tool that uses leverage to achieve greater velocity in dart or javelin throwing.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Although this tool has been around since the Paleolithic age around the world, the name given by archaeologists is in Nahuatl.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: As an aside, I must admit that before looking into this, I had no idea how the term Atlat was introduced into the English language.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: And to my surprise, none other than the great Zelia Nutal is credited with this honor.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Nutal wrote a study entitled The Atlat or Spear Thrower of the Ancient Mexicans in 1891 and published by the Peabody Museum.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: It is commonly understood by experts in Mesoamerican studies that she's likely the source of its introduction into the lexicon.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: And as a further aside for those of you who are atlat enthusiasts, you might be delighted to know that there is such a thing called the World Atlat Association, which is kind of a sports organization of sorts that holds events and I believe also like spear throwing competitions of some sort.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know about you but I just find that fascinating.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: In any case, let's take a closer look at the Aztic Ankara connection.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine you're walking through a market in 14th century Istanbul.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: You hear the rhythmic suffixes of Ottoman Turkish.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Then you're suddenly transported to the great market of Latelolko in the heart of the Aztic Confederacy.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: You hear a language that strangely sounds like it has the same heartbeat.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: The Aztecs spoke Nahuat, the Ottomans spoke Turkish.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: On the map, they are separated by 12,000 miles and the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yet for decades, a persistent fringe theory has suggested that these two cultures are long-lost relatives.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Today we're digging into the Turkish-Nawat connection.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: We'll explore the Sun language theory, the Lego brick logic of their grammar, and why the human brain is so desperate to connect dots that aren't actually there.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: The Nationalist Origins of the Sun language.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: The story of this connection doesn't actually start in Mexico.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: It starts in the 1930s in the Young Republic of Turkey.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, there was a massive push for a new national identity.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Enter the Sun Language Theory.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Or if I'm pronouncing this right, and please forgive me, I'm not a Turkish speaker.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Gunesh Diltiorisi, I believe is how you say that, and that translates to the Sun Language Theory.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: The theory, heavily promoted by the Turkish government at the time, claimed that because Central Asia was the cradle of civilization, all human languages must have branched out from an ancient form of Turkish, right?
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: So researchers started scanning the globe for evidence.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: They looked at Mayan, they looked at Inkan Kechwa, and they also looked at Nawat.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: They found the word tepi or tepe in Turkish, which means hill or summit.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Then they looked at the Aztecs who called the mountains Tepetl.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: They found the Turkish word su meaning water and compared it to the Nahuat term for water atl, which I'm not sure how those two connect, but apparently they found some kind of association.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: So it's tempting, right?
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, well it's uh it no, it's linguistics.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's usually just a coincidence.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Most of these matches are what linguists call onomatopoic words that mimic the sound of the thing they describe.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Or kind of like think of nursery words, for instance.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds like ma and pa, the words that babies find the easiest to make.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: So if you throw enough darts at a dictionary, guess what?
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to hit a bullseye eventually.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: And this leads us to the Lego agglutination factor.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: The real smoking gun for these theorists isn't really the vocabulary, it's the bones of the language.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Both Turkish and Nahuat are agglutinative.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: In English, we like our words short and our sentences long, but Turkish and Nawat like their words massive.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: They treat grammar like a game of Lego, and uh for instance you start with a root and you snap on functional blocks to change the meaning.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Let's try a Turkish example.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Take the word goz meaning eye, and then you add luck and it becomes ghazluk, eyeglasses, and then you add uh the cu which is I think pronounced sh so it's gozluk sh an optician, and then you add luck and duh and you get gozluk shluk di or something to that effect, which means in the profession of being an optician.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: I hope I didn't butcher that too much, I'm sorry if I did.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's compare this to Nawat.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Nawatlatos take agglutination to an extreme called polysynthesis.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: They don't just add grammar, they swallow the whole sentence.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: So if an Aztec speaker would say I am eating meat, they wouldn't say I eat meat as three separate words, they would say ni nakakwa, which is kind of one word pronounced very rapidly close together, and so ni meaning I, naka meaning meat, and kwa eat, so it's one giant sentence word.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a bit of a difference between the way that Turkish is done and the way that Nawad is done.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: But there is enough similarity that when scholars in the early 20th century saw this, they were blown away.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: They said, How could two groups on opposite sides of the world build their thoughts in the exact same way?
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the reality, folks.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Agglutination is just a very efficient way to organize information.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: It evolved independently, not just in Turkey or in Mexico, but in Finland and Japan, and even among the Sumerians, there's evidence of this, right?
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: So guess what?
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't require a shared ancestor necessarily for this to happen.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: This leads us into the ghosts of Siberia, because there is a connection if you go far back enough, and it might not be the one that you're expecting, and it might not be the one that you accept either, but these are the facts, right?
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: We have genetic evidence to suggest that there is a connection.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: So let's be fair here, there is a tiny thread of truth hidden in the prehistoric fog.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: But to find it, we have to travel back about 15,000 years to the icy plains of Siberia.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's a very long time.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, something that I learned from my co-host and good friend Curly is this idea of deep time that exists in archaeology, and it's something that I share with my students now whenever uh it's necessary, because we often as humans tend to collapse time.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's something that I use as a historian.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: I like to explain to my students that we like to collapse time and we like to think of the past as being one flat thing and then the present one flat thing, right?
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: But 15,000 years is a very long time, folks.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: But let's get into this, right?
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: Genetic studies show that indigenous people of the Americas migrated from Siberia across the Bering Land Bridge.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now we have the Kelp Highway, and we have uh more interpretations and explanations of this, whether you accept it or not.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's what at least the current scientific reasoning tells us.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that at the same time that this is happening, the ancestors of the Turkic people were also a nomadic tribe that were also kind of in the same region of North Central Asia, right?
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want to find that connection between these two peoples, you have to travel all the way back to that period in time when indigenous tribes were first beginning to make that trek across into the Americas.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: Does this mean that they share a connection?
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, genetically speaking, yes, in that sense.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: They share common ancestors from the Upper Paleolithic era, but here is the catch.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: When it comes to linguistic, this is the big catch.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: 15,000 years is an eternity in linguistics.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: Languages change so fast that after about 5,000 to 8,000 years, it becomes almost impossible to prove that two languages were ever related at all.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: By the time that Turkish and Nahuat were actually spoken as we know them today, they had been separated for twice that long.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: So they aren't brothers, they aren't even cousins, not even second cousins.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: They're more like people who lived in the same apartment building about 10,000 years apart, if that makes any sense.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: But to conclude, it's a bit of a letdown if you wanted this to be true, if you were hoping for some kind of secret Aztec Turkish Empire.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: But the reality is actually more poetic, at least in my opinion.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: It shows that the human mind, no matter if it's in the shadow of a volcano in Mexico or on the steps of Central Asia, it tends to solve the problem of how do we talk to each other in very remarkable similar ways, right?
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: So we don't need some sun language connection to feel connected.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: The connection is in the way that we build our world one suffix at a time.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, well that's it for this dispatch.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening to your listeners.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: I am Tlakatekat, and I'll see you next time.