Abstract
The origin of Native American peoples (the Indians) has been a topic of research for many years. Although DNA research has begun to make some progress, there are several competing theories that have yet to be disproved. One of the areas that may reveal the possible relations between Native Americans and other people is through the study of their languages. In this paper, we present a clustering analysis of n = 815 commonly used words in eight different languages including five western languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian), an ancient language (Latin), an Asian language (Japanese), and the language of a Native American tribe (Ojibwa). Several similarity measures were established in our clustering analysis using both the word spellings and phonic equivalents (metaphones), in an attempt to discover any underlying relationships between these languages. The results tend to support one of the leading theories describing how Native American tribes, specifically the Ojibwa people, arrived in North America.
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Daniels, J., Nye, D., Hu, G. (2016). Cluster Analysis for Commonalities Between Words of Different Languages. In: Lee, R. (eds) Applied Computing & Information Technology. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 619. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26396-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26396-0_6
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