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Languages
The languages of the native population of America are studied less profoundly than the languages of the Old World. The researchers do not agree even upon the number of language families of North America. Many languages are not classified, i.e. no even distantly related languages have been found for them. Some languages of the eastern part of the continent have not been fixed since Indians in these areas became extinct before anybody recorded their languages.
The Eskimo-Aleut language family stands separately. If it is related to any language family at all, it is rather the Eurasian than the American languages. Eskimo languages are divided into two branches – Inuit-Inupik (from the Bering Strait to Greenland) and Yupik (Chukchi Peninsula and south-west Alaska). The two Aleut languages that used to be spread in the west and the east of the Aleut archipelago are distantly related to the Eskimo languages.
Specialists agree on defining language groups of Indian languages only in the cases when modern languages branched off 4-5 thousands years ago or later. The largest language family whose existence is of no doubt is the Algonquin family. When the Europeans arrived, Indians who spoke the Algonquin languages inhabited the territory between the Rocky Mountains and the Atlantic. It is from these languages that the words moccasin, wigwam, tomahawk, totem, etc. come from. Among other large families are Siouan (to be more exact Siouan-Catawban), Uto-Aztecan, Iroquois, Selish, Athabaskan (that is part of a larger group Na-Dene). Some linguists believe that all Indian languages (except Na-Dene) are related to each other, but it is hard to prove this hypothesis, and its historic likelihood is doubtful. Linguists tried to unite many languages of the west of North America into Penutian and Hokan families, but the borders of both families remain indefinite.
Before the appearance of Europeans, the inhabitants of North America had no written language. Having familiarized themselves with the European system of writing, they began to invent their own, mostly pictographic (i.e. transferring not the phonation, but approximate meaning of concepts) systems. The first letter alphabet of North American Indians was invented in the 1830s by an Indian named Sequoyah; at the same time Indian newspaper “Cherokee Phoenix” began to be published.
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