Otto J. von Sadovszky (July 3, 1925 – May 12, 2004) was a

Hungarian-American Hungarian Americans ( Hungarian: ''amerikai magyarok'') are Americans of Hungarian descent. The U.S. Census Bureau has estimated that there are approximately 1.396 million Americans of Hungarian descent as of 2018. The total number of people wit ...

anthropologist An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms an ...

who worked at

California State University, Fullerton California State University, Fullerton (CSUF or Cal State Fullerton) is a public university in Fullerton, California. With a total enrollment of more than 41,000, it has the largest student body of the 23-campus California State University (CSU ...

in southern California for most of his career until his retirement. He is best known for his linguistic work attempting to link Native American languages of California to languages spoken in Siberia.

Personal life and education

Sadovszky was born in

Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Cr ...

on July 3, 1925 and grew to maturity there during World War II. He and his wife Maria raised two children. Sadovszky received his Ph.L. at Collegium Aloysianum. After leaving Europe for the United States to study Sanskrit at

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...

he met a graduate student in linguistics who was studying

Miwok The Miwok (also spelled Miwuk, Mi-Wuk, or Me-Wuk) are members of four linguistically related Native American groups indigenous to what is now Northern California, who traditionally spoke one of the Miwok languages in the Utian family. The word ...

, and Sadovszky found that he could understand many of the terms from Miwok, a language of the

Penutian Penutian is a proposed grouping of language families that includes many Native American languages of western North America, predominantly spoken at one time in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and California. The existence of a Penutian s ...

group, despite having no training in it, due to the familiarity of many of the terms to

Uralic languages The Uralic languages (; sometimes called Uralian languages ) form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian ...

from central

Siberia Siberia ( ; rus, Сибирь, r=Sibir', p=sʲɪˈbʲirʲ, a=Ru-Сибирь.ogg) is an extensive geographical region, constituting all of North Asia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It has been a part ...

he had studied earlier in Europe which were related to his native Hungarian. Sadovszky moved to Los Angeles to continue his graduate studies at

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California ...

Academic career

Sadovszky taught in Germany, and in the U.S. at

, UCLA, and the

University of Nevada, Reno The University of Nevada, Reno (Nevada, the University of Nevada, or UNR) is a public land-grant research university in Reno, Nevada. It is the state's flagship public university and primary land grant institution. It was founded on October 12 ...

before joining the

Cal State Fullerton California State University, Fullerton (CSUF or Cal State Fullerton) is a public university in Fullerton, California. With a total enrollment of more than 41,000, it has the largest student body of the 23-campus California State University (CSU) ...

in Orange County south of Los Angeles in 1971. He continued working there until his retirement in 1994, even after achieving professor emeritus status in 1991. During his tenure as

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professo ...

of anthropology at CSUF he claimed to have proven that almost 80 percent of the languages spoken by 19 Indian tribes in

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

are related to those spoken by two nations in

. This became known as the Cal-Ugrian Theory.

Cal-Ugrian theory

Sadovszky elaborates the Cal-Ugrian theory in his 1996 book. The theory describes the proposed relationship between the

Penutian languages Penutian is a proposed grouping of language families that includes many Native American languages of western North America, predominantly spoken at one time in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and California. The existence of a Penutian s ...

native to California (itself a disputed hypothesis) and the

Ob-Ugric languages The Ob-Ugric languages are a commonly proposed branch of the Uralic languages, grouping together the Khanty (Ostyak) and Mansi (Vogul) languages. Both languages are split in numerous and highly divergent dialects. They, along with Hungarian, ar ...

spoken in Siberia. According to Sadovszky, this relationship is based on more than 10,000 different words and grammatical traits. The Penutian languages were or are spoken in an area along the Northern California coast from Bodega Bay to Big Sur as well as along the

Sacramento ) , image_map = Sacramento County California Incorporated and Unincorporated areas Sacramento Highlighted.svg , mapsize = 250x200px , map_caption = Location within Sacramento ...

and San Joaquin rivers; the Ob-Ugric languages by 6,000

Mansi Mansi may refer to: People * Mansi people, an indigenous people living in Tyumen Oblast, Russia ** Mansi language * Giovanni Domenico Mansi Gian (Giovanni) Domenico Mansi (16 February 1692 – 27 September 1769) was an Italian prelate, theolog ...

and 17,000

Khanty The Khanty ( Khanty: ханти, ''hanti''), also known in older literature as Ostyaks (russian: остяки) are a Ugric indigenous people, living in Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug, a region historically known as "Yugra" in Russia, togethe ...

, east of the

Urals The Ural Mountains ( ; rus, Ура́льские го́ры, r=Uralskiye gory, p=ʊˈralʲskʲɪjə ˈɡorɨ; ba, Урал тауҙары) or simply the Urals, are a mountain range that runs approximately from north to south through western ...

. One claim of Sadovszky's theory is that the ancestors of some California tribes arrived only 3,000 years ago, which is much more recently than the origin of most tribes in the Americas which according to the generally accepted theory regarding the

settlement of the Americas The settlement of the Americas began when Paleolithic hunter-gatherers entered North America from the North Asian Mammoth steppe via the Beringia land bridge, which had formed between northeastern Siberia and western Alaska due to the lowering o ...

date their original migrations to around 20,000 years ago across the Bering Strait. In contrast, the migration around 1,000 B.C.E. would have occurred from the

Ob river } The Ob ( rus, Обь, p=opʲ: Ob') is a major river in Russia. It is in western Siberia; and together with Irtysh forms the world's seventh-longest river system, at . It forms at the confluence of the Biya and Katun which have their origins ...

delta across the Arctic Ocean in summer months and down the American coast.

Criticism

The Cal-Ugrian theory was not well accepted in the United States, with some linguists noting that Sadovszky was not trained in comparative linguistics although he had done some fieldwork among California Indians. As a result, his book was published abroad, and the upshot was that he gained a reputation for his knowledge of Indo-European and Uralic languages but more so in Europe than in the United States. Evidence for a relatively recent marine migration is very limited, but Sadovszky claims that archaeological and other evidence back up the linguistic evidence of his theory but there has been little interest in further research in this area. Specialists in the

have generally rejected Sadovszky's theory, citing general lack of understanding of the methods of comparative linguistics, leading to his work being riddled with problems such as poor semantic and phonetic correspondences. Sadovszky often makes no effort to show that some material he compares is truly native within the two language groups he compares, often cherrypicking examples from just one or two of the dozens of languages encompassed by "Penutian". The Dené-Yeniseian language theory linking a cluster of Siberian and Native American languages has been much better received than Sadovszky's theory.

Selected works

* ''Shamanism past and present'', I–II (1989) * ''Shamans and Cultures'' (1993) * ''Fish, Symbol and Myth'' (1995) * ''Shamanism in performing arts'' (1995) * ''Vogul folklore'' (1995) * ''The Discovery of California: A Cal-Ugrian Comparative Study'' (1996)

References

* ''

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