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

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

who worked at

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

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 is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning much of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia and ...

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, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkele ...

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 Americans in the United States, Native American groups indigenous to what is now Northern California, who traditionally spoke one of the Miwok lan ...

, 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 family, language families that includes many Native Americans in the United States, Native American languages of western North America, predominantly spoken at one time in British Columbia, Washington ( ...

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

Uralic languages The Uralic languages ( ), sometimes called the Uralian languages ( ), are spoken predominantly in Europe and North Asia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian. Other languages with speakers ab ...

from central

Siberia Siberia ( ; , ) is an extensive geographical region comprising all of North Asia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It has formed a part of the sovereign territory of Russia and its predecessor states ...

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, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school then known as the southern branch of the C ...

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 university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Reno, Nevada, United States. It is the state's flagship public university and prim ...

before joining the

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

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 Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...

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 U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

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 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 into numerous and highly divergent dialects, more accurately referred to a ...

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 Northern California (commonly shortened to NorCal) is a geocultural region that comprises the northern portion of the U.S. state of California, spanning the northernmost 48 of the state's List of counties in California, 58 counties. Northern Ca ...

coast from

Bodega Bay Bodega Bay () is a shallow, rocky inlet of the Pacific Ocean on the coast of northern California in the United States. It is approximately across and is located approximately northwest of San Francisco and west of Santa Rosa, California, S ...

Big Sur Big Sur () is a rugged and mountainous section of the Central Coast (California), Central Coast of the U.S. state of California, between Carmel Highlands and San Simeon, where the Santa Lucia Range, Santa Lucia Mountains rise abruptly from th ...

as well as along the

Sacramento Sacramento ( or ; ; ) is the capital city of the U.S. state of California and the seat of Sacramento County. Located at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers in Northern California's Sacramento Valley, Sacramento's 2020 p ...

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

Mansi Mansi may refer to: * Mansi people, an Indigenous people of Russia ** Mansi language *Mansi (name), given name and surname *Mansi Junction railway station * Mansi Township, Myanmar ** Mansi, Myanmar, a town in the Kachin State of Myanmar (Burma) * ...

and 17,000

Khanty The Khanty (), also known in older literature as Ostyaks (), are a Ugric Indigenous people, living in Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug, a region historically known as " Yugra" in Russia, together with the Mansi. In the autonomous okrug, the K ...

, east of the

Urals The Ural Mountains ( ),; , ; , or simply the Urals, are a mountain range in Eurasia that runs north–south mostly through Russia, from the coast of the Arctic Ocean to the river Ural (river), Ural and northwestern Kazakhstan.

. 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 It is believed that the peopling of the Americas began when Paleolithic hunter-gatherers (Paleo-Indians) entered North America from the North Asian Mammoth steppe via the Beringia land bridge, which had formed between northeastern Siberia and w ...

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 (; ) is a major river in Russia. It is in western Siberia, and with its tributary the Irtysh forms the world's seventh-longest river system, at . The Ob forms at the confluence of the Biya and Katun which have their origins in the Alta ...

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 Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness. Genetic relatedness implies a common origin or proto-language and comparative linguistics aim ...

, 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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