Mayan and Japanese?

Hi everyone,

I just heard from one of my colleagues at lunch that it had been "proven" one
year ago that the "Mayan language" (whatever that is) was related to Japanese
and even that the Japanese people and the Mayans were genetically the same
people!

I tried to explain him that Japanese had been tried to be compared to every
language family in the world and that the correspondances found were probably
just the same as you always find between any two languages you choose, but he
kept on saying that it was the official view of all anthropologists (not
linguists) studying Latin America that Mayans and Japanese were the same people.

Does anybody know of this particular hypothesis and can give me references
about it (and about their defendents and opponents, and who had the last word
if possible)? I ask that because he really annoyed me with his supposedly
learned references which proved nothing but his lack of knowledge of anything
which is linguistically related (he said that 40% of the lexicon of those
languages were virtually identical, without obviously knowing anything about
the comparative method. Check Mark Rosenfelder's page on
http://www.zompist.com/chance.htm for a good discussion about this phenomenon),
and even less of anthropology. He said it's the anthropologist he met one year
ago that told him about that, and that this man wrote a book with lots of
references, which would really have convinced him (along with all the Latin
American anthropologists) that Mayans and Japanese are really one and the same
people.

So, if anybody knows about this, I would really appreciate to know more about
this hypothesis, so that at least I can confirm or correct myself whether it's
a hoax or not :)) . You can reply me privately if you think it will bore the
list :) . Thank you in advance.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.