My apologies for what I’m about to say, but this is pure foolishness, and this “scholar” ought to be ashamed of himself. I’m no linguist, but I have a few years of Greek under my belt, and I also right now am studying Iroquoian languages—of which Cherokee is a member.
Their grammars are COMPLETELY different. As in COMPLETELY. Greek is, like the other Indo-European languages, an inflected language with a root stem on which suffixes are then added: anthropos, anthropoi, anthropou, etc. Cherokee, on the other hand, is an agglutinative language, where the root is buried in the middle of the word. I had difficulty learning Mohawk (which is distantly related to Cherokee) precisely because it wasn’t anything like the Latin/Greek/Italian/French grammars I was used to. It’s a completely different paradigm. Take something as simple as the subject/object of a verb. Greek marks the subject of verbs with a suffix—the object takes a separate word entirely. Iroquoian does it with a huge system of prefixes which have not only the subjects but also the objects embedded in them.
Second, I *guarantee* you, with a corpus of 10000 words between two languages—no matter what those languages are—you will find a few dozen words that look similar and have similar meanings. But he barely even did that: “ouktenna = something not killed” vs. “Uktena name of a dangerous dragon or serpent”? Astronomical instrument and Great Hawk? No serious linguist would take such comparisons seriously.
To prove common descent, you need much much more than a few look-alike words. You need regular variation with established sound laws: like N in one language regularly shows up as T in the other language. Moreover, you have to show it in the most basic, elementary words that are least likely to change as time goes on. Like numbers. Pronouns. Sun, moon, mouth, eye, man, woman, water. Show me comparisons with those words, with regular sound laws. Show me a similar grammar, and then we can talk about common descent.
If Cherokee was descended from Greek, we’d see much much more similarity between them. There is actually very very little. English and Sanskrit are way closer to Greek than Cherokee is.
In short, this article is dead wrong.
So says “Chief King Gyros” ... ;) I have two years of Koine greek myself, I call bunk.
Thanks!