The question implies that "Native Americans" have much in common. In fact, the diversity among Native American languages is about as great as between any two languages in the world, so it's not really possible to generalize about them as distinct from the typology of languages generally. That having been said, some features are more common in East Asia which are rare(r) in North and South American languages, and vice-versa.
(1) Many languages in East Asia, such as Mandarin, Vietnamese, Thai, etc, are isolating languages which do not inflect verbs and nouns for features like person, number, tense mood, directionality, evidentiality, etc. In various languages of the Americas, inflection for such categories is common. In particular, polysynthesis, in which verbs might take on a dozen or more affixes at the same time, exists in many families such as the Algonquian, Iroquoian, Caddoan, Na-Dene, Eskimo-Aleutian and Kiowa-Tanoan families. Polsynthesis exists in some Siberian languages, but it is otherwise rare in East Asian languages. (Isolating systems also occur in the Americas, though less frequently than in East Asia.)
(2) Phonologically, the languages of the Americas have little in common with East Asia, or each other. Languages of the Pacific Northwest have complicated inventories of consonants (including different kinds of glottalized consonants) and complicated syllable structures with multiple onsets and codas. Algonquian languages, on the other hand, have much smaller numbers of consonants and much simpler syllable structures. The most recognizable East Asian languages tend to have CV(C) syllable structures.
(3) Very many languages of East Asia have classifier systems in which to quantify a noun you must specify what 'type' it belongs to. This exists in a few languages of the Americas, such as Carrier (in British Columbia) and Wiyot and Yurok (in California), but is otherwise rarer than gender systems, such as the animacy-based gender system of Algonquian, or the systems in Chinook and Wishram.
(4) One huge difference between East Asia and Native American languages is their system of alignment, how the language marks subjects of intransitives versus subjects and objects of transitives. Many Native American languages (e.g. all Mayan languages, some Salish and Tsimshianic languages of the northwest) have ergative alignments in which intransitive subjects inflect in the same way as transitive objects. Many language families, including Iroquoian, Muskogean, Caddoan, Siouan, and Pomoan, frequently have so-called split-S patterns, in which some intransitive verbs pattern like the subject of transitives, while other intransitive verbs pattern like the object of transitives. These alternative alignment systems are rare in East Asia.
So on balance it does not seem productive to compare East Asian languages to attested Native American ones, as wholes. As has already been mentioned by other posters, recent research by Edward Vajda has suggested that there are some very tenuous connections between the Na-Dene language family and the Yeniseic family spoken in Siberia. However, it must be stressed that this is a link between one family in Asia and one family in North America, and not a more general connection between the continents. Yeniseic is also spoken so far west that it might not count as East Asian in the traditional sense.
Posted By: Yaiqab Saint
Sunday, March 20th 2016 at 4:33PM
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