Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

[finlay]

Three years too late, dude.

[Bristel]

This video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0

explains how all words can be traced back to Ancient Egyptian, and that Atlantean was actual a native american language.

You mean it explains how you are an insufferable cunt.

Oh you be nice.

You clicked on it, you deserve getting pranked. (you should always be wary on April Fool's Day, hon... )

[Grimalkin]

There's a time and a place for pranking. The time might have been right, but the place definitely wasn't...

[finlay]

Not even the right time.


a) it's not the 1st of April, b) it's not before 12pm on the 1st of April anywhere, c) it's 2011, not 2008.

Originality is important, dude, rickrolling is over and done with a long time ago.

[treskro]

I have "Fri Apr 01, 2011 6:26 pm"...

[Bristel]

I have "Fri Apr 01, 2011 6:26 pm"...

Mine was probably 5 hours behind finlay's, so he can stop whinging about "but but but, it wasn't April Fools anymore!"

Plus, there's always a place for a well placed joke.

[Delthayre]

Plus, there's always a place for a well placed joke.

Yes, but what you excreted out wasn't a well placed joke. Hell, it barely qualifies as a joke. Rick Rolls are old enough in internet years to withdraw money from its IRA without tax penalties, what you did was devoid of any real comedy. All that you did was post a plausibly idiotic description with a raw link. It was joyless, facile and thoughtless.

(For the record: I never went unknowingly to the linked video; I had ignored it as 'perhaps of interest in the future' on Friday and only viewed it today to confirm the suspicion that the response had provoked. I'm not irritated because I was tricked, I'm irritated because Rick Rolls are dumb and I hate them. If I could send them back in time to Auschwitz with Stars of David armbands, I totally would)

[finlay]

I have "Fri Apr 01, 2011 6:26 pm"...

Mine was probably 5 hours behind finlay's, so he can stop whinging about "but but but, it wasn't April Fools anymore!"

Plus, there's always a place for a well placed joke.

As I say, it's also after 12 midday, for you and me. You're not meant to make jokes after 12. (Mind you, the people who repeat that rule are often the ones who are bitter about being tricked... )

It's also just not a well placed joke.

[Bristel]

For the content of the thread, I felt it to be appropriate.

I don't believe my teaser post was facile, as there are no complexities to be had.

[dhok]

FUCK BANNER ADVERTS.

[Pellonpekko]

This is a legitimate article in a legitimate blog, but it discusses some fine crackpottery stemming from language purism. You know, glottal stops, or rather glottal attacks, can be bad for you. They could shred your voice and damage your vocal cords! Don't use them!

http://dialectblog.com/2011/04/01/glott ... d-for-you/

[Matt]

This is a legitimate article in a legitimate blog

It's also dated April 1st.

[Risla]

This looks suspiciously quackeriffic, but I'm hesitant to completely dismiss it out of hand just because people more knowledgeable than me appear to have (hesitantly) endorsed it, from reading the article. It might just be that the article is a ridiculous oversimplification of the actual study.

[masako]

This looks suspiciously quackeriffic, but I'm hesitant to completely dismiss it out of hand just because people more knowledgeable than me appear to have (hesitantly) endorsed it, from reading the article. It might just be that the article is a ridiculous oversimplification of the actual study.

Another article I stumbled across had this gem in it:

By studying the sounds made in 504 modern languages, Atkinson said he had found an ancient signal in them.

Ha.

[Matt]

It might just be that the article is a ridiculous oversimplification of the actual study.

The full text is here if you've got access to it: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6027/346.full.pdf.

[Aurora Rossa]

Oh damn, beat me to that article. I think it deserves an honored place alongside the "nasal squiggly" school of linguistics.

[Civil War Bugle]

The other day I happened to reread a chapter from a book on prehistory that talks about this guy and his Indo-European work and was going to post about him. Guess I was beaten to it by actual news.

[masako]

As I pulled out my Arabic Practical Dictionary by Hippocrene Books this morning at work, a coworker remarked:

"Oh, you have to reverse your brain to read that, huh..."

He then proceeded to defend his asinine assertion when I asked him what the hell he was talking about by trying to link handedness to reading ability/direction.

[sirdanilot]

Someone tried to argue that there was a language, namely Navajo, that would contain sounds completely impossible to be pronounced except by native americans.

There may be such languages (in practice, not in theory), yes, but Navajo? Definitely not your run-of-the-mill language, but not unpronouncable.

[Bristel]

Someone tried to argue that there was a language, namely Navajo, that would contain sounds completely impossible to be pronounced except by native americans.

There may be such languages (in practice, not in theory), yes, but Navajo? Definitely not your run-of-the-mill language, but not unpronouncable.

There is no sound in Navajo which I cannot pronounce.

Sometimes I feel like being a linguist is the worst field for discussion because it seems like people get more of it wrong than any other field.

[Risla]

It's pretty bad, but I'm definitely happier to be in linguistics than, say, quantum physics.

[Matt]

Someone tried to argue that there was a language, namely Navajo, that would contain sounds completely impossible to be pronounced except by native americans.

I think you'd have to rephrase that as something like "there are languages with such fine phonemic distinctions that only native speakers ever really grasp them" before I could agree with it.

But yeah, a lot of the languages of the Pacific Northwest have crazy amounts of dorsal consonants. Look at Nuuchanulth/Nootka and its /k kʷ k' k'ʷ q qʷ q' q'ʷ x xʷ χ χʷ w w'/ and tell me a non-native speaker could manage to keep those all straight.

[dhok]

From Conservapedia's article on Thai:

Thai is a language in Asia. It is the official language of Thailand, and is a rougher ancestor of the language Khmer.

Turning to the article on Khmer to have this explained, we learn that

Khmer is an important language descended from Sanskrit. It is the official language of Cambodia and widely spoken by peoples in Vietnam, Thailand, and the United States. It is superior to other languages in southern Asia because it does not depend on pronunciation for spelling, and so a speaker in Vietnam can talk with a speaker in the United States.

Or, if we turn to South American linguistics...

An interesting aspect of Quechua is that it uses a three-vowel system, omitting "e" and "o". The grammar is mainly isolating, making it typologically similar to Chinese.

LOLWUT

[MisterBernie]

Given Conservapedia's history of successful trolls-as-editors, I will put all my hopes that this is an example of Poe's Law for linguistic quackery.

...prettyplease?

[jmcd]

Actually, looking at the histories, it does seem that Mister Bernie above is right. Or at the very least, the Quechua was definitely written by a troll and the Khmer and Thai was written by the same editor who has written little else.