Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

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WeepingElf
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by WeepingElf »

araceli wrote:
WeepingElf wrote:This guy has smoked too many of the wrong mushrooms, it seems. I guess he's about 400 to 500 millinylands - twice as nutty as Octaviano.
He wrote:letters with very similar sounds had opposite meanings.
I had no idea the Proto-Indo-Europeans were literate. Does he know something we don't?
Indeed, the Proto-Indo-Europeans used the Latin alphabet, just as the Indo-Europeanists do. With superscript <h> for breathy voice, numeric indexes on the laryngeals, and all that. Steles found on the ocean floor around the Azores in ruins of Atlantis demonstrate this. Of course, THEY deny the existence of those steles!
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Particles the Greek »

Oh deity, look what I found! The same syllable meant "face", "bare", and "shiny"! It's a good example of website design, too.
Non fidendus est crocodilus quis posteriorem dentem acerbum conquetur.

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by CaesarVincens »

Someday I will create a ur-proto-language with no words less than three syllables, that is the most logical way to equate all languages in my mind. This language group lost these syllables, that language group lost those, viola.

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by KathTheDragon »

araceli wrote:It's a good example of website design, too.
Mm, it looks too blocky, and the contrasts are too high. Maybe with some subtler colours?

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by WeepingElf »

araceli wrote:Oh deity, look what I found! The same syllable meant "face", "bare", and "shiny"! It's a good example of website design, too.
Ahh, that thing. Weird. Stumbled upon it years ago, when Geocities still was alive. So this thing is still found on the Web!
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Zju »

Come on now, why don't you post howlers?

Down with the double standards in linguistic reconstructions!
That guy's English is quite readable when you get used to it and it's worth all the fun.
The fun begins at the end of page two, to reach its culmination points towards the end of page four:
More: show

On the other hand ,a hypothesis like “ Laryngeals “ has two serious indications if we still don't know how are they , and as Wiki says they have disappeared , means “obsolete” and no longer exist.This means either things like these don't belong to our “world of reality “ or the evolution of our vocal system had gone in the reverse direction, and costed us loss of three-laryngeals , in place of increasing our vocal abilities !!!
and
More: show
aruniyan wrote:Verugu is a kind of wild cat and veru, veri, veruppu are words that denotes fierce, furious,animosity/hate in Tamil.
The reply posted by “”aruniyan” has attracted my attention , and accordingly “”I will suggest without willing to be involved in endless discussion “ ,two words currently being used in an IE language -German , the other in Semitic language- Arabic.
1- The German verb “fressen” referes to the manner an animal eats up(very rarely referred to human )except when he eats up like an animal ,they describe him “er isst nicht, er frisst (wie ein Schwein) “He is not eating {like human}he is devouring like a pig .Means eating up hungrily greedily and quickly. The other synonyms of this verb “verschlingen ,aufessen ….“ The etymology and original meanings of this verb , is well-established and followed by „Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm '' which can be seen here
http://woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/?sigle...08681#XGF08681


2--In Ar. As well the verb “ferese فرس '' being used in exactly the same way .

From which the forms participle,and past participle are '' (mu)f(te)ris مفترس ,and “feriesa :فريسة whose meanings and the verb meaning you find here according to “A dictionary Of Modern Written Arabic-Hans Wehr”

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8l5yx8ww9iw3u ... e.pdf?dl=0


you have seen ,the root of “ 'eng. fierce” has been finally found ,distributed on different languages English- Tamil- German – Arabic- and probably more . That was what I was meaning when I referred to the “Unity 'of word languages ,it can be seen clearly sometimes . :)

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Tropylium »

[ˌʔaɪsəˈpʰɻ̊ʷoʊpɪɫ ˈʔæɫkəɦɔɫ]

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Particles the Greek »

Err... "dismantle and outsource the plausibility structure of the autochthonous people"?????
Non fidendus est crocodilus quis posteriorem dentem acerbum conquetur.

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Birdlang »

Of course Taa was written with click letters and IPA symbols. That's the way they write it.
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Birdlang »

Torco wrote:
Wattmann wrote:
Astraios wrote:
Vuvgangujunga wrote:Or is it "pure" as in it practices abstinence from hot language on language action?
Certainly not, Romanian's a whore. It's had Hungarian and Slavic and Romani as well as that filthy old Balkan substratum.
She certainly gets around a lot...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymo1GOH8REI
Is this those annoying Cheeky Girls song that counts to 4 in Romanian?
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Shemtov »

I once read something that basically called all linguists Nazis, over the so-called Afro-Asiatic languages, whose claim to unity, the author claims, is from the work of "Proto-Nazi linguists" who wished to prove their racist attitude of "inferior races" by saying that the Jewish and "Negroid" races are related.

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by marconatrix »

I found this the other day and it made my head hurt. They even drag in the Lemnos Stele ... OMG!

http://dailywales.net/2015/01/29/are-th ... of-israel/
Kyn nag ov den skentel pur ...

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by KathTheDragon »

That is absolutely hilarious.

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by hwhatting »

Hilarious, but not new.

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Xephyr »

This exceptional individual appears to have written a whole string of... interesting...reviews of grammar books. As far as I can make out, he apparently thinks the perfect tenses in English are wrong. As in, always. :? To quote a couple blokes in IRC: "that is the weirdest kind of grammar correction I have seen", and "it's not one I've heard before but it sound exactly like the sort of thing prescriptivists would typically do".

(P.S. please don't reply to him-- I already posted comments to two of his reviews, and I don't want him to be ganged up on.)
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The Gospel of Thomas

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by hwhatting »

Xephyr wrote:As far as I can make out, he apparently thinks the perfect tenses in English are wrong. As in, always. :?
Yes, really weird. What's next, a guy thinking the "the" doesn't belong to the English language and going on Amazon commenting on every book that contains examples of the definite article?

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Salmoneus »

...but the really weird thing is that he's doing it to grammar books.

I mean I can sort of get complaining about it regarding other books, in the bizarre but still sane misunderstanding that this was something that was officially "wrong" according to grammarians. But this guy is actually reading every single grammar book and language guide he can find and complaining that they are all wrong about grammar. How? What? But?
Blog: [url]http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/[/url]

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Sevly »

Surely at this point he qualifies as some sort of conspiracy theorist. I almost applaud the man for the levels of devotion it must take to read book after book and marvel at the neverending errors. I mean, there is a sufficiently large word count n, and it's not even that large, for which any published English work will be wrong according to this rule of his. As in, every single book in the adult section of a library. Either he has never stepped in one, or this is quite a conspiracy indeed...

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by finlay »

There were a couple where he said like "actually this one's fine", but I can't work out what criteria he's using. I caught something about requiring a context, but it didn't really make sense.

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Hydroeccentricity »

In the first 21 pages of "Last Days [in Shanghai]" the word 'had' appears 99 times, of which 21 are used correctly as the past tense of 'to have' or in the past perfect or in the subjunctive, leaving 78 in error and giving an error rate of 79%.
Of the 78 in error ...
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Neon Fox »

finlay wrote:There were a couple where he said like "actually this one's fine", but I can't work out what criteria he's using. I caught something about requiring a context, but it didn't really make sense.
I think that he thinks it's never right to use a perfect except in contrast. Like, you can say, "I had washed the dishes by the time she arrived" but not just "I had washed the dishes." So short example sentences (of the kind you find in, well, grammar books) are always incorrect because they have nothing to contrast with.

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by zompist »

It sounds like he thinks the only perfect is the pluperfect.

Perfects are hard to describe, but the weird thing is that he doesn't seem to object to the present perfect. E.g.

John has arrived.

From his remarks, he has no problem with this. And yet what does he think the past tense of this expression would be?

The point being, if he thinks the only valid past perfect is the pluperfect, then what he really doesn't understand is the present perfect.

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Sevly »

Neon is on point. The guy says that 'I had eaten" is NOT past perfect, not without context', so what he wants is an explicit reference to the more recent past. More specifically, 'The past perfect is commonly introduced by "when"', and it really does have to be "when":
  • I had had my textbook for two weeks when school started. Right.
    I had had the idea for a long time before I wrote the book. Wrong.
Sic.

As for the present:
  • "Look, they have painted the door." WRONG. Look, they PAINTED the door.
    "The Captain has swum. (present perfect)" No, G.G, NOT present perfect.
So whether present or past, no 'when', not perfect. Whatever you say, Brad; preach it, brother.

(No, really. I've read so many of these damn things that I think I'm actually starting to believe him. I need to take a break and return to reality.)

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Pole, the »

Quackery either way.
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Qwynegold »

This is old, but a connection between Indians (?) and Norse people:
http://www.thelocal.se/discuss/index.ph ... 10851&st=0 (the weird stuff starts at post #12).
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