Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by WeepingElf »

Qwynegold wrote: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).
Ah, Indians from India. Not really that weird. At least, both groups are Indo-European. If it were American Indians, it would be fun ;)
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by alynnidalar »

I dunno, you could construct some sort of theory about how the Norse at L'Anse aux Meadows and other North American settlements weren't the first Norse folks to show up in the Americas?

I didn't say it'd be a good theory, mind, but I'm sure somebody's come up with it before.
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by clawgrip »

Are not the remains at L'Anse aux Meadows proof that the Norse originated in North America? Some may dispute this due to the relatively recent age of the houses, but that's laughable! As if those were the oldest ones! The older houses just got destroyed by the Beothuk. Surely their poor relationship with the Beothuk is why the Norse left North America to settle Scandinavia in the first place. I mean think about it...Norse, North America. Norse means north.

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

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yee

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by WeepingElf »

YourFace wrote:Watch this.
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by WeepingElf »

This has been spammed to the Great Proto-Indo-European Thread recently.
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Richard W »

There've been some confused statements on who is banned from Nostratic-L.

Allan Bomhard is not banned. He left (several times) because he is too thin-skinned for forums. I don't think I could have kept him there even if I'd moderated every single post.

Octaviano is banned.

Arnaud isn't banned, but is on permanent moderation. Unfortunately, he occasionally suffers relapses in manners, so I feel obliged to punish myself by having to check his posts.
Nostratic-L now is a rather quiet place where often nothing is posted for days, as there are currently no crackpots over there (unless you count people like Bomhard as crackpots - which I don't, as he shows very civilized behaviour and takes other people and their opinions seriously), so there is no flaming and no trolling.
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by WeepingElf »

Allan Bomhard is, to my experience, a pretty nice fellow, and quite grounded despite his prominence in Nostratic studies, though he is rather deeply entrenched in his version of Nostratic, and trying to discuss my own ideas with him wasn't very productive - he always just pointed at this or that chapter of his monograph. Also, he eventually asked to be removed from the mini-discussion group (consisting of just him, Juho Pystynen (Tropylium) and me) I had set up after he had left Nostratic-L, because he felt that Juho's ideas were of poor quality and his knowledge of the relevant literature insufficient.

Bomhard's reason to withdraw from Nostratic-L was, I think, that Arnaud mercilessly picked everything apart and was just plain annoying. Arnaud's ideas are not really as crazy as Octaviano's (at least, he accepts the conventional reconstruction of PIE), but he firmly believes in Hurrian being IE (what about Urartian? he never mentions that), and tends to offend those who contradict him. Recently, there was a fruitless debate on Proto-Uralic vowels between Arnaud and Juho, with some occasional comments from others, but then Arnaud announced taking a break from the discussion, and Nostratic-L fell silent.
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Zju »

Richard W wrote:There've been some confused statements on who is banned from Nostratic-L.
What is the address of Nostratic-L?

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by hwhatting »

Zju wrote:
Richard W wrote:There've been some confused statements on who is banned from Nostratic-L.
What is the address of Nostratic-L?
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Nostratic-L/info
Pro tip: I googled "Nostratic-L".

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by ol bofosh »

Apparently Irish beatha and Latin vita can be read an pronounced the same. XD
It was about time I changed this.

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by linguoboy »

ol bofosh wrote:Apparently Irish beatha and Latin vita can be read an pronounced the same. XD
Lenition of beatha yields bheatha, and gorgia toscana yields vi[θ]a, so there you are.

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by WeepingElf »

ol bofosh wrote:Apparently Irish beatha and Latin vita can be read an pronounced the same. XD
AFAIK, they are perfectly cognate, but pronounced the same? This reminds me of the case of Russian luna 'moon'. At first I thought that the Russian Luna lunar probes were named after the Latin word for the Moon, but in fact, both Latin lûna and Russian luna are from PIE *leuksneh2, ending up virtually the same through utterly different sequences of sound changes!
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Pole, the »

WeepingElf wrote:AFAIK, they are perfectly cognate, but pronounced the same? This reminds me of the case of Russian luna 'moon'. At first I thought that the Russian Luna lunar probes were named after the Latin word for the Moon, but in fact, both Latin lûna and Russian luna are from PIE *leuksneh2, ending up virtually the same through utterly different sequences of sound changes!
Well, after all, Moscow is the Third Rome. :P
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Vijay »

Years ago, I remember being invited to a party at a neighbor's house with my parents. He's Tamil and said something along the lines of "well, all Indian languages come from Sanskrit, right?" which is perhaps ironic given certain political movements in Tamil Nadu in the 70s trying to distance Tamil from Indo-Aryan languages (such as Sanskrit) as much as possible. He and most of the other adult male guests were sitting around the dinner table with my dad and me, and at some point, his daughter happened to stop by, too. I think she's an anthropology major or something, so she said something about how when early hominids migrated from Africa to Southeast Asia, they crossed India on the way. One of the guests talked about a business trip he took to Thailand where he saw statues of Hindu mythological figures and references to the Ramayana. I know this isn't exactly linguistic quackery, but that brought them to the following conclusion: The Neanderthals (yes, the Neanderthals) migrated out of Africa, stopped off in India just to write the Ramayana, and then brought it with them to Southeast Asia.

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by TinyMusic »

Speaking of India...

Oh dear:

"The word 'Indo-European', in my opinion, is mis-nomer. Does 'Indo' to the IE mean that all the IE languages have their origin in Sanskrit? Or, are the IE languages of either 'Indic' or 'European' origin, or of both? Origin of any language can/should be only in one language. Polygenesis of any language is not right."

"Based on irrefutable historical evidences (my emphasis), this book will establish any doubt that there has not yet been any scientific research to support the thesis that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin have same parentage. The Indic and European languages - culturally and historically different and geographically too distanced - can not have linguistically a common parentage."

"Aryan invasion did not happen. It has been mischievously engineered by the British."

"Dravidians are Aryans."

"Extra wide age differences of more than 1,000 years between Sanskrit and the two European languages - Latin and Greek - suggests that it would be too difficult for their mother PIE to secretly disappear and hide without the knowledge of the speahers [sic] of her daughters, particularly her eldest daughter Sanskrit. The literature of Sanskrit - which has been orally transmitted for ten thousand years - would have narrated the sad story of her separation from her mother (PIE) (my emphasis) and two European sisters, Latin and Greek...If the PIE really existed, Sanskrit scriptures would have known at least her name and its some text, as is about the Avestan...this clearly suggests that it is a fabricated story."

+ stuff about Sanskrit "raj" and Latin "rex" (can't reproduce it here)

...and so on. How many quacks/milli-nylands?
Last edited by TinyMusic on Tue Mar 01, 2016 11:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Vijay »

Hahahaha wow, all of that sounds all too familiar except the complaint about the saga of PIE. :D

This made me start going through some of the...stuff written in essays in those books from the National Integration Language Series called "Learn [language name] in 30 Days." Sometimes they start speculating about how exactly one language is related to another: Is language X language Y's mother, daughter, or stubborn but lovely daughter-in-law?

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Frislander »

The Proto-Indo-European, Sumerian and Old Japanese ones are of course speculative (though less so the Old Japanese), and the Old Chinese one sounds like he's just come across the language.

The Latin one pronounces "v" as "v", not "w" as it was, as well as palatalising the velars when he shouldn't (that is, never).

I'm not hearing ejectives in the Mayan.

I'm also not sure that Old English, Middle Chinese, Old Norse, Early Middle Japanese, Quechua and Ryukyuan count as "ancient", especially since two of them represent later versions of languages already represented.
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Frislander »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wEtsGldrkc

Very dodgy, and the accompanying pictures are sometimes quite inaccurate (particularly the Amharic and Navajo ones!). Probably harmless folk linguistics, though.
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Vijay »

If I made a video like that, probably all ten languages would be Otomanguean. :P

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Chengjiang »

TinyMusic wrote:Speaking of India...[snip]
Ah, the good old "PIE is a racist lie invented by British colonizers to rob Indians of their Dravidian heritage, also Sansrkit is really really soooper ancient" canard. I'd rate it at least 0.1 Nyland. I'd rate it higher if it weren't so common.
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Vijay »

It's funny, you get linguistic quackery in like every direction in an Indian context. Sanskrit is the mother of all languages! But wait a minute, Tamil is older! Nuh-uh, Telugu is just as old because it has a literary history that goes at least as far back as Tamil! Malayalam has literature going back at least 1500 years and is thus a Classical Language of India! (<- Weirdly, this particular claim is actually recognized by the Indian government). Tamil's just bad Malayalam! Malayalam's just the Tamil they speak over the mountains!

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Chengjiang »

Also, I love "The literature of Sanskrit - which has been orally transmitted for ten thousand years..." How would you possibly determine that figure for an oral tradition?
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Vijay »

By reading the Wikipedia article on the Rigveda and adding in a 0 :D

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