Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

[linguoboy]

Posted without comment: http://www.universalverballanguage.org/page3.html

[Hallow XIII]

Well.

At least now we know why the Welsh are so rowdy!

[WeepingElf]

Tolkien must have missed this. Just look at his Eldar:

The Noldor speak Quenya, which has hardly any voiced fricatives, and they make an awful noise (see Feanor and his sons).

The Sindar speak Sindarin, which has voiced fricatives without end, and are comparably wise and peaceful.

He had it backwards!

[Dewrad]

This is also clearly why Dutch settlers became so much less prone to violence when they settled in southern Africa! [ɣ] is clearly a pernicious phone.

[Particles the Greek]

This is also clearly why Dutch settlers became so much less prone to violence when they settled in southern Africa! [ɣ] is clearly a pernicious phone.

Not as pernicious a phone as this:



I don't remember if it was voiced or voiceless, though, but definitely a fricative.

[linguoboy]

That is totally the phone I would like to have if I had to club someone to death with it.

[Zju]

Things just got serious.

[Lyra]

TOO MUCH EVIDENCE! MAST BE TRUE!!



Some prick on fb is hissy fitting over how I thought it was BS.


~Lyra

[KathTheDragon]

Things just got serious.

Summary please? I can't d/l it.

[Zju]

tl;dr in a 150 or so pdf he argued that Basque is IE in a style that could convince someone new to the area. I'm not saying all of his conclusions and presumptions are quackery, but still...
And in this pdf he replies to the critics in the same style, if not even more convincingly sounding. What attracted my attention was that he actually replied to the critics, a thing a lot of the others don't do and on top of that he seems to have good counterarguments.
And both pdfs are free to download, you only need to register.

[KathTheDragon]

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=42832

Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/201403200007 ... 12&t=42832

[sangi39]

Proto-Sumerian. I'm sure people here have seen this before, since it's the first external link from Wikipedia's "Sumerian Language" article, but I starting reading it and the further I got, the worse it got. I'm sure some of it is correct, but things like:

Having identified the sets of ideas associated with each proto-Sumerian consonant, the question arises as to why these particular associations and not others. The answer is foreign to the modern mind, accustomed as we are to words which are constructed of arbitrary consonants and vowels, words which we commit to memory as unbreakable morphemic sequences. In modern languages, except for a few words which are recognized to originate in sound symbolism, meaning is divorced from sound. The sounds that make up modern words do not have meanings which everyone acknowledges. This was not the case for the inventors of the proto-Sumerian language because they were trying to use the mouth and the sounds that it produced to 'point' at objects and actions. One can think of these sounds as 'mouth-gestures' or 'mouth-pictures'.

Just go a bit far in the "wtf" direction...

[KathTheDragon]

Wut.

[prettydragoon]

Stephenson (1992) hinted at such a direction for research.

[Kereb]

TOO MUCH EVIDENCE! MAST BE TRUE!!

:O :O :O :O

[Zju]

Proto-Sumerian. I'm sure people here have seen this before, since it's the first external link from Wikipedia's "Sumerian Language" article, but I starting reading it and the further I got, the worse it got. I'm sure some of it is correct, but things like:

Having identified the sets of ideas associated with each proto-Sumerian consonant, the question arises as to why these particular associations and not others. The answer is foreign to the modern mind, accustomed as we are to words which are constructed of arbitrary consonants and vowels, words which we commit to memory as unbreakable morphemic sequences. In modern languages, except for a few words which are recognized to originate in sound symbolism, meaning is divorced from sound. The sounds that make up modern words do not have meanings which everyone acknowledges. This was not the case for the inventors of the proto-Sumerian language because they were trying to use the mouth and the sounds that it produced to 'point' at objects and actions. One can think of these sounds as 'mouth-gestures' or 'mouth-pictures'.

Just go a bit far in the "wtf" direction...

From the same website:

/h/: This is a velar voiceless fricative, pronounced like the ch in German Buch or Scottish loch. The back of the tongue is held close to the velum so that when air is forced past the constriction the result is a series of small explosions. The repetitive explosiveness is what led to the meaning 'numerousness'. This contrasts with the 'quantity' of /š/ in the same way that 'many' contrasts with 'much' - the distinct explosions of /h/ correspond to 'many' and the sustained, smooth friction of /š/ corresponds to 'much'. This consonant refers to saliva or phlegm because of its similarity to the sound of hawking phlegm.

Apparently, fricatives are series of stops. /x:/ [k k k k]

[Kereb]

Apparently, fricatives are series of stops. /x:/ [k k k k]

what I think is happening here is you've got an Anglophone who, like many of us have done at some point, thinks that a velar fricative is the same thing as a really phlegmy and rattley uvular [χ] (don't know what the diacritic is for lots of phlegm and turbulence). I'd bet this guy pronounces "loch" like an actor portraying a Klingon. So he attributes meaning to the cycles of uvular rattling he hears from himself -- that must have been how the sumerians pronounced their [x] too, after all

[WeepingElf]

Russian ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky wants to abolish a Russian vowel

[Kereb]

Neat, he even repurposes "guttural" for describing a vowel sound!

[Shm Jay]

Russian ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky wants to abolish a Russian vowel

Well, that's silly. How on earth are they going to be able to watch the famous Soviet film Кин-дза-дза! then?

[Qwynegold]

Russian ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky wants to abolish a Russian vowel

lol:

It’s Zhirinovsky that needs disemvoweling!

[Zju]

In English, one is the cardinal number and first is the ordinal; in Arabic, wa2id or a2ad (one)is the cardinal and 2adi (first) is the ordinal. As can be seen, these cardinals and ordinals do not seem to be related at all. However, they really are because Arabic has another commoner synonym for 2adi which is awwal (one, first). That is, one is directly derived from the latter,commoner Arabic ordinal word awwal via two sound changes: (i) initial syllable deletion (i.e.,/aw/-loss) or /?/-merger with /w/ as commonly happens in Arabic in similar cases suchas ?akhkhir → wakhkhir (go back) and ?irth → wirth (inheritance) and (ii) the replacement of /l/ by /n/. In other words, the course of this phonetic change in English might look like this:
awwal → wal → wan(one).

https://www.academia.edu/2230123/_2012a ... _languages

Now I understand why we couldn't reconstruct a single PIE word for one - it's because all numerals in all IE languages are borrowed from Arabic! Never mind *Hoino-, *Hoiwo-, *Hoikʷo-, *Hoi(H)nos or *Hoi - the ultimate source is awwal! The apparent possibility to reconstruct a single protoword for all words for one is just a side effect of later SCs.

The crackpottery is strong with this one:
https://www.academia.edu/2229724/_2012e ... y_approach
https://www.academia.edu/2237324/_2012f ... y_approach
Ultimately, every single word from every single language comes from Arabic, you can see how here: https://qu-sa.academia.edu/ZaidanJassem

[Tropylium]

"402 followers" ;_;

[pharazon]

Neat, he even repurposes "guttural" for describing a vowel sound!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEfF6inQbDY

[Arzena]

He even links Mandarin and Arabic!

And there's this crazy under his 'Talks' section:

The aim of this seminar is to show that Arabic and English as well as European languages are
dialects of the same language, whose differences are due to natural and plausible causes of phonetic, morphological and semantic change