Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

[masako]

A guy at might work thinks there are "300 German dialects".

Srs.

Everyone knows there are over 9000.

Well, yeah.

[Acid Badger]

"Every language in the world descends from Turkisch, except for Armenian and Jewish."

[rickardspaghetti]

Who said that?

[Soap]

It's a splittist/lumpist thing. If you look at a dialect map of every English speaking country and make a line along every little isogloss, you could probably come up with a claim that there are 300 dialects of English.

Looking at Wikipedia I can find classification schemes that divide Low German into a bunch of dialects with names like Oldambsters and Kollumerpompsters, and all of that is crammed into a little area, so if the rest of the German speaking area was similarly diverse I bet you'd have 300 dialects there too. But that a lot of assumptions, and doesn't mean such a classification scheme is valid. I bet a lot of the speakers of the dialects would be surprised to be told that they were speaking them.

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldambtsters
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kollumerpompsters

[Acid Badger]

Who said that?

A turkish guy I know. I found it quite amusing.

[Etherman]

I checked it out - it basically says that Biblical Hewbrew is the original garden of Eden language, My favorite is the guy behind it all - you see his bio page, and all his degrees are in English lit.

Well this makes perfect sense; after all, El Shaddai spoke the world into creation using Hebrew.

Zionist propaganda. Allah speaks Arabic as demonstrated by the fact that the Quran is in Arabic and that any translation of the Quran into another language is not the Quran.

[Gaxa]

"Chinese comes from Tamil, and Japanese comes from Chinese! Stop with your stupid Proto-Sino-Tibetian nonsense and Altaic stupidity!"

Summing up a conversation I had with an Indian friend of mine.

[linguofreak]

http://www.bearfabrique.org/Catastrophism/babel.html

In his defence, historical linguistics does kind of stop making sense if one takes the Earth to be 6000 years old. (But then again, so do a lot of other things.)

I'd argue with that: Historical Linguistics makes a lot of claims within the past 4000 years (by a young-Earth Biblical chronology it's about 2000 years from creation to Babel), and we find that where written records exist, these claims are born out. (This is where he really gets things wrong: Languages *do* evolve, otherwise one must explain the appearance that Latin evolved into French and Spanish, and why English orthography is so screwed up (it's easy to explain if you take the current orthography to be a fossilization of Middle English)).

If one makes the assumption that an event along the lines of the Babel story occured, all this does is restrict the time period over which historical linguistics (or any other empirical science, in the case of other world-changing miracles) can make valid claims. It doesn't affect the validity of claims about things that happened since Babel. Empirical sciences tell us what the rules are in the case of "business as usual". They can't tell us what happens when business does not go as usual, or whether business has ever not gone as usual.

[rickardspaghetti]

Who said that?

A turkish guy I know. I found it quite amusing.

And he was serious?

[Acid Badger]

Who said that?

A turkish guy I know. I found it quite amusing.

And he was serious?

Oh yes, he was.

[tezcatlip0ca]

One teacher of mine used to say that all languages descend from Latin except Basque.

[Kai_DaiGoji]

Who said that?

A turkish guy I know. I found it quite amusing.

And he was serious?

Oh yes, he was.

"Give me a word, any word, and I show you how the root of that word is Greek."
"Kimono."
"Kimono, okay, let's see. I have it. Kimono comes from Greek word, Chimonas, which means, 'winter' - and what do you wear in the winter: a robe."

[catberry]

One teacher of mine used to say that all languages descend from Latin except Basque.

The anti-Edo Nyland.

[ayyub]

"Give me a word, any word, and I show you how the root of that word is Greek."
"Kimono."
"Kimono, okay, let's see. I have it. Kimono comes from Greek word, Chimonas, which means, 'winter' - and what do you wear in the winter: a robe."

[Kai_DaiGoji]

"Give me a word, any word, and I show you how the root of that word is Greek."
"Kimono."
"Kimono, okay, let's see. I have it. Kimono comes from Greek word, Chimonas, which means, 'winter' - and what do you wear in the winter: a robe."

I was worried with such an international crowd here that the reference would be missed

[sirdanilot]

Random facts on some googled site...

"Language with the most words: English, approx. 250,000 distinct words

Language with the fewest words: Taki Taki (also called Sranan), 340 words. Taki Taki is an English-based Creole spoken by 120,000 in the South American country of Suriname."

The second one might just be true if the Taki Taki they speak of is not a creole, but a simple pidgin. But can you really call that a language. In any case, I call BS.

[rickardspaghetti]

I don't think it sounds as if these guys are out to decieve. I think they're just misinformed.

[MrKrov]

I didn't know quackery depended on being intentionally deceitful. I don't think it does!

[sangi39]

Random facts on some googled site...

"Language with the most words: English, approx. 250,000 distinct words

Language with the fewest words: Taki Taki (also called Sranan), 340 words. Taki Taki is an English-based Creole spoken by 120,000 in the South American country of Suriname."

The second one might just be true if the Taki Taki they speak of is not a creole, but a simple pidgin. But can you really call that a language. In any case, I call BS.

I think I read a short paper about Sranan which more or less said that the "340" figure has come about as the result of overanalysis of stems. To take an English example it'd be like saying that "flute" is actually "flu"+"te (alternative of "te" in the solfege scale)" rather than an unanalysable root. In other words, under the the 340-word analysis, some of the words which would be considered compounds don't really have meanings which intuitively relate to the underlying roots.

[Whimemsz]

Who said that?

A turkish guy I know. I found it quite amusing.

And he was serious?

Oh yes, he was.

Well obv. those bastard Armenians with their constant whining about "genocide this" and "genocide that" don't speak a language descended from Turkish. But "Jewish"? Is this about the Israeli raid on that ship, or what?

[bulbaquil]

To take an English example it'd be like saying that "flute" is actually "flu"+"te (alternative of "te" in the solfege scale)" rather than an unanalysable root.

But that totally is where "flute" comes from. Isn't it obvious?

[dhok]

This is...this is special. There is no other term for it.

[Rui]

http://students.washington.edu/cbsf/cool/Chinese.swf

[Bristel]

http://students.washington.edu/cbsf/cool/Chinese.swf

Wow... just wow... interesting spin on Chinese characters, but I heard a duck call the entire time I was reading it... QUACK

[Morrígan]

http://students.washington.edu/cbsf/cool/Chinese.swf

Wow... just wow... interesting spin on Chinese characters, but I heard a duck call the entire time I was reading it... QUACK

I died a little.