Nationalism and fringe linguistics

[Particles the Greek]

must... not... mention... that... Basque... guy...

[Yng]

yeah I'd imagine these claims are made whimsically in a lot of languages but we have dumb quotes about mugging other languages for loose grammar and whole books written by pseudoacademics like bill bryson about how ~~~whacky~~~ the english language is!!!! why do we DRIVE in a PARKway but PARK in a DRIVEway?! hohohohoho

[WeepingElf]

Of course, no continuity can be claimed with the classical alphabet, as the earliest Greek alphabet was Linear A, which is totally different and unrelated.

ObNitpick: Linear B. The language of Linear A is unknown, as the script is only partly deciphered. But that doesn't affect your point.

[Imralu]

Relevant. Also, the comments do seem to indicate this is very common.

[Terra]

Relevant. Also, the comments do seem to indicate this is very common.

(Psst. Dewrad already posted that on the first page.)

[Nortaneous]

The myths for English are at least understandable -- it really does have many more (noticeable) loanwords than the obvious languages for comparison. The languages a ~cultured~ English-speaker was most likely to encounter were (probably) Latin and French, and then maybe they come across German and realize that it looks less like English than French does.

It's nowhere near the only language in Europe to have those characteristics -- Basque has borrowed affixes from Latin, and Albanian, Hungarian, Romanian, etc. have vaguely comparable levels of loans -- but who's going to come across Basque, Albanian, Hungarian, or Romanian?

(I forget what the Basque guy's deal was, other than not understanding that sound correspondences are supposed to be regular. Vasco-Caucasian, or?)

Also, yeah, Greek went through loads of alphabets before the Greek alphabet came along, and the Greek alphabet itself had a good deal of variance when it spread to Etruscan and so on.

[Qwynegold]

OP: Did you see this thread?

[Glossophilos]

Nope. I intended to open this thread discussing the alleged "unique properties" of Greek, and the denial of the IE theory, but then I thought that this would make the thread too narrow, so I put a more generic title

[Dewrad]

Relevant. Also, the comments do seem to indicate this is very common.

(Psst. Dewrad already posted that on the first page.)

Yeah, but I was showing off and posted it in Greek.

[Radagast revived]

I think it is found to different degrees in all kinds of nationalism - nationalism after all is based on the Herderian/Humbolditan ideology of one people, one language one nation. In the US there are people who believe Jesus spoke English and that it is the original language of the Bible. Its easier to convince folks of being nationalists and that belonging to a national state is a great idea if there is something truly special about belonging to nation X if there is something truly special about that nation and its language and territory.

I work with Mexican Nationalism and Nahuatl, which also has a lot of this. USually it was mostly Chicano activists and a few urban Mexicans who used Nahuatl for nationalist purposes who would make weird claims about the languages origin - but recently a couple of serious scholars have taken it up. One french archeologist argues that Nahuatl speakers must have been the culture that started the Mesoamerican civilization - with hardly any other argument than "who else could it have been? the Aztecs are biologically programmed to conquer other peoples." One linguist has taken up this argument and built a pseudo linguistic prehistory of Nahuan languages based on the assumption that Nahuatl dialects have not changed over the past 3000 years.

[Matrix]

One french archeologist argues that Nahuatl speakers must have been the culture that started the Mesoamerican civilization

So, what, they're just completely ignoring the Olmecs?

[Radagast revived]

No, they are claiming the Olmecs were Nahuatl speakers.

[zompist]

One of my favorites along these lines: an Aymara scholar had heard that the Native Americans arrived from Asia and spread south from Alaska. He therefore looked at place names from Alaska down to Bolivia, finding Aymara etymologies for them.

The kind of sad thing is that he wrote the Aymara dictionary and grammar I have. With less-studied languages, the cranks may be the only ones with the energy to produce the materials.

[Xephyr]

Same with John Asher Dunn. He's the foremost authority on Coast Tsimshian, wrote the grammar and dictionary, but he also is convinced that Tsimshianic is Indo-European.

[gach]

The fortunate thing is that the cranks can still be entirely respectable in terms of the descriptive work they produce. I have a guide of the Finnish dialects written by Kalevi Wiik and the book does the descriptive job just fine despite the guy also being a proponent of the periglasial theory.

[CatDoom]

Pretty much anything any Indian nationalist says about Sanskrit counts here.

Tamil is another South Asian language that sometimes gets these theories attached to it. Interestingly enough I've never heard them for any of the other Dravidian languages, but maybe that's just because Tamil is the biggest.

A while back I was rooting around for online resources on Dravidian historical linguistics, and I found it a little disheartening how often I ran into people insisting that Tamil *is* proto-Dravidian, with the implication that every other Dravidian language is just a bastardized form of Tamil.

[Miekko]

Whatwith the nationalist party having made some gains in the elections in India, it wouldn't surprise me if more money is channelled into fringe linguistics in India

[Shrdlu]

Swedish is related to Nihali via on off-shot of Turkish that was forced across the Bosporus. Twise. Danish and especially Norwegian are unrelated languages that have borrowed much of the lexicon and undergone structural relexification but still displays a non-european substrate(Danish: Stod and Vigesimal counting, Norwegian: Lack of the sje-sound).

[CatDoom]

Althought not really related to nationalism there's a "Cal-Uralic" hypothesis that seems to have been around for a while now, which rejects the evidence for a close relationship between the Miwok and Costanoan language families and instead argues that the Costanoan languages (as well as several nearby native Californian languages) are most closely related to the *Uralic* family. That seems like a *real* stretch to me, but hey, it's not like the proponents of the hypothesis are entirely unselfconscious:

It can also be noted that false cognates also exist in the corpus: for example Salinan tsˀep ‘good, well’ looks like a potential comparandum for Mokša tsebεr ‘beautiful, good’ or Hungarian szép ‘beautiful’. This is a loanword of Turkic origin. Mokša tsebεr is most probably from Tatar čibar and in all cases inherited words in Mokša cannot begin with affricates like ts or č. I am not aware of a received etymology for Hungarian szép. It is likely from a similar Turkic source. Apparently Miwok cannot be the source of that word in Salinan, nor does Miwok look Turkic.

This suggests Salinan might have been in contact with some kind of Turkic language in the past, either in Eurasia or in the Americas.

-Arnaud Fournet, A Preliminary Survey of Some Uralic Elements in Costanoan, Esselen, Chimariko and Salinan

I'm calling it; Tsimshianic can't be Indo-European, because it's obviously Turkic.

[WeepingElf]

Ah, Arnaud Fournet. That crank used to molest the Nostratic-L mailing list for a while. He also used words for metals and domestic animals in sundry languages of the Ancient Near East as evidence for a relationship he dated to the Mesolithic, and kept a blog named "World Web Trolls, Idiots and Assholes" for the sole purpose of flaming other amateur linguists. That blog has since then been closed and deleted, probably not by Arnaud himself.

[Nortaneous]

Swedish is related to Nihali via on off-shot of Turkish that was forced across the Bosporus. Twise. Danish and especially Norwegian are unrelated languages that have borrowed much of the lexicon and undergone structural relexification but still displays a non-european substrate(Danish: Stod and Vigesimal counting, Norwegian: Lack of the sje-sound).

Some Tibetan dialects also have the sje-sound. This is evidence of their ancient link to the Aryan race something something Hyperborea

[Chuma]

That brings to mind good old Olof Rudbeck, who claimed that Sweden is actually Atlantis, which is also the origin of all civilisation, and that Swedish is thus the original language spoken by the first humans. At the time, he was a world-leading scientist, not a fringe thinker at all. Fortunately, this was about 300 years ago. His work in connecting IE languages eventually led to better theories - he was sort of half right, he just got the order wrong.