Skeptical Humanities

Hi everybody!

I’ll begin to comment here on some important specific cases of non-standard ‘epigraphics’ around the world

In his book, Saki Mafundikwa provides a survey of historical and other aspects of African scripts.  Some of the systems discussed by Mafundikwa are not in fact true scripts but are instead semiotic systems not representing specific languages or their words, or even simply art or at best matters of graphic design (see above).  This may involve the desire to suggest that pre-modern African societies were more literate than was in fact the case (a manifestation of Afrocentrism).  In more general terms, too, the level of linguistic expertise leaves something to be desired.

There are also more overtly Afrocentrist works about African scripts.  Earlier I referred to Ayele Bekerie, who focuses upon the Ethiopic script, which he believes spread from Ethiopia to South Arabia rather than vice versa as is generally held.  Bekerie uncritically adopts hyper-diffusionist accounts of the development of human civilizations – especially those formulated by earlier Afrocentrists – and the associated (discredited) methods of comparative reconstruction.  He also advances a highly tendentious view of the origin of the Greek alphabet, and claims links between Armenian script and Ethiopic.

The epigraphic ideas of Molefi Kete Asante (also mentioned earlier) are confused and at times simply mistaken, in much the same manner.  He first seems to endorse the notion of the development of scripts through successive types, in Africa as elsewhere (as also does Bekerie); but laterhe rejects the entire ‘Eurocentric’ notion of script as too narrow to cover all relevant African systems (some of which do not really appear to be written language; see earelier). Still later, Asante decries emphasis on the development of writing as itself Eurocentric.  However, this conflicts with his claim that any advanced civilization must have written language (which is falsified, in any event, by the case of the Inca).  In fact, Asante’s entire discussion of writing systems is terminologically and conceptually utterly confused.

As far as the Americas are concerned, many claims of this type involve the contentious decipherment of what are alleged to be inscriptions found in the Americas as being in known Old World scripts (or variants thereof) and either in known Old World languages or adapted to write local Amerindian languages which are generally deemed to have been unwritten until modern times.  This is the main linguistic aspect of hyper-diffusionist claims to the effect that transatlantic and/or transpacific voyages brought representatives of many cultures to the Americas before the firmly established Norse settlements of around 1000 CE.  The non-mainstream tradition in question is best represented in the USA, where its proponents identify themselves as ‘epigraphists’; many of them are members of the Epigraphic Society¹, which has various regional branches in the USA and issues ‘occasional publications’.  As I noted last time, the best known American ‘epigraphist’ is Howard Barraclough (‘Barry’) Fell, the late academic biologist and hyper-diffusionist non-mainstream linguist.

Fell and his supporters interpret many markings found in the Americas as inscriptions in various scripts/languages: Chinese, Egyptian, Libyan, Phoenician, Hebrew, African systems, etc.; and also in an otherwise unattested variant of Ogam/Ogham, a script used mainly to write Irish Gaelic.  They also link the Tifinagh alphabet (a series of abjadic and alphabetic scripts used by some Berber peoples of North Africa, notably the Tuareg, to write their language) with Ogam and its variant ‘Consaine’ (vowel-less Ogam).

A few of the very many alleged inscriptions are:

The Bat Creek Stone Inscription (Tennessee) (interpreted as Hebrew, as Cherokee or – by skeptics – as a hoax; it may not be linguistic at all)

The Cook Farm Mound Tablets (Iowa)

The Davenport Tablets (Iowa)

The now lost Grave Creek Mound Stone (West Virginia)

The Los Lunas Decalogue Stone (New Mexico)

The Mystery Hill artefacts (New Hampshire)

The Newark Holy Stones (Ohio)

The Newberry Inscription (Michigan; allegedly in the Cypriot syllabary)

The Yoder site (California)

Petroglyphs (markings on rocks) found in Michigan

The allegedly mysterious ‘hieroglyphs’ used to write Micmac (Eastern Canada); Fell implausibly regards the characters as Egyptian in origin

Alleged inscriptions on amulets and ‘out-of-place’ coins found in the Americas, including characters found on the ‘mini-maps’ found on Phoenician coins as interpreted by geologist Mark McMenamin

As I noted, some of the alleged inscriptions appear to be in fact markings produced by natural processes or by non-linguistic human activity such as ploughing. Some genuine inscriptions are apparently recent and uncontroversial (they are being misinterpreted); other inscriptions may be deliberate forgeries.

Some writers claim that the Norse penetrated deep into North America in medieval times. The main set of claims involves the Kensington Stone from Minnesota, allegedly written in runic Scandinavian in the fourteenth century CE.   Most informed commentators have concluded that the Stone is a nineteenth-century forgery, but a few accept it as genuine.

Another key case is that of the Yarmouth Stone (Nova Scotia; thirteen characters only). Zoltán Simon reads the Stone as Hungarian, while others read it in various other ways, in one case also in Hungarian but with the opposite ductus and naturally with a different meaning. (Of course, if the Stone is indeed in Hungarian, it may still date from the time of the Viking settlements in North America, around 1,000 years BP: users of Hungarian could conceivably have accompanied Viking expeditions.)

Other allegedly runic inscriptions include the Spirit Pond Runestones (Maine), the Heavener Runestone (Oklahoma) and other Oklahoma runestones.

I’ll comment further on any of these cases on request.

Over the years, a number of serious scholars, such as the Islamic historian and archaeologist Norman Totten, have supported Fell – but usually without adequate knowledge of linguistics.  Cyclone Covey (whom I mentioned earlier) is an academic historian with research interests in the Greeks, Troy, etc. and with some knowledge of languages and linguistics; he too has been persuaded by the arguments of Fell.  Covey’s specific epigraphic interests include Burrows Cave (see below) and especially artefacts unearthed at a site in Arizona interpreted as the remains of a Latin-using community terming itself ‘Calalus’ which allegedly migrated there from Europe around 775 CE.  The main linguistic aspect of this case involves supposed Latin texts, notably one inscribed on a lead cross; but the artefacts are no longer available for examination.  Richard Flavin, Bill Rudersdorf and other scholars have concluded that this site, while not a hoax, has been misinterpreted and is in fact from a much later date and not controversial.

Burrows’ Cave is a decidedly controversial site in Illinois; in 1982 a large quantity of cultural material was allegedly found there by Russell Burrows.  Some of the markings are regarded by supporters of Burrows as epigraphic in nature, including surprisingly accurate maps (identified by Bill Kreisle), coins, and thousands of stone tablets apparently bearing texts. Paul Schaffranke and Brian Hubbard ‘deciphered’ some of the inscriptions as Vulgar Latin written in an Etruscan alphabet.  Others were ‘deciphered’ as Hebrew and Egyptian by Arnold Murray and Zena Halpern. Fred Rydholm and Joseph Mahan, founder and long-time president of the Institute for the Study of American Cultures (ISAC), suggest that bodies found in the cave are those of refugees from Ptolemaic Egypt, including a Jewish contingent from the Roman-controlled Kingdom of Mauritania.  Kurt Schildmann also endorses the material, but regards it as written in Sanskrit (which he also finds in similar texts reported from Peru); in addition, he finds words from Old World languages in Mayan script.  The scholarly community is agreed that the items alleged to have been found in Burrows’ Cave are in fact modern fakes.

More next time!

Mark

Hello again, everybody!  Thanks as ever for your various helpful comments!  I turn here to claims associated with ‘Afrocentrism’.

Many non-mainstream diffusionist authors have claimed that Africa was an early centre for the spread of cultures and languages.  (These claims are not to be confused with the almost universally accepted view that hominids first arose in Africa and spread over the Earth from that base in the much more remote past; most of them are also separate from the widely-held view that Homo sapiens, specifically, spread from an African base at a considerably later but still very ancient date.)  The theories of most of these authors involve ‘Afrocentrism’: the tendency (especially in the USA) to exaggerate the role of Africa in world culture, by way of reaction to the previous, often racist down-playing of Africa’s contributions to history and intellectual life.  Afrocentrism has been popularized among African-American students and researchers in recent decades; it involves the reassessment of matters concerning the history and culture of Africa and the African diaspora (especially the African-American world) with a very heavy focus upon the experiences and traditional viewpoints of African people.  Central to much Afrocentrist theory are the claim that African civilization is very old indeed and the hyper-diffusionist view that Africans have had much more influence on word culture than is usually believed, notably (but not exclusively) through ancient Egypt (see also below), which Afrocentrists dubiously call Kemet and which they regard – very controversially – as ethnically and culturally part of Black Africa.  It is also suggested that Africa is much more linguistically and culturally united, at least historically, than non-Afrocentrist scholars would allow; for instance, Ancient Egyptian has often been identified – prominently by the major mid-twentieth-century Afrocentrist Cheik Anta Diop – as a pan-African ancestor language, contrary to the views of mainstream linguists.

Many Afrocentrists hold that words (and loosely similar sounds) from Ancient Egyptian, Ge’ez (the classical language of Ethiopia) and other widely-distributed and apparently unrelated African languages have common origins; the intention is to argue that all African languages are really one ‘family’, possibly descended from Ancient Egyptian.  They also claim that African languages and scripts were influential in early Europe, Asia and the Americas, and that many forms in European languages, along with the associated cultures, can be attributed to African sources.  Some Afrocentrists, notably Clyde Wintersand his associates, pay especial attention to linguistic matters; for instance, Winters ‘deciphers’ the genuinely mysterious Indus Valley Script (discussion to follow!) as Dravidian (Southern India) and links Dravidian generally, Sumerian and even Chinese with African languages held to have been widely diffused by an early African diaspora.  Some other Afrocentrist diffusionist work focusing upon language has been published under the editorship of Ivan Van Sertima.

Martin Bernal’s claims to the effect that Greek borrowed very heavily indeed from Egyptian as part of an Egyptian cultural ‘invasion’ of Greece are set in a more scholarly context, but still involve the usual loose comparative linguistic methodology.  Bernal’s etymological ideas have been generally rejected by classical scholars and Egyptologists following justifiably sharp critical reactions by philologists such as Jay Jasanoff and Alan Nussbaum.  Jasanoff and Nussbaum discuss many Greek words for which Bernal unconvincingly proposes Egyptian ancestor-words on the basis of loose semantic similarity and unsystematic and/or superficial similarity of form; for example he derives the Greek goddess-name Athene from the (phonetically not really similar) Egyptian expression Ht Nt (‘temple of the goddess Neit’). Many of Bernal’s etymologies appear arbitrary and there is no reason to accept them.

One of the more prominent recent Afrocentrist writers with a linguistic focus is Ayele Bekerie, who focuses especially upon the Ethiopic script, which is an ‘abugida’ (intermediate between an alphabet and a syllabic writing system) and which he treats as uniquely well-structured.  In addition, Bekerie uncritically accepts hyper-diffusionist accounts of the development of human civilizations – especially those formulated by Afrocentrists – and the associated (discredited) methods of comparative reconstruction that I have discussed earlier; for instance, he gives an implausible etymology for Greek sophia (‘wisdom’) in terms of words in Egyptian and in Ge’ez.  Other words from various languages are identified as cognate with Ge’ez words, with no worthwhile evidence.

Bekerie’s linguistics is indeed unorthodox and dubious more generally; he often seems to be operating in a folk-linguistic manner, without much awareness of the discipline as normally practised. For instance he claims that ‘grammar’ can be deduced from writing systems alone, and suggests that certain formal structures in some African languages and the Ethiopic abugida itself closely reflect African ‘philosophy’ – which does not seem to be the case.

Another such case involves the linguistic sections of Molefi Kete Asante’s work, which promotes Afrocentrism more generally, focusing especially on the alleged close links between ancient Egypt and Black Africa.  Asante makes implausible claims similar to those of Bekerie.  He identifies even the ‘indigenous’ peoples of Australia and New Guinea as African, the result of a very early African diaspora.  Asante’s discussion of Indo-European and of ancient languages and their relations is badly confused and the etymologies given are far-fetched to say the least.  His account of Egypt and its ancestral significance for the languages, cultures and ‘science’ of Black Africa is highly partisan and (again to say the very least) contentious, and he is overoptimistic about the reconstruction of very ancient languages using only modern data.  He also uses dated sources and the views of near-’fringe’ linguists to support his theories about the relationships between African languages, as developed in particular by Diop (see above).  Folk-linguistically, he uses phonetic(ally) to mean ‘phonemic(ally)’.

More next week!

Mark

Hello, everybody

Thanks for the ongoing feedback!

I am aware of the Zuni-Japanese claims and may well comment on them down the track as one example of claims of this nature!

Re a query re my earlier comments about ‘Jewish’ writers who uphold non-mainstream ideas about Hebrew: I am informed by David Leonardi that he personally identifies as a Christian (albeit of an unusual kind), and that some of Jeff Benner’s supporters are also Christians. As far as I know, Benner himself is Jewish.

Another set of non-mainstream claims regarding relationships between languages involves the use of typological similarities as evidence of unrecognized links between languages. Typological features are general features, at any linguistic level (phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic), which may be shared between languages whether or not they are (‘genetically’ or by contact) related (for instance, the degree to which words are heavily ‘inflected’ = displaying many grammatical affixes such as noun-case endings, verb-tense markers, etc.) – or on the other hand may differ between languages which are closely related (for example, Icelandic and Afrikaans are quite closely related [Germanic] languages, but the former is heavily inflecting and the latter almost entirely without inflections). In many cases, typological features have only a small number of possible values; for example, there are obviously only two possible preferred word orders for pairs of associated linguistic items such as a noun and its modifying adjective (‘big book’, ‘book big’). Typological features cannot themselves be treated as evidence of relatedness.

Despite this, there are various typology-based claims that apparently unrelated, often geographically dispersed languages are in fact related either ‘genetically’ or by contact. For example, there are various claims regarding links between Dravidian (Southern India) and Finno-Ugric (Finnish, etc.) based largely upon typological similarities, notably the ‘agglutinating’ morphological structure which both groups of languages display. This use of typological similarities by non-mainstream writers in no way strengthens their cases.

Of late, it has become common for conclusions regarding deep-time linguistic relationships to be grounded partly in newly available data on the evolutionary cladistics (‘family-tree’ structure) of human genetics. Not surprisingly, these two sets of characteristics do often correspond significantly; and this means that one can seek to clarify obscurities in historical linguistics through ancient genetic information, which is often more readily accessed. This applies especially to the pre-literate period, where there are no linguistic details at all apart from reconstructed ‘deep-time’ ancestor-forms (inevitably uncertain).

However, there are many cases, such as those of the African-Americans, where genetically identifiable groups have (for various reasons) abandoned their languages, at least in some areas. Although some recent discoveries suggest that there are fewer such cases than might be imagined, it is still clear that it is dangerous to press arguments of this kind too far in filling in ‘gaps’ in the linguistic record. The important genetic work of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and others does not necessarily have the major linguistic implications which might be attributed to it (especially by writers predisposed to argue for genuine ‘racial’ divisions of the species on these and other grounds).

Despite these issues, some important findings have emerged from this interaction between disciplines. For example, Spencer Wells, relying mainly on genetic data and the ideas of the maverick linguist Ruhlen, treats Na-Dene (North America) as demonstrably related to Sino-Tibetan and as probably related to Caucasian (Caucasus). Although this position might appear outrageously hyper-diffusionist to most linguists, it has been argued since the mid-1990s (by Ruhlen and Sergei Starostin) and with more persuasion since 2008 that the Yeniseian language ‘family’ of Siberia is related to Na-Dene in a larger Dene-Yenisein ‘family’ (obviously involving a very considerable time-depth). Even this more modest proposal is not by any means universally accepted, but it is not altogether to be dismissed. On the other hand, it is not clear that the comparative method as such is appropriate when dealing with a proposed common ancestor as early as 50,000 BP. (Starostin for his part ranges more widely, for example linking Basque and Amerindian.)

Some non-mainstream authors propose entire alternative theories of language change, intended (overtly or covertly) to replace existing mainstream theories (similar in nature to more general alternative linguistic theories). Such theories tend to display degrees of confusion; some of them involve elements, not necessarily compatible with each other, drawn eclectically from those mainstream theories with which the author does have some familiarity. Some of the mainstream ideas used in this way are also misinterpreted.

One writer of this kind is David Leonardi (discussed previously), who believes that all or nearly all of the world’s languages and very many of their forms are related (that is, there are far fewer genuine cases of accidental similarity than most mainstream linguists hold), chiefly by way of language contact and diffusion; Leonardi downplays the entire notion of ‘genetic’ relatedness. He invokes in his support various mainstream and marginally mainstream linguists, some of whom disagree profoundly with each other. They might also reject Leonardi’s interpretations of their ideas, which he sometimes takes to be closer to his own than they are. (Edo Nyland, also discussed earlier, takes a similarly inaccurate view of the status of his own ideas.) However, Leonardi’s exposition of his own ideas is often obscure, and it is difficult to comment upon them in detail.

A more prominent alternative theory of language change was expounded by the members of a mid-twentieth-century breakaway Italian school of non-scientific linguists, the ‘Neo-Linguists’, influenced by the idealist philosophy of Benedetto Croce. Some of the neo-linguists, such as Giorgio Fano, rejected Croce’s more extreme ideas, but remained conspicuously non-mainstream in international terms. Robert Hall – interestingly a believer in the Kensington Stone (see later) – provides a linguistic critique of Neo-Linguistics.

More next time!

Mark

Hello again, everybody!

Correction: back in my third post, I attributed the derivation of the word Australia from Astralaya (supposedly meaning ‘land of missiles’) to Gene Matlock.  Without having all the relevant books immediately to hand, I think that this etymology was originally proposed by Stephen Knapp, who does include it among his examples.  I’m not sure that Matlock has endorsed it or would endorse it.

Hello again, everybody!

As I said last time, there are some special groups of historical linguistic claims which illustrate particular types of historical and other non-linguistic background thinking and motivations.  Some of these involve religions, nationalistic ideas, Afrocentrism, catastrophism, etc.

One obvious group of claims of this general type involves the view that the original language of a revered body of scripture has special status – and, in extreme versions, represents the Ursprache.  As I noted earlier, Biblical Hebrew, regarded by many as the Ursprache in pre-scientific times, remains popular in this respect among fundamentalist Jewish and Christian authors, but there are many others, notably Sanskrit (Hinduism/Vedanta) and the related Pali (Buddhism).  Some religious believers eagerly adopt non-standard accounts of the history of the relevant languages (and territories) which they find congenial in this respect; many of them will not countenance objections to these accounts.

For example, David Leonardi argues that the ‘Masoretic’ amplification of Hebrew spelling – which employs ‘points’ displaying the vowels, hitherto unwritten or written in makeshift ways; the Masoretic system was originally developed around 700 CE and after, and persists today – seriously distorts the structure of ancient Hebrew (and thereby frequently distorts the meanings of biblical texts).  He holds that early Hebrew had an exceptionally highly ‘organised’ phonology involving very short morphemes (compare the works which I discussed in earlier blogs; my brief comments about Hebrew foreshadowed these present comments) and can be regarded as a shallow-time Ursprache (and was also much more closely related to Ancient Egyptian than is generally held; he largely rejects the accepted decipherment of Egyptian).  Leonardi suggests that God created spoken and written Hebrew fully formed (which supposedly explains the ‘organised’ nature which he ascribes to the language).

Other Jewish authors who regard Hebrew as the Ursprache – many of them ‘creationists’ – include Isaac Mozeson (who claims that virtually all the words of all languages derive from his ‘Edenic’, which is basically early Hebrew), Jeff Benner (who also advances non-standard notions about Hebrew script, specifically), and some of the British Israelites.  I will say more about these and other such writers on request.

Similar claims regarding Sanskrit (often incorporating extreme Indian nationalist ideas) are promulgated by various writers with Hindu/Vedantic affiliations.  Some of these writers are again creationists, but it should be noted that Vedantic creationism involves very long time-depths rather than the short time-depths adopted by most Jewish-Christian fundamentalists.

The standard academic position is that Sanskrit was probably brought into India (not necessarily by way of an ‘Aryan Invasion’ as was once held) around 3,500 years BP, as part of the European/West-Asiatic diffusion of the Indo-European (henceforth IE) language ‘family’ from a base somewhere near the Black and the Caspian Seas (variously dated as commencing around 4-6,000 years BP).  There is something of a case for the contrary view that the language was in India rather earlier and is perhaps represented by the undeciphered Indus Valley Script (IVS) – to which I shall return – found on tablets in the ruins of Mohenjodaro and Harappa in modern Pakistan and dated around 4,500-4,000 years BP.  On this scenario, IE was in India too early for the Indian IE-speakers to have arrived as an entire group by way of an incursion as late as the second millennium BCE.  But even this relatively modest claim is not especially widely accepted by mainstream scholars, especially linguists.  (I am trying here to summarise this complex matter fairly; I realise that there is a range of views, and that knowledge is constantly developing.  For example, some scholars have recently argued that the Indus Valley ‘script’ is in fact non-linguistic in character.)

Extreme versions of this position, presented by Indian writers such as K.D. Sethna, treat the IE ‘family’ as having actually originated in India.  Sanskrit would thus be especially close to the ancestor language of the ‘family’, Proto-Indo-European.  This latter was a popular view among mainstream linguists in the early decades of the 19^th Century when the discipline of historical linguistics was new; however, the philological arguments against this view are strong, and few qualified scholars would now endorse it.  (For instance, Ancient Greek is clearly a better guide to the Proto-IE vowel system than is Sanskrit, where parts of the system had undergone far-reaching changes.)  In addition, this position struggles to handle the obviously long-standing presence in India of other language ‘families’, notably Dravidian (now found mainly in the south); but its advocates find ‘ways around’ this issue.

On still more extreme versions of such a position, upheld by some nationalistic ‘Hindutva’ believers, Sanskrit is the ancestor of all (or almost all) languages, i.e. the Ursprache; thus, human language diffused from an initial base in India.

Some writers of this kind argue extensively from detailed linguistic data without the requisite knowledge of linguistics; one such is David Lewis.  In an attempt to render his position more impressive, Lewis attacks various quasi-mainstream ‘straw-men’; he appears insufficiently familiar with the relevant scholarly tradition.  For example, no qualified writers have argued that Sanskrit derives from Proto-Dravidian as Lewis suggests; it is transparently IE (the main clearly Dravidian elements in Sanskrit are some transferred vocabulary and some aspects of the sound-system).  In addition, Lewis makes egregious errors of his own.  So-called root words of Sanskrit do not appear in ‘almost all major languages’, as he claims.  Only other IE languages share words with Sanskrit, except for the special cases of a) words (etc.) transferred within South Asia into Dravidian (notably Malayalam) and other local languages and b) relatively recent transfers into other languages of cultural words involving Hinduism.  Even the words which are shared between Sanskrit and non-Indian IE languages do not in general derive from Sanskrit, as Lewis implies, but from the common IE ancestor, Proto-IE.

Another recent manifestation of this belief system is the work of Stephen Knapp, who argues that Vedic ideas, together with the Sanskrit language, were once spread all over the Earth by a technologically advanced Hindu civilization which provided the impetus for all later civilizations.  Knapp argues on the usual specious grounds that Proto-IE – as distinct from Sanskrit – never existed, and indeed that Sanskrit is the ancestor of all languages; and he also asserts that conventional linguistic methods cannot be used to date Sanskrit, because it is ‘neither mundane nor human’.  Like Vedic ‘knowledge’, it was literally given to humanity by the gods.

However, most of Knapp’s linguistic claims are simply mistaken; as is usual in such cases, he proceeds by identifying unsystematic, superficial similarities between Sanskrit words on the one hand and words in other languages on the other, and deduces that the non-Sanskrit words are derived from the Sanskrit words (corrupted and perverted are among his own terms).  Most of these equations are simply asserted as facts, with no supporting evidence.  At best they are undemonstrated and not especially plausible, and in fact most of them are actually known to be invalid; the words in question are simply not connected but have established unrelated etymologies.  In some other cases, we simply cannot be sure whether words are cognates or not, as there is insufficient evidence; but there is no reason to accept Knapp’s equations.

In some of Knapp’s examples, the IE roots from which an English word (or a word in another European IE language, especially an older language such as Ancient Greek or a conservative language such as Lithuanian) is derived do also have reflexes in Sanskrit.  But in most such cases the English or other word is clearly derived from IE via older European IE forms (Germanic, Latin, Greek, Baltic etc.) – not from the Sanskrit forms (compare Lewis).  For instance, Knapp identifies English month names such as October as derived from their Sanskrit equivalents; but in fact they are clearly derived from familiar Latin roots, with which the Sanskrit forms are themselves cognate.  Knapp also identifies other words as derived from Sanskrit in various ancient and modern languages of the Middle East and Europe, and also in Arabic, Hebrew, Malay, Vietnamese, Khmer, Japanese, Quechua (‘Inca’, as Knapp calls it), etc.

Another writer in this vein is Gene Matlock, whose procedures and conclusions are similar to Knapp’s but if anything are even more extreme.

Knapp and Matlock draw much inspiration and many examples from P.N. Oak, an older pro-Hindutva writer.  Oak attacks the accepted etymologies for hundreds of English and other non-Indian words, place-names etc., and proposes new Sanskrit etymologies – most of them ludicrous both linguistically and historically.  For example, he derives Liver– in the English city-name Liverpool from Lava, the name of a son of the divinity Ram.  Like Knapp and Matlock, he gives no evidence for most of his etymologies, but merely invites readers to agree that they are obviously correct.

Next time I will commence with some other religion-oriented positions, including some still more extreme ideas about Sanskrit and also the views of Jordan Maxwell.

Mark

Re: Language can form anything (the new “realm of possibility” or “kingdom of heaven”) / Language can form anything

http://jrfibonacci.wordpress.com/2012/03/17/language-can-form-anything-the-new-realm-of-possibility-or-kingdom-of-heaven/

This material was posted on Skeptical Humanities as a pingback to my own material there.  In general I do not expect to be able to engage in extensive discussion of this material, but this specific sample has been deliberately brought to my attention and therefore I would like to comment on it at some length on this occasion.

The following represents my considered opinion, but of course this is subject to change in response to evidence and argumentation.  I have to say that I find most of the novel aspects of this material difficult to interpret with any confidence.  Unless this material can be presented more clearly, and properly defended, I do not think that linguists and philosophers will feel obliged to take it seriously.  The onus is upon this source to justify the attention of linguists and philosophers (if this is wanted).  (It might also be better if a less ‘forthright’ style were adopted.)

Although the material was posted as a pingback to my specifically linguistic material, in its own discussion of language the source adopts a ‘tone’ and approach very different from what prevails in empirical linguistics.  In addition, the specific statements about language which it makes, where they are intelligible and accurate, are already familiar to linguists.  Any useful insights which the material may possess are more likely to be philosophical in character.  Unfortunately, even this is uncertain, chiefly because the discourse is often (in my view) obscure; it also seems to involve a radical general ontological stance which (here, at least) is only roughly sketched and not defended.

I may wish to comment on the philosophical aspects of this material at a later date.  At this present moment I prefer to address more specifically linguistic issues.

It is claimed here that language means nothing and never will mean anything.  Subject to the major issues regarding how the term nothing is being used here, this viewpoint is, of course, contrary to prevailing opinion both popular and academic (the latter including both linguists and philosophers), and thus needs to be justified at this point.  Indeed, it might be suggested that if language ‘means nothing’ it cannot itself be used to say anything useful.  And, while – as is proclaimed here (albeit in somewhat strange wording) – language can be seen as ‘a sequence of codes for the directing of attention’, it is generally taken as obvious that language has other functions and aspects in addition to this.

Within language, it is accepted here that different words and letters are distinct.  (The use of the term letters seems to betray a folk-linguistic starting-point; a writer with knowledge of linguistics would instead talk here primarily of phonemes.)  But these words and letters are all seen as variations on ‘nothing’ (this raises the above-mentioned issues regarding this term); and, while they do possess meaning (this apparently contradicts what is said earlier), this supposedly arises only ‘through perception’.  Concepts are identified as ‘linguistic formations’ arising ‘out of nothing’, which is ‘the capacity for linguistic formations to simply happen by themselves’.  Like individual words and ‘letters’, each specific language is distinct, being seen as ‘a specific set of distinct, isolated formations’ – and is ‘finite’, in contrast with ‘language itself’ which is ‘infinite’; it is not clear how the terms finite and especially infinite are to be understood here.  And boundaries between languages are, again, seen as different manifestations of ‘nothing’.  I find the conceptualising obscure at this point, and it is difficult to comment helpfully.

I add here brief comments on some specific points in later sections of the material.

‘One language evolves into another, with perhaps an entire family of languages being similar to each other’

While essentially ‘along the right lines’, this claim apparently mixes diachronic and synchronic points and needs to be clarified.  (The term evolve is also contentious here.)

‘Languages mix and influence each other.  Languages may be called distinct, but the boundaries between them shift’

Although the reference to shifting boundaries is obscurely expressed and perhaps mis-conceptualised, these general points are, of course, very familiar to linguists.

‘If the boundaries shift, then the boundaries are arbitrary. In fact, the alleged boundaries between various languages are alive, existing only through the declaration of language’

This appears obscure.  There may be a good (if familiar) point in the former of these two sentences, though it needs to be much more clearly expressed; but the second sentence, as expressed, is very strange (what do alive and declaration mean here?).

‘Is Creole [= a particular creole language? (MN)] a language? Clearly it is entirely composed of other languages.  [Not necessarily the case. (MN)]  However, it is also not a dialect of any particular language. What is it? It is whatever it is called!’

It is not clear that there is a genuine issue here regarding creoles as such.  There are relevant definitional-cum-philosophical issues at a more general level concerning the individuation of languages, the ‘language’-‘dialect’ distinction, etc.; but these are not rehearsed here.

‘Is there such a thing as “I” (“me”)? In many languages there is such a thing as “I” or similar concepts to the concept of “I.”  However, “I” is fundamentally a concept, a construct of language, merely a thing. “I” is not itself fundamental (which is the ancient teaching called anatma).’

Hello again, everybody!

I said last time that there are solid general linguistic arguments showing why the words of a language cannot be predominantly monophonemic (composed of single phonemes).  It may be worthwhile here to expand slightly on this point.

All known languages – and indeed all invented languages – have a modest number of distinctive phonemes (speech-sounds considered as structural units): between ten and around 150.  Indeed, one of the distinguishing features of human language is its ‘double articulation’ into a) phonemes and b) meaningful morphemes/words (made up of these phonemes in combination), which enables it to express very many word-meanings with such a limited inventory of individual sounds.  If most or all morphemes were monophonemic, the result would be a great deal of homophony: different, unrelated morphemes/words with identical pronunciations, as in the case of short polyphonemic homophonous forms such as English roe (‘fish eggs’), row (‘line of items’) and row ‘propel boat with oars’.  Given an absolute maximum of around 150 monophonemic morpheme/word-shapes, a thoroughly monophonemic morphology would display altogether unmanageable amounts of homophony.  For instance, a language with monophonemic morphology and a system of fifteen consonants and five vowels (a typical small phoneme system) would have only a maximum of twenty possible morphemic shapes to cover the entire vocabulary (probably fewer, as consonants of many kinds cannot readily stand alone).

Even a thoroughly monosyllabic morphology must generate large amounts of homophony.   Subject to any specific further constraints, the imaginary language just introduced would have five possible syllables each consisting of a vowel alone, 15 x 5 = 75 possible syllables of another of the most basic syllable-types, Consonant-Vowel, etc., etc.  This would still yield large numbers of homophonous words; or else almost all word-meanings would have to be borne by polyphonemic compound (polymorphemic) words such as English black-bird.

There are in fact languages where morphemes are typically monosyllabic; Chinese is the best-known example.  The probability of homophony is thus high in Chinese – Mandarin, specifically, has only about 400 possible syllables as far as consonants and vowels are concerned (and still has only 1300 even when the ‘phonemic tones’ are taken into account) – and homophony at the level of individual morphemes thus occurs frequently.  This problem is resolved in part by other features of (spoken and written) Chinese.  However, these features would not be adequate in a language with many monophonemic morphemes; the question of how such putative languages would avoid or manage very widespread homophony remains unresolved.  (We saw last time that languages can have a few monophonemic morphemes.)

I also said last time that I would mention a particularly sensationalistic claim involving very short morphemes.  This is the case of ‘Mantong’, an alleged ancient language/script reconstructed from the English names of the letters of the Roman alphabet and various short English words associated with these.  In this case, the original language/script was regarded as coming from a very mysterious source.

The Mantong case was originated by the amateur writer Richard Shaver; it was initially presented in the form of (alleged) surviving fragments of the language/script.  Shaver had happened upon an article in Science World (1936) by one Albert Yeager, claiming that six letters of the Roman alphabet represented concepts as well as ‘sounds’ (phonemes).  He later claimed that he himself had discovered (by telepathy and then through actual contact with a non-human entity; see below) concepts represented by all the letters of the Roman alphabet in addition to their phonological function (not his words).  In 1943 Shaver offered this material to the science-fiction magazine Amazing Stories to be ‘saved’ for posterity and studied by any suitable more highly qualified people with an interest in the matter.  The magazine editor Ray Palmer was intrigued by the material, and large amounts of quasi-fictional material on Mantong and associated matters were published in Amazing Stories in the 1940s, and later in Palmer’s ‘Hidden Worlds’ series (with an increasing focus upon alleged mysterious ‘rock art’ supporting Shaver’s stories).

The case involves alleged subterranean humanoid but non-human beings known as the ‘dero’ (degenerate and wicked) and the ‘tero’ (good), the products of a disaster which occurred 20,000 years BP (involving a seriously non-standard account of the history of the Sun) and its effects on the Earth.  These two groups continued to compete for control and influence over humans, who represent an offshoot group who re-colonized the surface of the Earth after the disaster.

The Mantong script is bound to the English version of the Roman alphabet (which is itself highly suspicious).  Five letters (B, C, I, U, Y) are morphemes with the meanings of English words expressing core concepts and homophonous with the contemporary English letter-names (be, see, I, you, why).  The letter X represents conflict, as its form might suggest, and R refers to horror. Sixteen letters refer to other core concepts expressed in English by words commencing with the letter in question; thus, M has the sense ‘man’ (man), W ‘will’ (will), etc. The last three letters are especially important: D refers to detrimental forces, T to ‘integration’ and growth, and Z to a state where these two forces neutralize each other (and thus sum numerically to zero).

Shaver’s analyses of individual words allegedly made up of these elements are not always consistent. For instance, he analyzes the word trocadero as t– (‘good’) + –ro– (‘one’, that is, ‘person’) + –c– (‘see’) + –a– (‘a’, the indefinite article) + –d(e)- (‘bad’) + –ro (‘one’), overall ‘good one see a bad one’; he relates this to the (derived) use of the word as a name for theatres, though why spectators might be deemed good and actors bad is not made clear.  This analysis involves: a) an unexplained morpheme ro (‘one’), not apparently made up of r and o and having a meaning unrelated to their meanings; b) a interpreted as ‘a’, the indefinite article, not as ‘animal’ as provided in Shaver’s list; c) d replaced in spelling by de, with the presence of e unexplained.  In a further bizarre ‘twist’, the word dero, already explained as ‘bad one’ as in trocadero, is then re-explained as derived from abandondero, an obviously English-based word meaning ‘the abandoned ones’.

In addition to these inconsistencies, Shaver appears naive in his linking of supposedly ancient forms with the English alphabet as now read off and with contemporary English words, and also in treating letters (and their names) rather than words as primary; indeed, he seems unaware of the important distinction between language and script.  Furthermore, the largely monophonemic nature of the morphemes which he establishes generates the various problems discussed above.  Shaver also ignores known or well-established etymologies, simply proclaiming his own.  Even if the non-linguistic aspects of this case did not appear outrageous, the linguistic aspects would appear very dubious indeed.

As well as positing very short morphemes, Shaver and Palmer also believed in conspiracy aimed at concealing the truth surrounding Mantong.  In this case, this had allegedly been conducted not by any human agency but by the dero themselves.

There are other such cases of this kind; but it may be better at this point to turn to some other special groups of historical linguistic claims which are not so dramatic in character either linguistically or by way of background ideas but which illustrate particular types of historical and other non-linguistic background thinking/motivation.  These involve religions, nationalistic ideas, Afrocentrism, catastrophism, etc.  I will talk about some of these claims next time.

I’ve been invited to comment on the following article and the work which it summarises:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304459804577285610212146258.html