Skeptical Humanities

37: DAVID LEONARDI AND M.J. HARPER AGAIN (GENERAL THEORIES)

Hi again, everybody!  ‘Hall Of Shame’ continues!

Instead of (or as well as) offering specific non-standard claims about specific languages or specific aspects of languages, some non-mainstream thinkers propose non-standard, often bizarre theories and methodologies involving language in general or major aspects of language(s).  These theories are rivals to the various general theories current in the mainstream of linguistics, and are often in sharp contrast with all such mainstream theories (and with each other).  I have discussed some such theories in earlier posts in this forum; for those involving historical linguistics, see now also Chapters 1-4 of my 2013 book Strange Linguistics (Lincom-Europa, Munich).  The writers who discuss non-historical issues in this vein include postmodernist philosophers such as Jacques Derrida with their focus upon written language at the expense of spoken, John Trotter, Owen Barfield, Brian Josephson & David Blair, David Wynn-Miller, and John Latham; on these authors, see now Chapter 10 of my book.

Another author of this kind is Mick Harper, who, as discussed last time, presents some astounding and inadequately supported views regarding the history of English (and of other European languages).  Harper also proclaims, by way of methodological background to these ideas, a supposedly novel research methodology for historical linguistics and indeed for the humanities generally, which he titles ‘Applied Epistemology’.  He seems to have developed this notion in response to what he perceives as sloppy and tendentious reasoning on the part of mainstream linguists, historians etc.  In his view, the errors in question are often so basic and so damaging that a new ‘paradigm’ of research is required, much more securely grounded in logic and the theory of knowledge.

Harper’s treatment of these matters is less than persuasive.  The most that can be said in his favour is that he occasionally spots a weak or inadequately explicit piece of argumentation in mainstream work.  But this is not a sufficient basis for erecting (or purporting to erect) an entire novel methodology.  And indeed Harper’s ‘Applied Epistemology’ does not appear significantly different from the methods actually used in the mainstream, where the philosophical background issues are already very familiar.  Harper rejects mainstream scholars’ conclusions – but he offers little valid criticism of the methods used to reach them.  In addition, Harper himself argues weakly and tendentiously in various places (sometimes also displaying inadequate knowledge of the facts); he often treats the evidence and reasoning against mainstream views and in support of his own as much stronger than they actually appear to be.

Recently, in this forum, I discussed the 2013 book Egyptian Hieroglyphic Decipherment Revealed: A Revisionist Model Of Egyptian Decipherment Showing Evidence That The Ancient Egyptian Language And The Ancient Hebrew Language Are Closely Related, by David Leonardi.   In Chapter 7 of this book (pp. 71-77) and the early sections of Chapter 8 (pp. 78-82), Leonardi presents his idiosyncratic ideas about morphology (the structure of complex words each including more than one morpheme = ‘meaningful component’) as applied to Egyptian and Hebrew and also – and more relevantly here – as applied to languages generally.  Following up his earlier published work (and his correspondence with me over the last decade), he introduces here an obscure and unnecessary system of novel morphological terms.  Leonardi regards himself as knowledgeable about historical linguistics, and he even runs a bulletin-board misleadingly called simply Historical Linguistics which promotes his idiosyncratic ideas.

Leonardi’s use of linguistic terminology is idiosyncratic and obscure, and more generally his wording is often strange.  These faults are well exemplified in this section of his book.  To exemplify: in his wording, at least, Leonardi repeatedly confuses synchronic (non-historical) and diachronic (historical) issues (as he does elsewhere) – despite announcing on p. 72 that his focus here is on synchronic issues only, at least as far as Egyptian and Hebrew are concerned.  Specifically, he badly hinders his own exposition of such matters by loosely using the diachronic term change to refer also to synchronic alternation as in English wife versus wive[s] (this is an instance of what a PhD supervisor would castigate as ‘undergraduate’ usage).

Further, Leonardi uses the term derivation with a broad ‘popular’ meaning involving various kinds of synchronic and diachronic relationship between the forms of related words and/or the varied and shifting meanings of one word or of a set of related words (see below for examples).  In fact, this term has a specific technical sense in linguistics, involving the (synchronic or diachronic) morphological relationships of form between distinct words – belonging to the same or to different ‘parts of speech’ – which share a stem, as exemplified by connected English verb-noun pairs such as condemn and condemnation (it contrasts here with the term inflection, referring to grammatically distinct forms of the same word, as in the verb condemn and its past tense form condemned).

Perhaps because of failure to appreciate this, Leonardi seems to confuse etymology considered generally (which is a diachronic matter and is occasionally and informally referred to by linguists as derivation) with the more specific issue of (synchronic or diachronic) matters of derivational morphology in the technical sense of derivation as just explained.  In particular, Leonardi’s decision to include under ‘derivation’ purely semantic differences and changes (those which involve only meaning, not any difference of or change in the form of a word) is very strange and confusing.  On p. 73 he even implies that in what he calls ‘morphological derivation’ there is always [a ‘change’ of] meaning associated with the ‘change’ in form (see above; does he intend the term change to be understood here synchronically, diachronically or both?).  But, although most derivational phenomena (in the narrow, technical sense of the term) do involve differences of (grammatical) meaning, there are counter-examples, involving pairs such as English orient and orientate (both verbs, same sense).  And Leonardi himself includes as derivational some ‘familial’ derivations (see below) involving no change of meaning.  His discussion of these matters appears utterly confused.

Leonardi’s use of some key specific expressions, such as in theory (for example on pp. 71 and 72) is also obscure – disastrously so, in context.

Another problem with Leonardi’s exposition involves his tendency to focus upon spelling and written forms rather than on phonology/pronunciation (which is, obviously, conceptually prior).  On p. 71, when defining his term familial (see below), his references fluctuate between spoken and written forms; but on p. 73 he goes so far as to declare that if a word undergoes only a ‘change’ (see again above; does he intend this term to be understood synchronically, diachronically or both?) in pronunciation (i.e. not in spelling) then that change does not qualify as a ‘morphological derivation’.  But the relationships between spoken and written forms in each language are historically complex; and there is no good reason to exclude differently-pronounced forms from the concept of ‘derivation’ merely because they are spelled the same (consider pairs of forms such as the English noun and verb both spelled permit and derivationally related but pronounced differently).  This confusion on Leonardi’s part is partly the result of sheer linguistic naivety and partly associated with his idiosyncratic non-standard belief that that God simultaneously created spoken and written Hebrew and that in early Hebrew, at least, letters and phonemes can therefore be equated.

Leonardi’s account also displays various outright inaccuracies.  For example, he commences Chapter 7 with the blatantly false (and confusingly supported) statement that ‘the field of Historical Linguistics lacks terminology to describe types of word derivations’ (p. 71); it appears that he is not sufficiently familiar with the linguistic literature or has failed to understand it.  And indeed – as in his earlier work – Leonardi misinterprets the statements of mainstream linguists such as P.H. Matthews (cited – without a full reference – on p. 79) about these matters (though he refuses to accept correction on this front); and in places he attacks ‘mainstream’ straw men.

Another set of mistakes involves Leonardi’s decision to treat as etymologically related various pairs or sets of words which either are known to be unrelated or have uncertain etymologies.  This is often connected with his belief that many words in many languages have unacknowledged Hebrew origins.  Examples include English plot and plate, cited together on p. 71, and his tracing (p. 74) of English court to English core and ultimately to Hebrew sor (‘court’).  There are also sheer errors of fact regarding word-meanings (for example that of the Latin word posterior; see p. 72).

Apparently thinking here of ‘derivation’ in his loose sense, Leonardi introduces some general issues which are only marginally relevant to the narrower technical notion of ‘derivation’: a) the transfer of words and of some of their phonemes from one language (or ‘dialect’; he confusingly refers in this context to ‘dialect group[s]’) to another, described here as filtered derivation (p. 73), b) the phenomenon of words taking on new meanings through originally metaphorical use (Leonardi calls this phenomenon analog derivation and is careful to distinguish this notion from that of analogy, on which see c) below) (p. 74); c) the reanalysis of the morphology of transferred words by way of analogy (p. 75), d) the obscuring of background morphological facts over time within one language (p. 75), and e) the development of words based on onomatopoeia or sound-symbolism (p. 75; also Chapter 8).  His comments on all these matters are largely valid in themselves, although some of the last body of material (e) relates to his own non-mainstream views about the origins of Hebrew phonemes and letters.

Leonardi’s own novel morphological terms include:

Familial (pp. 71ff)

In these cases, one word is said to be ‘derived’ from another (within one language or cross-linguistically; see p. 76) by way of an unsystematic difference of form and an associated unpredictable difference of meaning.  It is suggested (p. 77) that some cases of this kind can involve compounded sequences of two or more stems with distinct, linked meanings; but Leonardi’s main examples involve single stems with simple senses.  Leonardi states that ‘in theory’ there are no examples of familial derivation in Hebrew or Egyptian, because their morphologies are highly systematic.  But his examples from other languages (such as English plot and plate as discussed above) are typically wrong or at any rate unsupported; and in any event this would involve derivation only in Leonardi’s looser sense of the term.  In addition, Leonardi confusingly states (p. 73) that some familial derivations involve no change of meaning.  Overall, it is not at all clear that a new term is needed here, still less that familial would be the best term (Leonardi justifies it as referring to ‘families’ of words, an unhelpfully loose concept, subject – like his version of the notion ‘paradigm’ – to multiple interpretations).

Associative (pp. 72ff)

In these cases, the same form is said to have taken on (slightly) different meanings in different contexts (within one language or cross-linguistically).  Leonardi’s specific example (involving Latin and English uses of posterior) is wrong (as noted above), but the point is made.  Now in the technical sense of ‘derivation’ it is perfectly possible for some pairs of derivationally-linked words to have the very same forms, in writing (see above on permit and permit), pronunciation or both (consider noun-verb pairs such as English book and book = ‘make a reservation [in a book]’).  But the (main) differences of meaning between the members of such pairs are, obviously, grammatical.  In contrast, Leonardi (obviously thinking only of ‘derivation’ in his loose sense) is speaking here of (diachronic) shifts of meaning at word-level (‘lexical’ as opposed to grammatical meaning).

Lexiform (pp. 72ff)

Cases of this kind are said to be especially numerous in Hebrew and Egyptian as reinterpreted by Leonardi.  In these cases, two or more word-stems (lexical morphemes) combine to form what traditional grammarians and many modern linguists have called compound words, as in blackbird or antifascist (this is derivation in the technical sense).  Leonardi acknowledges this usage (see below) but also states that linguists have used the term complex word in this context.  This latter is false; he has misunderstood the literature.  Complex words are in fact those which include at least one lexical morpheme and at least one grammatical morpheme, as in derivation in the technical sense or inflection.  Leonardi rejects the ‘straw-man’ position he has erected on the grounds that it fails to allow for the later development of the words in question (originally sequences of two or more lexical stems with distinct, linked meanings) into simple words seen as having single meanings – a phenomenon used on p. 75 to exemplify his point identified above as point d) (the specific example used is English magpie).  But this objection appears irrelevant in any case: the initial (synchronic) compound nature of such words is one thing, and the subsequent (diachronic) loss of their internal morpheme boundaries (etc.) – and their later ensuing (synchronic) single-morpheme status – is another.  Leonardi is again, it seems, confusing synchronic and diachronic issues (and berating linguists for not thinking in this confused way!).   He goes on to suggest (again wrongly, as it seems) that the term compound is more commonly used (by linguists?) for cases which are ‘semantically disjoint’, giving two obscure English compound words as examples of this pattern but failing to explain his apparently idiosyncratic use of the term disjoint.  He then suggests (correctly) that some linguists use the term compound more widely to include all ‘lexiform’ cases and (obscurely) that they thus fail to distinguish ‘semantically singular’ and semantically disjoint words (the reader still does not know what either of these terms means).  And he concludes this section by redefining his term lexiform in quite other terms, as involving ‘changes’ (synchronic or diachronic?) of phonemes resulting in new meanings and as contrasting in this respect with ‘familial’ derivations which (here only) are said to involve no meaning change (see above).  After reading this section one still has no real idea as to what the novel term lexiform is supposed to mean!

Inflectional (pp. 73ff)

This term is itself mainstream (see above), but it does not actually involve derivation in the technical sense.  Leonardi’s own discussion of the relevant ideas again manifests large amounts of confusion and error.  First: he correctly states that inflections (‘inflectional derivations’) are grammatical; but so are derivations in the technical sense.  Second: some of Leonardi’s examples here actually involve derivation, not inflection (for example, the English noun cooker vs the verb cook), or else cases which are ‘borderline’ and/or ambiguous in this respect (such as cooking).  Third: Leonardi, correctly indicating that inflectional differences involve different forms of the same lexeme (‘dictionary word’), defines this latter concept in terms of the ‘bases’ (‘stems’?) of the (complex) words in question being ‘semantically exactly the same’ (having the same meaning).  This is correct in itself but not restrictive enough: i) the very same is true of derivational differences, and ii) the stems must also be the same in form, or at least recognisably closely related, to count as the same lexeme (the stems abattoir and slaughterhouse have the same meaning but they do not represent the same lexeme).  Fourth: Leonardi sets up another straw man by claiming that some linguists treat the English verb-forms left and went as inflectionally related; in fact, all linguists would agree with him in identifying went as inflectionally linked with go (as a highly ‘irregular’ past tense form).  (The morphological and semantic history of go and went is actually very interesting, but I cannot deal with it here.)  And the obscure final sentence of this section wrongly invokes (as it seems) ‘the point of view of the speaker’ and the sociolinguistic process of standardisation.

Leonardi completes this chapter with a summary (pp. 76-77) which includes further references to his own idiosyncratic views and serves mainly to add to the overall confusion.

I hope it will be clear even to non-specialists that the material discussed here, and Leonardi’s material in particular, exemplifies ‘how not to do linguistics’.

More next time (when pos)!

Mark

For my book Strange Linguistics, see:

http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=64212

Copies are available through me at the author’s 50% discount, for EU 26.40 including postage to anywhere outside Germany.  Please let me know if you’d like one, suggest means of payment (Paypal is possible) and provide your preferred postal address.

36: M.J. HARPER

Hi again, everybody! ‘Hall Of Shame’ continues! The case of M.J. (Mick) Harper arose in the context of my last post. Some readers are aware of him, and I am often asked about him when I identify myself as a skeptical linguist; so, while the iron is hot, here goes!

Harper presents the astounding view that Modern English, while related to Old English, is not descended from it, and that Middle English therefore did not exist at all except as a highly artificial literary variety (although this would not be his own preferred wording at this point). He also suggests (more obviously speculating) that Modern English has existed since ancient times, when it was current across Western Europe, and is indeed the ancestor of most modern Western European languages, including the Romance languages; that Latin was therefore not the ancestor of these languages and was in fact invented; and that the vast majority of the etymologies given for English words are therefore mistaken.

Harper thus challenges all scholarly opinion on the subject, purporting to offer an alternative, more truly scholarly position. But he does not fulfil the standard obligations of scholarship: there is no scholarly apparatus of any kind. Perhaps most strikingly, there are virtually no references to the scholarly literature, and opposing views and scholars are mentioned only to be dismissed with often facetious contempt as biased and hidebound. And on the evidence available Harper’s knowledge of linguistics is not adequate for the task he undertakes here; he is out of his depth in both factual and theoretical linguistic matters. For example, he repeatedly seizes on individual ‘anomalies’ as weapons with which to belabour scholarship. Some of these are spurious; others are genuine but are already familiar to linguists and are the subject of intense study. One good example is the apparently rapid series of changes which distinguish Middle English from Old English. The genuinely rapid lexical changes can be attributed to the flood of French loanwords which entered English after the Norman Conquest of 1066; but a major reason for the grammatical differences lies in the fact that literary Middle English was based on a Midland dialect, while literary Old English was almost entirely based on a Southern dialect. The two dialects were already divergent before the Norman Conquest, and many changes that affected early Midland dialects did not take place in Southern dialects; there is no evidence that the changes in the Midland dialects were markedly more rapid than any other linguistic changes. (This particular case also illustrates the general point that, like many non-linguists who venture into the discipline, Harper grasps issues involving vocabulary much more readily than structural issues involving phonology and grammar.) The case for the mainstream account of the history of English is much stronger than Harper thinks, and the alleged anomalies much less damaging. And, even if Harper were correct in his arguments against the standard view, he does not give readers sufficient reason to accept his alternative story.

Harper also makes broad overgeneralizations about what scenarios and changes are or are not plausible. For instance, he believes that two diachronically related languages could equally well be related in either order. For most such cases this is simply false: it is easy to show, both by internal evidence and by cross-linguistic evidence on the nature of linguistic change, that (for instance) the verb system of Italian is descended from that of everyday spoken (‘Vulgar’) Latin, rather than vice versa. (The novel Italian tense morphemes are clearly derived from Vulgar Latin auxiliary verbs; the Latin morphemes cannot be explained on the basis of Italian.)

Romance is also the locus of one of Harper’s most telling errors of fact. He argues (correctly) that it would be strange if a whole ‘raft’ of identical grammatical changes were to occur independently in languages which are descended from a common ancestor but which are not currently in contact. Under such circumstances, some identical and numerous similar changes would actually be expected, thanks to shared structural pressures among the related languages; but one would not expect globally identical changes. Harper uses this point to attack the standard model of Romance. But in fact most of the features that distinguish early Romance from Classical Latin were already found in Vulgar Latin, among them the reduction of the case system and the collapse of the neuter gender; there is no mystery here.

See Harper’s The History of Britain Revealed: The Shocking Truth About the English Language, 2nd edn, London, 2007, etc.). For more comments on Harper’s work, see Mark Newbrook and Sarah Thomason, Review of Harper, M.J., The History Of England Revealed (2002), The Skeptical Intelligencer, 7 (2005), pp. 34-6; see also Mark Newbrook and Sarah Thomason, Comments on Harper’s reply to Review of Harper, M.J. (2002), The Skeptical
Intelligencer, 8 (2005/2006), pp. 38-9.

More next time (when pos)!

Mark

For my book Strange Linguistics, see:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=64212

Copies are available through me at the author’s 50% discount, for EU 26.40 including postage to anywhere outside Germany. Please let me know if you’d like one, suggest means of payment (Paypal is possible) and provide your preferred postal address.

35: JOHN CHAPPLE

Hi again, everybody! ‘Hall Of Shame’ continues!

John Chapple believes that he can demonstrate fallacies in historical chronology; for example, he holds that many of the ‘medieval’ roads of England must have been built long before the Roman roads, in pre-historic times. He goes on from ideas of this kind to develop seriously revisionist perspectives on history and historical linguistics. Some of his ideas are reminiscent of those of Mick Harper (The History of Britain Revealed: The Shocking Truth About the English Language, 2nd edn, London, 2007, etc.). For instance, he too (along with Fomenko also; see Hall of Shame 32) accepts as probably reliable the largely fanciful ‘history’ of Britain written by the 12th-Century clergyman-scholar Geoffrey of Monmouth (the source for the stories of Gog & Magog, Old King Cole, King Lear, etc), according to which Britain was settled by the Trojan prince Brutus. Chapple accepts Geoffrey’s undemonstrated claim that his work is based on a supposedly older (7th-Century) Welsh text (which, even if it were genuinely older, might itself be largely fantasy), and suggests that the ‘truth’ of Geoffrey’s narrative has been suppressed by orthodox scholars.

As far as the history of the English language is concerned, Chapple argues that it arose much further east than the Germanic-speaking area of Europe, in Anatolia (modern Asiatic Turkey). Here – misled by naïvely ‘gung-ho’ newspaper headlines written by amateurs – he is grotesquely misunderstanding recent phases of the ongoing debate as to the precise location and date of Proto-Indo-European, the unattested & reconstructed ancestor of the Indo-European language ‘family’ and thus the ULTIMATE ANCESTOR of English!

Chapple also argues (again with Harper) that closer ancestors of English were used in Britain in pre-Roman times, alongside Celtic, and were NOT introduced in late-Roman & post-Roman times as is normally held. A date as early as 4500 BCE for the arrival of pre-English-speakers is proposed. Some of the individual points made in this context by Chapple and his correspondents are not without interest; but overall the level of linguistic sophistication is inadequate, conflicting evidence is soft-pedalled, and the general claim is in no way demonstrated.

Chapple also links the Druids (as described by Geoffrey) with the Phoenicians (in the context of the development of the Greek Alphabet) and makes various other claims which are speculative or worse.

For Chapple’s material, one could start at http://www.johnchaple.co.uk/index.html.

More next time! I am very busy at present and may be posting at longer intervals (fortnightly or even monthly) rather than weekly.

Mark

For my book Strange Linguistics, see:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=64212

Copies are available through me at the author’s 50% discount, for EU 26.40 including postage to anywhere outside Germany. Please let me know if you’d like one, suggest means of payment (Paypal is possible) and provide your preferred postal address.

Hi again, everybody! ‘Hall Of Shame’ continues!

34. LYN MAGREE and LYNNE TRUSS

Some private individuals offer attempts at remedying (alleged) problems with usage; these amateur proposals may, of course, be prescriptivist or otherwise folk-linguistic. In 2001, for instance, Lyn Magree, an Australian parent concerned about the struggles of children with English (and mathematics), self-published a book designed to give intelligible and accurate advice at the relevant level; a second edition, revised (if not adequately) in response to initial criticisms, quickly followed (1). The book contains many errors and misleading or confusing statements about English, and Magree also accepts folk-linguistic myths about the relationship between speech and written language. She believes that explicit knowledge of grammar (and even the learning of lists of unexemplified terms for parts of speech) is needed by young native speakers; and she makes heavily negative prescriptive comments about features of children’s non-standard varieties which she wishes (not necessarily unreasonably) to discourage in the school context. Furthermore, some of her own usage is non-standard.

Lynne Truss’ books (2) argue for a quite heavily prescriptivist approach to punctuation (commas, brackets, apostrophes, etc.). Truss’s first book met with intense criticism on various fronts. Ironically and embarrassingly, much of her own punctuation is widely judged non-standard, especially (though not only) by non-British commentators unused to British norms. Louis Menand, for example, identifies many punctuation ‘errors’ in the book, describing these (in an American context) as instances of ‘British laxness’ (3). In contrast, the strongly anti-prescriptivist linguist David Crystal (4) and the English lecturer Nicholas Waters (5) attack Truss’ linguistic purism and offer approaches more tolerant of variation and of a degree of informality in written usage.

Re the title of item (5): note that root means ‘copulate’ in Australian English!

References:

1 Lyn Magree, The Pocket Basics for English and Maths, 2nd edn (Sydney and Melbourne,
2002).
2 Lynne Truss, Eats Shoots & Leaves, 3rd edn (London, 2009); The Girl’s Like Spaghetti: Why, You Can’t Manage Without Apostrophes! (London, 2006).
3 Louis Menand, ‘Bad Comma: Lynne Truss’s strange grammar’, The New Yorker, 28 June
2004, available online at
http://www. newyorker. com/archive/2004/06/28/040628crbo_books1#ixzz1EEISWnIY
4 David Crystal, The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot and Left (Oxford,
2006).
5 Nicholas Waters, Eats, Roots and Leaves: An Open-minded Guide to English (London, 2005).

More next time!

Mark

For my book Strange Linguistics, see:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=64212

Copies are available through me at the author’s 50% discount, for EU 26.40 including postage to anywhere outside Germany. Please let me know if you’d like one, suggest means of payment (Paypal is possible) and provide your preferred postal address.

Hi again, everybody! ‘Hall Of Shame’ continues!

33: DAVID LEONARDI

First: thanks to Pacal for the comments on my last! I don’t disagree with any of these comments, and I didn’t INTEND to be ‘too kind’!

On to this week’s instalment.

In his previous work, notably in his book Discovering Ancient Biblical Hebrew Word Formation (Las Vegas, 2010; see my earlier comments in this blog), David Leonardi has argued that both Ancient (Biblical) Hebrew and Ancient Egyptian have been badly misanalysed by mainstream scholars. In fact, he rejects the accepted decipherment of Egyptian (starting in the 19th Century); and he believes that medieval and modern scholars (starting with the ‘Masoretic’ reformers of Hebrew spelling) have failed to recognise major changes in the use of the Hebrew script (a previously unembellished 22-character ‘abjad’ = an alphabet displaying only consonants) and have thereby missed major changes in the language itself. He holds, in fact, that Ancient Hebrew and Ancient Egyptian were much more closely related than is generally held (he now suggests that the degree of ‘overlap’ is around 80-85% or even higher) – and that the Ancient Hebrew language in particular, with its supposedly coeval abjad, was closely equivalent to a implausibly recent universal ancestor language or ‘Proto-World’ (this itself is an obviously non-standard position).

In a new book (Egyptian Hieroglyphic Decipherment Revealed: A Revisionist Model Of Egyptian Decipherment Showing Evidence That The Ancient Egyptian Language And The Ancient Hebrew Language Are Closely Related; 2013), Leonardi presents, in much greater detail than before, his claim that Ancient Egyptian is closely related to Ancient Hebrew. Leonardi’s focus here is mainly upon vocabulary: Ancient Egyptian and Hebrew words, as written and (as far as can be determined) spoken. Like most non-mainstream authors, he pays little attention to matters of grammar, especially syntax – although grammar is often crucial in establishing relationships between languages. He does refer to matters of morphology; but even here he ignores what is known about the Semitic language ‘family’ which includes Hebrew and also Phoenician (crucial in context), and writes as if Hebrew were considered a language ‘isolate’ with no known (close) ‘genetic’ relatives (like Basque).

Now it is generally agreed by linguists that there is indeed a ‘genetic’ relationship between the Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Hebrew languages; they are both considered part of the Afroasiatic language family which includes Semitic and some other more specific language families. But this does not mean that they are closely related in respect of their vocabulary (or other features), still less that they are the same language or even were to any degree mutually intelligible. Leonardi claims to have a good knowledge of historical linguistics, and he even runs a bulletin board called (arguably misleadingly) simply Historical Linguistics and promoting his idiosyncratic ideas on decipherment and historical morphology (see also below); but he does not appear to grasp this rather basic point (or, if he does grasp it but REJECTS it, he is far too inexplicit about his position). He does attempt to explain the mainstream view in terms of the failure of scholars to notice the allegedly large number of shared features. However, this attempt depends entirely upon three principles (listed by him here as 1)-3)); all of these principles involve his own undemonstrated (and often obscure) reinterpretations of Egyptian and Hebrew.

A review of this book, written with the help of an Egyptologist at the University of Liverpool, is in preparation and will appear in the British skeptical press (reference on request as and when). But to summarise in advance: overall, the model proposed by Leonardi has no basis in reality and can be shown to be incongruous with the slightest academic rigour. Leonardi’s statement ‘[m]y claim is one that can be proven true or false, though it may take years to reach an irrefutable proof’ is extremely bold; but it takes only minutes to demolish it. And when Leonardi claims (personal communication) that ‘the evidence I have gathered thus far would be exceedingly unlikely unless Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Hebrew were [closely] genetically related’ he displays only his own inadequate grasp of the principles involved.

More next time!

Mark

For my book Strange Linguistics, see:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=64212

Copies are available through me at the author’s 50% discount, for EU 26.40 including postage to anywhere outside Germany. Please let me know if you’d like one, suggest means of payment (Paypal is possible) and provide your preferred postal address.

Hi again, everybody! ‘Hall Of Shame’ continues!

30: MORRIS SWADESH, ANATOLY FOMENKO, FLORIN DIACU, ROGER WESCOTT, DAVID TALBOTT, TED HOLDEN

Morris Swadesh was a mainstream linguist whose ideas became markedly less mainstream towards the end of his life. His approach was intended to extend linguistic reconstruction into the remote past, beyond the range of the established methods of standard comparative methods (using those established methods, forms and families can be reconstructed with any reliability only to a date a little earlier than the earliest written records, that is, to about 10,000 years BP). Swadesh developed statistical methods known as ‘glottochronology’ and ‘lexicostatistics’, which purported to allow reconstructions (and quite precise estimates of date) on the basis of the ‘mass comparison’ of large numbers of superficially similar potential cognates across a wide range of languages, and to arrive at ‘family trees’ which could not be demonstrated using the more clearly reliable traditional comparative methods because the posited time-depths were too great. The theory was rapidly undermined by contrary data from known language ‘families’; it is now invoked mainly by writers with only a limited knowledge of linguistics – although some mainstream linguists, notably William Wang, have revived it in modified forms in more recent times (and some ‘maverick’ linguists such as Merritt Ruhlen have adopted broadly similar approaches) However, Swadesh himself persisted with his own initial version of glottochronology, and towards the end of his life his proposals – set out in an ultimately posthumous book (The Origin and Diversification of Language, Chicago, 1971) – became truly wild (by this time he was working in Mexico after coming under suspicion in the USA for his overtly left-wing views) . For instance, he presents a map of the Earth purporting to show the probable geographical distribution of language ‘families’ in 25,000 BCE.

One group of contemporary non-linguists who still use Swadesh’s methods is the Russian group of chronological-revisionist historians led by Anatoli Fomenko. Fomenko argues that conventional historical chronology is seriously awry and that several bogus centuries have been inserted by way of scholarly error into the accepted accounts of ancient and even medieval history. He and his associates advance novel interpretations of linguistic evidence by way of support for these ideas, based on glottochronological methods.

For some critical but not wholly unsupportive comment on these thinkers, see the work of the Canadian mathematician Florian Diacu, notably The Lost Millennium: History’s Timetables Under Siege (Toronto, 2005), especially pp. 199-206 on Fomenko and the historical dialectologist Andrey Zalyzniak. Zalyzniak is the linguistically-most-competent of Fomenko’s associates, and joins Fomenko in accepting glottochronology, although in fact his own main body of academic work is not centrally relevant here. Associated with this material is Diacu’s thought on catastrophism, as outlined in his 2009 book Megadisasters: The Science of Predicting the Next Catastrophe. See also his ‘Mathematical Methods in the Study of Historical Chronology’, at http://www.chronologia.org/en/2013_florin_diacu.html.

More moderate historical claims of a broadly similar nature are rehearsed on sites such as http://nabataea.net/modernchron.html

Roger Wescott, a ‘neo-Velikovksyan’ catastrophist, a ‘saltationist’ evolutionist, a ‘Nostraticist’ (Nostratic is a deep-time ancestor of Indo-European and several other language families, reconstructed/accepted by various linguists on the margins of the mainstream) and a qualified linguist, adopted a glottochronological approach to the early development of language in Homo sapiens; he too posited relatively recent dates for the commencement of diversification, partly because he dates sapiens itself as originating as recently as 55,000 BCE and partly because of his catastrophist account of the recent history of the planet (many pre-existing cultures and their languages, if these existed, would have been destroyed in any Velikovskyan catastrophe). See his book The Divine Animal (New York, 1969), and the book Language Origins (Silver Spring, MD, 1974), which he edited; see also, for example,
http://www.velikovsky.info/Roger_W._Wescott.

Wescott has understandably been adopted as a ‘pet linguist’ by neo-Velikovskyan catastrophists who themselves know little linguistics; his ideas have indeed been extended by writers of this persuasion such as David Talbott and the more extreme Ted Holden. In The Saturn Myth (New York, 1980), Talbott seeks to explain myths from around the world and the associated vocabulary as referring to a series of major-planet catastrophes and to the very different configuration of the Solar System which preceded them (Earth and the other inner planets were supposedly in captive rotation about a then-much-larger Saturn) – often obliquely and non-transparently, but according to Talbott with a startling degree of conformity. Holden’s material can be sampled at http://www.bearfabrique.org/, etc. For Holden’s questions for mainstream scholars and brief but telling responses, see Wayne Throop, ‘Ted Holden’s Frequent Questions Answered’, available at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/ted-qfa-reply.html#language1, especially Why aren’t languages and ancestry better correlated?,
Why have languages gotten simpler instead of more complex?.

More next time!

Mark

For my book Strange Linguistics, see:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=64212

Copies are available through me at the author’s 50% discount, for EU 26.40 including postage to anywhere outside Germany. Please let me know if you’d like one, suggest means of payment (Paypal is possible) and provide your preferred postal address.

31: JOSEPH JACOTOT

In 1818 Joseph Jacotot reportedly discovered – commencing from experiences using a bilingual (French/Flemish) text of Archbishop Fénelon’s novel Télémaque – that students can be effectively taught in languages which they do not know, and that they can be taught to read by illiterates (such as the parents of his own pupils). Jacotot believed that all people were already possessed of vast amounts of latent knowledge which a teacher had only to ‘bring out’ (and which individuals lacking a teacher could actually ‘bring out’ in themselves). Some of the methods which Jacotot employed under the rubric ‘ignorant schoolmaster’ do appear usable; but the anecdotal nature of the reports hinders assessment of the degree to which his stronger claims can be accepted.

For much more on Jacotot, see Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Kristin Ross trans.) (Stanford, CA, 1991).

More next time!

Mark

For my book Strange Linguistics, see:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=64212

Copies are available through me at the author’s 50% discount, for EU 26.40 including postage to anywhere outside Germany. Please let me know if you’d like one, suggest means of payment (Paypal is possible) and provide your preferred postal address.

Hi again, everybody! ‘Hall Of Shame’ continues.

30: SUSAN B. MARTINEZ

Susan B. Martinez is unusual among advocates/users of blatantly non-standard methods in comparative historical linguistics in that she has a semi-relevant PhD (in Anthropology, from Columbia) and indeed a specialisation in ethnolinguistics. Perhaps she has never studied the specifically HISTORICAL aspects of the discipline, but even then her approach (nowadays typical only of untutored amateurs) is surprising. If she IS familiar with historical linguistics but REJECTS mainstream thinking on the methodology of the subject, she should state this openly and should ARGUE for her own position.

Martinez’s shift away from mainstream thought (on linguistic and other issues) seems to be connected with her discovery in 1981 of the ‘Oahspe Bible’ (one could usefully start at http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oahspe:_A_New_Bible), a tome produced in 1882 by John Ballou Newbrough by way of automatic writing. This work represents itself as containing new revelations from ‘the Embassadors of the angel hosts of heaven prepared and revealed unto man in the name of Jehovih’. Much of the Oahspe material involves non-standard accounts of early human history. Martinez embraced these notions and they occupy a central place in her subsequent work, where there are many specific references to the Oahspe text as if it were historically authoritative

Oahspe itself contains some strange linguistic material: it is connected with ‘Mantong’ as promoted by Richard Shaver (see ‘Fringe Historical Linguistics 5’, this blog, 26 March 2012, and pp. 102-103 of my 2013 book Strange Linguistics as advertised below), and the text begins with a three-page glossary of ‘strange words used in this book’; these are a peculiar mixture of known words and phrases from English (such as angel) or other human languages (such as Abracadabra) – many of them re-defined in Oahspian terms – and unfamiliar words.

Martinez’s material can most readily be found in her book Lost History Of The Little People: Their Spiritually Advanced Civilizations around the World (available on Amazon). Here she argues that Homo sapiens originated in ‘pygmy’/’negrito’ form and that this ‘lost race’ was later forced out of its homeland on the continent of Pan (‘lost’ in a major flood in early historic times) and was in due course marginalised by its taller offshoots, who came to misperceive their predecessors as supernatural beings (fairies, leprechauns, etc.).

Martinez supports this position with data drawn from various disciplines (archaeology, ethnology, etc.), but there is an especially heavy focus upon comparative linguistics; she traces many key features of known languages to an ancestral language ‘Panic’ used by the pygmies. Like most amateurs advancing such proposals, Martinez proceeds by equating unsystematically and superficially similar words (often very short words, which makes chance similarity especially likely) and (also very short) word-parts (morphemes or putative morphemes, syllables, etc.) from a wide range of languages which are normally considered not to be ‘genetically’ related (except perhaps in ‘deep’ pre-history) and to have had no influential contact with each other. (See my earlier instalments in ‘Fringe Historical Linguistics’ and Chapter 1 of my book on the objections to such methods.)

Martinez’s academic background (which is ‘upfront’; unlike most legitimate scholars, she advertises her PhD on the cover of her book) may mislead some readers not versed in linguistics into taking her linguistic material seriously. However, whatever may be said for the rest of her material, Martinez’s linguistic equations, specifically, CANNOT be taken seriously. Examples of these equations include: the derivation of very many sequences in many languages including -in- from a Panic word ihin (referring to the pygmies themselves); similar derivations involving ong/ang (‘light from above’), su (‘spirit’), ba (‘small’), etc.; and the proposing of novel Panic-based etymologies for familiar words with very well-established etymologies, such as the Spanish word pan (‘bread’) with its very clear Latin etymology; etc., etc.

For Martinez’s career, see http://www.justenergyradio.com/archive-pages/smartinez.htm.

I propose to review Martinez’s book at greater length in the British skeptical press (I will post a reference as & when).

More next time!

Mark

For my book Strange Linguistics, see:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=64212

Copies are available through me at the author’s 50% discount, for EU 26.40 including postage to anywhere outside Germany. Please let me know if you’d like one, suggest means of payment (Paypal is possible) and provide your preferred postal address.

Hi again, everybody! ‘Hall Of Shame’ continues (a short one this time!).

29: WILLIAM EMPSON

In his book The Structure of Complex Words , 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA, 1989), William Empson focuses upon the complex ‘play’ of semantically rich and variable words such as English man and in the ensuing potential for confused thinking.

Such ideas are by no means without interest; similar material can be found in the work of mainstream linguists. However, Empson’s own grasp of linguistics appears too weak for the task he has set himself. For example, his discussion of the various senses of the English word quite is rendered confused by his apparent ignorance of two key issues. Firstly, the distinction between the word’s two senses ‘altogether’ and ‘to some degree’ is quite sharp: these are discrete meanings, not parts of a continuum, and cases such as He was quite drunk thus exhibit ambiguity rather than vagueness as Empson appears to suggest (this is a matter of linguistic semantics). Secondly, the dialectology of this word is crucial in context. In its second sense, quite has a stronger force – akin to ‘very’ – in the USA than in the UK. The contrast between the two senses is thus even sharper in British than in American English. Writers like Empson need to learn more linguistics before pronouncing on such matters.

More next time!

Mark

For my book Strange Linguistics, see:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=64212

Copies are available through me at the author’s 50% discount, for EU 26.40 including postage to anywhere outside Germany. Please let me know if you’d like one, suggest means of payment (Paypal is possible) and provide your preferred postal address.

Hi again, everybody! ‘Hall Of Shame’ continues!

28 MINAS TSIKRITSIS

More from the Ancient Greek world: As noted earlier (see ‘Around The World In ‘Mysterious’ Scripts & Texts’ 3, this blog, 28 May 2012), Linear A is one of a number of syllabic scripts found in Crete during the twentieth century by archaeologists such as Arthur Evans. It is visually similar to Linear B, which was deciphered as very early Greek in 1952 by the talented and well-informed amateur Michael Ventris and the linguist John Chadwick; but Linear A itself, as it seems, cannot be read as Greek, and the script has resisted authoritative decipherment. The maverick Cyrus Gordon’s West Semitic interpretation has not been generally accepted; and, although the more mainstream classicist Simon Davis reads Linear A – along with the ‘Minoan Pictographic’, Eteocretan, Cypro-Minoan and Eteocypriot scripts – as Hittite (Indo-European, from Anatolia), this interpretation too is controversial to say the least. (References on request)

More recently, the amateur Minas Tsikritsis (http://www.anistor.gr/english/enback/v014.htm) – proposes (with support from Gavin Menzies, The Lost Empire Of Atlantis, London, 2011; see especially pp. 314-21) that Linear A does indeed represent an early form of (his native) Greek. In fact, he regards fifteen of the symbols on the Phaistos Disk (again, see ‘Around The World In ‘Mysterious’ Scripts & Texts’ 3) as shared with Linear A and B, and ‘deciphers’ part of the Disk text too as Greek. He also proclaims that various bodies of symbols found in various locations spread across Europe, the Near East, India, etc. represent Linear A, and thus indicate (along with his readings of the Cretan texts) that the users of the script operated far beyond Crete and the Aegean. However, the evidence for these identifications appears inadequate; the parallelisms are not patently systematic, and indeed the cited bodies of non-Cretan data are typically too small for systematicity to be manifested.

More next time!

Mark

For my book Strange Linguistics, see:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=64212

Copies are available through me at the author’s 50% discount, for EU 26.40 including postage to anywhere outside Germany. Please let me know if you’d like one, suggest means of payment (Paypal is possible) and provide your preferred postal address.