Skeptical Humanities

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

27 YAHUDA, RHOME, WILKENS ETC ON GREEK

Because of its long history and respected status, Greek – from Mycenaean through Homeric, Classical, Koine, Hellenistic, New Testament and Byzantine/Medieval to Modern (both Katharevousa and Demotic) – is a major focus for non-mainstream claims.

Some non-mainstream theories involve claims to the effect that Greek was the Ursprache. Joseph Yahuda, supported by Konstantinos Georganas, Kostas Katis and others (see also ‘Around The World In ‘Mysterious’ Scripts & Texts’, this blog, 22 May 2012), is one writer who advances this view. Yahuda commences from the claim that Hebrew specifically is disguised Greek, almost all of its words being composed of one or more distorted Greek roots, and goes on to identify Greek as an overall Ursprache and thus to deny the existence of Proto-Indo-European as an ancestor for Greek and other languages. However, even where Yahuda’s claims are not mutually contradictory or are not actually refuted by other evidence, the ‘evidence’ in their favour is of the usual inadequate kind.

Another author of much the same kind is Harrell Rhome. Citing Yahuda and various dated sources, Rhome identifies Greek as the ancestor of Hebrew, Semitic languages generally, Egyptian, Indian languages, etc. Rhome’s main intention here is to lower the status of Hebrew, which he perceives as having been tendentiously exaggerated by Jewish writers. But in fact it is not clear how seriously he himself takes his own account of Greek.

Some other non-mainstream theories involve the Greek legends regarding the Siege of Troy (in modern Turkey) and its aftermath, as recounted in the Homeric poems. Several authors have sought to re-assign the location of the Trojan War and associated legendary events to distant areas, in the Atlantic and elsewhere. On less than persuasive grounds, Iman Wilkens (previously alluded to in ‘Linguistics Hall of Shame 2’, this blog, 23 March 2013) holds that the main actions of the Trojan Cycle really occurred in Britain, France and his native Netherlands. (Compare Daunt and others, who relocate the events reported in the Old Testament). Wilkens identifies Homeric place-names etc. with later British (Celtic), English, Dutch and other local place-names using the usual amateur methods. For instance, he equates Cambridgeshire river-names with the superficially and unsystematically similar Homeric Greek names of rivers in the Trojan Plain.

Felice Vinci instead re-interprets the actions of the Trojan Cycle as occurring in the area surrounding the Baltic Sea. Linguistic details are not at all salient in Vinci’s argument, but he does make a vague comment about ‘Achaean-like place-names’ in the Baltic and naïvely interprets the presence in the Baltic region of Lithuanian (a conservative Indo-European language but not one especially closely related to Greek) as supporting his case.

Of course, the precise location of Troy was not known until relatively recently, and the ‘facts’ of any genuine ‘Trojan War’ and the locations of many associated places remain disputed and indeed often conjectural; but it is very generally accepted that these events, or the genuine events upon which they were based, did indeed occur in the Eastern Mediterranean Greek world, where they appear to be set.

References to any of these writers on request!

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 (main heritage trips over for now!).

26 W.G. SEBALD & JORGE LUIS BORGES (more oddity than shame!)

W. G. (Winfried Georg) Sebald (1944-2001) was a German literature scholar who spent much of his life in East Anglia, England. He wrote (apparently intentionally) in old-fashioned and elaborate German (an effect which is partly but not completely lost in the English translations to which Sebald himself contributed). His subject-matter is wide-ranging. His best known book is probably The Rings Of Saturn, which (like much of Sebald’s other work) displays the influence of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), especially the 1940 short story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’.

The ‘storyline’ of ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ starts with an encyclopedia article about a country which is in the process of being fabricated and hence created by a cabal of scholars; this country is called called Uqbar or (as it is increasingly reified) Tlön, and eventually begins replacing Earth itself as a feature of the ‘real world’.

A substantial part of the story deals with the invented languages of Tlön and with its tradition of ontology/epistemology: a strong version of idealism. The languages reflect (and/or generate?) this position, for instance by having many sequences of short adjectives or else many impersonal verbs with no subjects; indeed, they have no nouns at all. These patterns are extreme versions of some which are actually found in some real languages, such as Apache. The absence of nouns relates to the absence of things (entities) in the philosophy accepted in Tlön – this, supposedly, excludes both propositions and deductive reasoning.

However, even if no entities are recognized, it is not clear that these further exclusions are necessarily implied. Indeed, some of Borges’ own linguistic formulations appear to express propositions, albeit in forms unfamiliar to those accustomed to English or other Indo-European languages. More generally, the linguistic strictures and notions developed by Borges appear interesting and not lacking in insight but as somewhat exaggerated. The same can be said of Sebald’s applications of these notions.

Of course, if either author’s intention be judged STRICTLY fictional, such objections are not in any way damning; and, even if Borges and/or Sebald are to be regarded as expressing genuine ontological/epistemological stances, their positions might still be arguable. But they do appear rather extreme. It is not clear that a language incorporating such features in strong versions would really be usable in practice, whatever philosophical ideas were embraced by its speakers and writers.

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 (still between heritage trips!).

25 ILCC INC.

ILCC Inc. (Intergalactic Lovetrance Civilization Center) work to ‘provide more precise guidance to seekers of Truth’. They adopt a Vedantic world-view similar to that of Oak, Knapp and other extreme Hindu writers discussed in earlier instalments of this blog: Hinduism and the Sanskrit language were universal throughout the world for millions of years, until wicked Christians, scientists etc. took advantage of temporary weakness to pervert this paradise and re-write history. ‘Lovetrance’ is ILCC’s name for the civilisation which existed before this outrage and (if they had their way) would exist again. However, they need first to become more accurate about basic historical facts. There follows their account of British history; all of it is grossly in error. Strangely, none of this (except, marginally, 2) relates to these writers’ non-standard ideas on Hinduism, the Vedas etc. 1) First [Britain] was conquered by the Romans, then the Celts. 2) The Celts combined with the ancient Aryan Dravidians… 3) Britain was then gradually conquered by the Mutos, Thangles, Sextons, and Danes. 4) In 1066 French and Germans from Denmark’s royal races conquered and governed over Britain. 5) The British were then converted into Christians. 6) Until Henry VII, French was the national language of England. 7) Then the German royal race was amalgamated into England and the conqueror and the conquered became amalgamated into one Christian community.

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 (between heritage trips!).

24 WILLEM HIETBRINK & OTHERS ON DUTCH

A somewhat extreme proposal regarding language origins is that of Willem Hietbrink and Ronald Lagendijk (both Dutch), who propose in Het Oertaalwoordenboek (Rotterdam, 1994) that all expressions in all languages are ‘corruptions’ of meaningful short sentences in contemporary or near-contemporary Dutch, often via series of intermediate forms (without providing historical evidence of these intermediate forms). For instance, English exact derives from Dutch ik zeg ‘t dich (‘I say it to you’), via ‘k sektik, ‘k sakt. Of course, the chronology does not work; many of the non-Dutch words cited have established etymologies or indeed were themselves already used long before the development of the modern Dutch language.

Hietbrink analyzes Dutch as having 24 consonants and fifteen vowels. (The usual analysis is different; for instance, Standard Dutch is held to have fourteen monophthongal vowels and nine diphthongs. Hietbrink appears to have been distracted by the spelling.) He refers to the Dutch phonological system as ‘the alphabet’; thus he is naïvely folk-linguistic in treating the spelling rather than the phonemics as primary. Indeed, he appears to believe that this 39-phoneme system is valid for all languages. (This is reminiscent of spelling reformers who imagine that their reformed system for spelling English can also replace the International Phonetic Association Alphabet for the transcription of other languages.) Hietbrink goes on to claim that there are thus only 24 x 15 = 360 ‘combinations’ of vowels and consonants that human beings can pronounce, at least as long as they use the Roman alphabet (of course, the spelling/writing system used will in fact have no decisive effect on what sequences can or cannot be pronounced). This assumes that only syllables of the form Consonant-Vowel or Vowel-Consonant occur; but many languages, including Dutch, also permit many more complex syllable structures, such as Consonant-Vowel-Consonant. In addition, even some of the short Dutch words cited by Hietbrink have more than one syllable.

Hietbrink’s work resembles that of early modern Dutch-speaking writers such as Jan van Gorp (seventeenth century) and Simon Stevin (late sixteenth-early seventeenth centuries), who worked before scientific linguistics had developed.

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.

23 WRITERS ON CREE, CHEROKEE AND LENAPE

Jean-Louis Pagé (see my ‘Around The World In Mysterious Scripts & Texts’ 3, this site, 28 May 2012) claims that the Algonkian language Cree and its script are related to his version of ‘Atlantean’ (which very probably never existed) and thus to ancient languages of the Old World. The Cree writing system (a syllabary-cum-alphabet) was demonstrably invented by James Evans in 1840-46 on the basis of shorthand, the syllabic Cherokee script (itself held by some, such as ‘Traveler Bird’, to be much older than it appears to be; this system too was in fact, as it seems, invented, around 1821, by a member of the Cherokee nation named Sequoya) and other scripts known to him; it cannot be related to ancient scripts. In addition, Pagé’s conceptualization of the system as logographic or even ideographic is confused and inaccurate.

Cyclone Covey’s associate Ethel Stewart offers another non-mainstream account of Cree and its writing system.

Another interesting case is that of the ‘Walam Olum’, a document allegedly obtained by Constantine Rafinesque from the nomadic Lenape Amerindians but in fact probably forged. This text, written in Lenape in an otherwise unknown ‘ideographic’ (logographic) script, supposedly recounts the wanderings of the tribe over many thousands of years, starting from their ultimate origins in Asia. Others have endorsed and developed this analysis.

References to all these sources on request!

More next time (which will be delayed until midweek or maybe even 8 September; my beloved & I will be away, in Iceland)!

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.

22 MILAN ELESIN

There are numerous nationalistic myths concerning the various Balkan Slavic languages, notably Serbian. Milan Elesin, a Serbian writer, apparently believes that the Lord’s Prayer was mistranslated into Serbian and other modern Slavic languages, preferring his own reading of the version in Old Church Slavonic (OCS) – the classical language of Eastern European Orthodox Christianity – supposedly written by St Cyril. Elesin seems reluctant to acknowledge the status of the New Testament Greek text as the original formulation of the prayer. For instance, he regards the Serbian equivalent of the word daily in the prayer – and, it seems, the English word itself and equivalent words in other languages – as a confusing mistranslation. Elesin does not seem to be denying that the Greek sentence in question has the meaning ‘Give us today our daily bread’, or claiming that the English, Serbian etc. are mistranslations of the Greek. Instead, he ascribes higher status to the OCS wording, which he repeatedly translates quite differently from the Greek (differing in this respect from mainstream OCS scholars, though without overt acknowledgment of this divergence). In the case of the key word epiousion (‘daily’) as cited here, he treats the OCS as importing ideas from an Egyptian hymn beseeching divine relief from a drought. His view seems to be that Cyril had access – directly or indirectly – to these pre-first-century formulations, and that the OCS thus preserves these better than does the Greek. But these versions are not themselves known; and – like all scholars between post-dynastic times and the nineteenth-century decipherment – Cyril himself was surely unable to read Egyptian.

In other places Elison’s own interpretations are truly bizarre; for example, he translates one section of the OCS as referring to the gas ozone. And his ‘understanding’ of the ideas and covert motivations of contemporary linguists and biblical scholars is also bizarre.

It may be possible to purchase Milan Elesin’s e-book on this subject by writing to him at
elesinmilan@gmail.com. It should be borne in mind that his English is often very strange and difficult to understand (some of it is machine-translated)

I found one source where Elesin’s surname was transliterated Elisin; maybe this spelling should be included in web-searches.

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.

21 ANOTHER SERIES OF ECCENTRICS

Around 1890, Significs, intended to be a ‘theory of signs’, was developed by Victoria, Lady Welby, in close connection with the work of Charles Peirce, her correspondent. Some followers of Significs, particularly in France, developed the theory into an account of human language based heavily upon meaning and in particular on the international (originally Latin) root sign- as in English signify, etc. Significs constitutes, in effect, a ‘proactive’ version of what is more usually called ‘semiotics’, the overall study of meaning including linguistic meaning (semantics) but also the meanings of non-linguistic symbols of various kinds. As far as language per se is concerned, Significs is a doctrine of etymology and historical word-meaning, with a close focus on the study and classification of semantic terms themselves. It is argued, in fact, that reform of the use of semiotics in education and public policy is needed in response to the changing circumstances of humanity, but that linguistic reform alone, while necessary, is insufficient for this enterprise. Many of the specifics of the proposals are, however, rather abstract and philosophical in character.

In addition, some followers of Significs seem to have seen Ancient Greek and Latin as models for semiotic and linguistic reform, without giving an adequate explanation of this view; this aspect of the proposal appears rather traditionalist.

Stuart Chase was especially concerned with communication issues and the interface between language and other domains of human activity. Chase was troubled by miscommunication arising from the use of words with varied, shifting and largely emotive meanings and the political and social upshots of this effect. He argues (among many other things) that most people in developed societies have lost the ability to ‘translate’ words into ‘verifiable’ meanings and are thus liable to be defrauded. Much argument which is ostensibly about facts is in fact, he claims, about definitions. While there is an element of truth in this view, Chase’s specific version appears exaggerated. He summarizes, for the most part positively, the work of Alfred Korzybski, the founder of General Semantics.

Eli Abir claims to have arrived at an algorithmic means of determining and expressing linguistic context in such a way that machine translation can be completely reliable. His method as described is essentially a numerical expansion of existing methods, but if it were technically feasible it would indeed increase levels of reliability (though perhaps not as much as is suggested). Abir does apparently go too far in claiming that this work will revolutionize linguistic theory itself. He also seems to adhere to extreme and quasi-mystical worldviews.

The small book by an unidentified writer styling himself ‘Basilegist’, apparently a solipsist, begins: ‘Difficulties of language abound in the Retection. The simplicity of that, the opening section of the Retection does not mean that the language of Retection introduces linguistic tangles, but is a statement that as clouded thought is inseparable from language, then its apparent appearance even in Retected Thought using language as its medium is inevitable…’. What ‘Basilegist’ calls Retection involves an attempt to free the human mind from confusion allegedly generated by the universal expression of thoughts by means of language and to enable it to access the ‘morphic’ state in which language is no longer thought of as necessary. He dismisses all notions about the past which are ‘known’ through language, including notions about the origin of language itself. Some of his own usage is highly idiosyncratic.

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.

20 ZOLTÁN SIMON

As some readers may recall, Zoltán Simon (ZS) argues for a historical Atlantis in Western Atlantic waters, and for a catastrophist and otherwise revisionist account of early human history; he believes that the cases for (a) catastrophist interpretations of early history, (b) the early discovery (and subsequent loss) of advanced technology, and (c) extraterrestrial intervention in that period are much more persuasive than they are. He exaggerates the influence of his native Hungarian and its early speakers on linguistic differentiation and world history, finding pseudo-cognates and grammatical parallels between Hungarian and English and reading the arguably mysterious runic Yarmouth Stone (Nova Scotia) as Hungarian.

ZS’s linguistic ‘evidence’ is of the usual amateur kind, but his approach is somewhat more overt than is often the case. For example, he believes that a good way of establishing whether or not any two languages are related is to compare their vocabularies for matching pairs (similar forms, similar meanings). In fact, he imagines that this is how mainstream historical linguists operate, and berates them for engaging in this enterprise in a disorganised way and for not following up apparent connections which they find unpalatable. ZS appears unaware of linguists’ focus on SYSTEMATIC similarities in this context. He also pays no attention to a) the degrees of phonological and semantic similarity between words which might be required if they were to be regarded, pre-theoretically and prima facie, as probably shared (he talks as if pairs of forms are either obviously connected or obviously not, and his own judgments on this front appear arbitrary), b) the phonological systems of the relevant languages (which affect how similar forms can be and which phonemes are likely to correspond with which if forms are connected), c) the lengths of the words (for example, if two languages not known to be connected share a very short word-form such as [sa] with the same meaning, this could very well be accidental, whereas if they share the form [tolpesveblig], again with the same meaning, or with transparently related meanings, this is less likely), d) the cross-linguistic frequency of the sounds and sound-sequences in question (very widely-shared sounds such as [e], [s], etc. or common sound-sequences such as [til] or [po] are more likely to be shared by chance than sounds and sequences found in relatively few languages). And e) he openly disregards matters of grammar, maintaining indeed that until recently many languages did not even have grammar (a most gross error!).

In addition, ZS has an interest in dialectology and has worked on a dialect atlas of Hungary. He has also done some work on the results of the 1950s Survey of English Dialects (UK), comparing the vocabularies of different English dialects with a view to assessing the relative closeness of relationship between each pair of dialects (as he does with languages, as described above). It is more unusual in this context for factors a)-d) above to be an issue (it is normally clear enough whether or not forms with the same meaning in different dialects of the same language are ‘the same word’); but ZS still ignores the systematicity requirement, the phonological structures of the various dialects, and matters of grammar. His approach (which he himself regards as altogether pioneering) is at best a rough-&-ready initial method of assessing the overall patterning of such data. (The same applies to his work on Hungarian.)

ZS criticises the SED for poor and incomplete presentation of their data (‘cartographically a disaster’), but this seems to involve the fact that he has seen only their maps themselves, not the background and interpretive materials.

ZS has a range of other non-mainstream opinions. For example, he holds that Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe is in fact autobiographical.

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.

Sorry, there will be no blog this week; I have been unwell. Normal service should resume soon! Mark

Hi again, everybody! ‘Hall Of Shame’ continues (early this week since my beloved & I are going away until next Tuesday).

19 OWEN BARFIELD

Owen Barfield was a member of the mid-twentieth-century group of Oxford writers, literature scholars and philologists centred on J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Tolkien himself espoused some implausible ideas about language grounded in literary and philological notions rather than in the then current work of linguists. He apparently believed, for instance, that he himself had acquired older varieties of English formerly used in his own home area near Birmingham (where his family had long resided) more readily than would students from other areas. No positive evidence of such effects exists, and, if they were genuine, they would in fact be difficult to explain in scientific terms (such characteristics are acquired, not genetically transmitted). For his part, Barfield developed a more articulated and wide-ranging non-mainstream approach to language. He lived to a very advanced age and long survived all the other ‘Inklings’.

Barfield’s most relevant works (Saving the Appearances (London, 1957); Worlds Apart (Hanover, NH, 1963); Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, 3rd edn (Hanover, NH, and London, 1973)) deals mainly with poetic language, seeking ‘objective’ standards of criticism involving philosophical considerations on the relation between language and thought (although it is far from clear that he succeeds in this enterprise). Like Tolkien, he was less aware of twentieth-century mainstream scientific linguistics than of philology (also scientific, albeit in a weaker, partly pre-theoretical sense) and linguistic philosophy. He offers little concrete empirical evidence for his general claims, and his comments about non-Indo-European languages (for example, on Chinese word order) are oversimplified.

Barfield claims that poetry genuinely is the ‘best’ language, and that in early times all language had a poetic character, before ‘logic’ came to dominate both usage itself and most strands of thought about the subject. This poetic character, he holds, is still found in ‘primitive’ languages such as pidgins (in fact, no truly ‘primitive’ languages are known, although some linguists do hold that some features of pidgins may reflect earlier stages of language). Barfield objects to the notion that a language becomes richer and more poetic as it ‘ages’ historically. He judges that the poet Percy Shelley and others were profoundly mistaken in holding that a spiritual, creative awakening, accompanied by a strengthening of the relevant aspects of language, occurred in their own time, arguing that if language were indeed becoming more poetic all people would have been accomplished poets by his own time.

Barfield’s focus on the past leads him to interpret the semantics of words in a heavily etymological manner, with a focus on metaphor as a vehicle of meaning-shift. He also accepts Otto Jespersen’s view that there is very generally a movement during the ‘lifetime’ of a language from inflectional morphology with relatively free word order (as in Sanskrit or Latin), which he prefers, to isolating morphology and a fixed word order (as in contemporary English); in fact, this is at most an Indo-European tendency.

Barfield’s ideas are interesting, but from the point of view of a scientific linguist they are too heavily grounded in partly subjective judgments and insufficiently justified in empirical terms.

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.