We've talked here about Edenics before (e.g. in a post called Origins of the Specious,
here), a kind of armchair 'mass comparison' approach to comparative linguistics that traces all human languages back to something close to Hebrew. It's in the news again,
here.
Back on an earlier post, Mr. Happy commented ...
Yes. And I nominate it for the craziest piece -- on the web or anywhere else -- about language in the still-young millennium. Maybe talk to somebody who's had a linguistics course before publishing on the topic?
But I have a question: Has anybody seen any kind of effort to rebut this particular one? I guess I wouldn't know quite where to start ...
5 comments:
There's always the late Edo Nyland's truly glorious theory: http://web.archive.org/web/20090416231319/http://www.islandnet.com/~nyland/
In particular, all the Indo-European languages of Europe were artificially constructed en masse by Benedictine monks out of Basque roots.
Yeah, that's competition, I guess.
Good heavens. This is the worst attempt at pop etymology I've seen. It definitely beats my previous high-water mark, which was a section in When God Was a Woman which tries to identify the ancient Hebrews as Indo-European fire-worshippers on the basis of the words Levi and lava (and a whole bunch of other unrelated words, like levity and light ['brightness', not 'not heavy']).
For refutation, multilateral (mass) comparison has a pretty good critique in Campbell 2003. He shows that, using Greenberg’s own methods, Japanese is necessarily *more* of an Amerind language than any of the other languages Greenberg placed in his Amerind macrophylum. Since this is patently false based on all the other nonlinguistic evidence, we are shown that the method can’t separate fact from reality.
Campbell, Lyle. 2003. Beyond the comparative method? In Historical Linguistics 2001: Selected papers from the 15th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Barry J. Blake, Kate Burridge, & Jo Taylor (eds), pp. 33–56. ISBN 1-58811-372-8.
Oh, sorry, I meant for non-linguists ... among linguists, I think it's pretty clear.
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