Waradpande seems to have destroyed PIE already
anal...@hotmail.com
http://www.organiser.org/15oct2000/mus.html
start quote:
Waradpande bluntly states that a language called Indo-European is a
figment of the European imagination. Going into the details of the
principles of linguistics and examining--and ripping up--the guesswork
of philologist after philologist, he asserts that presupposition of a
mythical pre-vedic language called Indo-European is an outrage on
logic. In fact in the 'linguistic' part of his thesis Waradpande
brings to bear the full weight of his erudition. He quotes as many as
250 Richas from the Rigveda, examines the various meanings given to
them by commentators from Sayana to Tilak, and delves into a detailed
examination of the frequent assertion that the Rigveda contains
abundant references to the Aryan-non-Aryan conflict.
end quote.
I assume that the reviewer is referring to PIE as "Indo-European".
Peter T. Daniels
How does examining nothing but Vedic tell him anything at all about
Indo-European as a whole?
What does the mythic "Aryan-non-Aryan conflict" have to do with Indo-
European linguistics?
Why was it too much trouble to see what Warapande says, as opposed to
someone called "organiser"?
anal...@hotmail.com
>
Organiser is a magazine. Its an assumption that Waradpande examined
only Vedic. Its on my to-do list to get hold of his book - but any
comp linguist whose head is not buried in concrete should be
interested too.
> - Show quoted text -
Peter T. Daniels
Do you have trouble reading even what you post? It refers to his
"erudition" and then says he quotes 250 Vedic passages and mentions
nothing else.
> Its on my to-do list to get hold of his book - but any
> comp linguist whose head is not buried in concrete should be
> interested too.
What does the mythic "Aryan-non-Aryan conflict" have to do with Indo-
European linguistics?
anal...@hotmail.com
OK since you cannot live without humiliation
"Going into the details of the
principles of linguistics and examining--and ripping up--the
guesswork
of philologist after philologist",
how do you read that as "examining nothing but Vedic"?
>
> > Its on my to-do list to get hold of his book - but any
> > comp linguist whose head is not buried in concrete should be
> > interested too.
>
> What does the mythic "Aryan-non-Aryan conflict" have to do with Indo-
> European linguistics?- Hide quoted text -
I humiliated you once before along these lines. I cannot answer for
everything in a cited passage. I am only intrested in the alleged
refutation of Sankrit's descent from another language called
"(proto)Indo European"
benl...@ihug.co.nz
Why? Sounds like another self-deluded Indian imagining he can
"destroy" PIE. Just like yourself. Before you, we had S. (for "Skull
cap") Kalyanaraman, and before him others.
> > What does the mythic "Aryan-non-Aryan conflict" have to do with Indo-
> > European linguistics?- Hide quoted text -
>
> I humiliated you once before along these lines. I cannot answer for
> everything in a cited passage. I am only intrested in the alleged
> refutation of Sankrit's descent from another language called
> "(proto)Indo European"
It's amusing that Mark Hubey (the one you cited as an authority, well
known here as a crank) used to indulge himself in the same fantasy. In
his computer-game fantasy world he was regularly "humiliating" his
enemies, the people here who argued with him, whereas to a real-world
observer he was merely adding arrogance to stupidity.
Ross Clark
anal...@hotmail.com
>
> - Show quoted text -
Is Daniels some kind of community idiot-child that all of you spring
to his defense?
Actually I am as sick of this stupidity with Daniels as you seem to be
- how come nobody chides him for reducing all debate to combat?
From what I have experienced here I take it as a working hypothesis
that there is some atavistic attachment to PIE to posters of European
heritage that leads to a tribal cohesion amongst them against its
attackers,
I really hope you folks understand that even a hundred epithets hurled
at the messenger do not constitute a reply to the message.
Peter T. Daniels
Daniels isn't even an Indo-Europeanist; he only repeats the common
wisdom that anyone who's taken Linguistics 101 plus the Introduction
to Historical Linguistics class absorbed as an undergraduate.
> Actually I am as sick of this stupidity with Daniels as you seem to be
> - how come nobody chides him for reducing all debate to combat?
Howcome you think there's a "debate"? Typing (or cutting and pasting!)
quotations, especially quotations you don't understand, is not
"debating."
> From what I have experienced here I take it as a working hypothesis
> that there is some atavistic attachment to PIE to posters of European
> heritage that leads to a tribal cohesion amongst them against its
> attackers,
You would do well to broaden your experience -- for instance by
studying an introductory textbook of IE linguistics.
> I really hope you folks understand that even a hundred epithets hurled
> at the messenger do not constitute a reply to the message.-
Nu, why do you never respond to the substance of the refutations of
your postings?
benl...@ihug.co.nz
You laid down the terms from the moment you appeared here. "Genocidal"
was in the subject line of your first thread, followed by numerous
other abusive terms.
>
> From what I have experienced here I take it as a working hypothesis
> that there is some atavistic attachment to PIE to posters of European
> heritage that leads to a tribal cohesion amongst them against its
> attackers,
No surprises there. You take all kinds of nonsense as "working
hypotheses".
> I really hope you folks understand that even a hundred epithets hurled
> at the messenger do not constitute a reply to the message.- -
When there's a message worth replying to, it will be replied to.
When you have some "substantive arguments" (another pretentious phrase
you used a couple of days ago) it will be time to discuss them.
Ross Clark
anal...@hotmail.com
If and when that happens, I'll acknowledge it. All I am getting so
far is personal attacks and "lalalalalalalala.....I can't hear you!"
Who knows - even as we speak perhaps some lurker is chasing down my
references and is going to surprise all of you. I intend to follow
them all up when time permits and I am also lookig for gotchas such as
trying to see if the PIE priesthood found cognates with Greek Latin or
ProtoGermanic in classical sanskrit not found in Vedic - that would be
some mega egg in the face of the PIE mafia wouldn't it?
Harlan Messinger
Why does anyone have to be springing to his defense to observe the plain
fact that it's foolish for you to claim to have humiliated someone when
you would have no way of knowing whether you had done so. You might as
well have said, "Once again I've made you cry", when as far as you know
the person you're addressing hasn't cried in years and certainly not
over anything you've written.
> Actually I am as sick of this stupidity with Daniels as you seem to be
> - how come nobody chides him for reducing all debate to combat?
He gets his share. But when it comes to information about the
linguistics, he has the advantage over you of being right most of the
time, and unlike you he acknowledges situations where he lacks expertise
in the area of linguistics to which something on which he's been asked
to comment belongs.
> From what I have experienced here I take it as a working hypothesis
> that there is some atavistic attachment to PIE to posters of European
> heritage that leads to a tribal cohesion amongst them against its
> attackers,
Only in the same sense that people of European heritage have an
atavistic attachment to the theory of evolution, the theory of gravity,
theories of mechanical physics, theories of radioactivity, etc.
> I really hope you folks understand that even a hundred epithets hurled
> at the messenger do not constitute a reply to the message.
Likewise, "I don't believe you, you're just saying that because you're
European" does not constitute a cogent reply to a message explaining
something you don't understand.
anal...@hotmail.com
<hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
> analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
> > On Nov 24, 3:28 pm, "benli...@ihug.co.nz" <benli...@ihug.co.nz> wrote:
> >> On Nov 25, 9:04 am, analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
>
> >>> On Nov 24, 2:55 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> >>>> On Nov 24, 2:11 pm, analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
> >>>>> On Nov 24, 1:10 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> Why does anyone have to be springing to his defense to observe the plain
> fact that it's foolish for you to claim to have humiliated someone when
> you would have no way of knowing whether you had done so. You might as
> well have said, "Once again I've made you cry", when as far as you know
> the person you're addressing hasn't cried in years and certainly not
> over anything you've written.
I don't want to belabor the point, but unearthing a mixed review of a
work he characterized as having been universally laughed out of court
is merely giving him a chance to say he was in error. But when he
insists on sticking to his guns, he humiliates himself - his alleged
superior knowledge of linguistics notwithstanding.
I totally abhor this kind of crowing from me or from others - but from
my end this kind of hyper-argumentativeness is purely for
deterrence. For the most part, I want to deal with facts and logic
and if at all there are going to be putdowns, only witty and good-
humored ones.
I'll go after certain posters as a matter of policy (for example Jai
on the topic of "circumcision" ), but no one from sci.lang fits that
bill.
>
> > From what I have experienced here I take it as a working hypothesis
> > that there is some atavistic attachment to PIE to posters of European
> > heritage that leads to a tribal cohesion amongst them against its
> > attackers,
>
> Only in the same sense that people of European heritage have an
> atavistic attachment to the theory of evolution, the theory of gravity,
> theories of mechanical physics, theories of radioactivity, etc.
>
evolution - perhaps. But science is a stretch.
<snips>
This "You don't understand" stuff is getting dated. I think I have a
pretty good understanding of the state of affairs (In fact some
correspondences are pretty sickening Skt German French asti, ist,
est :: santi, sind, sont - - so I know that my task is pretty
daunting).
Harlan Messinger
> On Nov 24, 4:33 pm, Harlan Messinger
> <hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>> analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
>>> On Nov 24, 3:28 pm, "benli...@ihug.co.nz" <benli...@ihug.co.nz> wrote:
>>>> On Nov 25, 9:04 am, analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
>>>>> On Nov 24, 2:55 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>>>>>> On Nov 24, 2:11 pm, analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
>>>>>>> On Nov 24, 1:10 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>> Why does anyone have to be springing to his defense to observe the plain
>> fact that it's foolish for you to claim to have humiliated someone when
>> you would have no way of knowing whether you had done so. You might as
>> well have said, "Once again I've made you cry", when as far as you know
>> the person you're addressing hasn't cried in years and certainly not
>> over anything you've written.
>
> I don't want to belabor the point, but unearthing a mixed review of a
> work he characterized as having been universally laughed out of court
> is merely giving him a chance to say he was in error. But when he
> insists on sticking to his guns, he humiliates himself - his alleged
> superior knowledge of linguistics notwithstanding.
You *are* belaboring the point, since you persist in making an assertion
the truth value of which you are in no position to know. Personally, I
find it highly doubtful that Peter feels humiliated.
> I totally abhor this kind of crowing from me or from others - but from
> my end this kind of hyper-argumentativeness
You repeatedly dispute the merits of a field of study with a grossly
inadequate basis for doing so, and you bait people in the field with
derisive subject lines like "what Indians should know about 'comp ling'
[sic]" and "Marcantonio and the emperor's new clothes" and "more Indo
european follies" and then you cast your *respondents* as the
hyperargumentativeness! You are a real piece of work.
> is purely for
> deterrence. For the most part, I want to deal with facts and logic
Your response when they are presented to you says otherwise.
> and if at all there are going to be putdowns, only witty and good-
> humored ones.
>
> I'll go after certain posters as a matter of policy (for example Jai
> on the topic of "circumcision" ), but no one from sci.lang fits that
> bill.
>
>
>>> From what I have experienced here I take it as a working hypothesis
>>> that there is some atavistic attachment to PIE to posters of European
>>> heritage that leads to a tribal cohesion amongst them against its
>>> attackers,
>> Only in the same sense that people of European heritage have an
>> atavistic attachment to the theory of evolution, the theory of gravity,
>> theories of mechanical physics, theories of radioactivity, etc.
>>
>
> evolution - perhaps. But science is a stretch.
>
> <snips>
>
> This "You don't understand" stuff is getting dated.
It continues to be true, so it continues to be the appropriate response
as often as it's called for.
> I think I have a
> pretty good understanding of the state of affairs
"I think" is the key. You have the understanding you arrived with,
fortified with the conviction that your preliminary understanding
supersedes the understanding of anyone who disagrees with you even if
theirs is much, much deeper than yours because they've studied it for
decades and maybe have made it their life's work.
> (In fact some
> correspondences are pretty sickening Skt German French asti, ist,
> est :: santi, sind, sont - - so I know that my task is pretty
> daunting).
I don't know what you mean by your use of the word "sickening" here, but
I don't much care: if your judgment of these things is based on what
"sickens" you, then clearly you are being motivated by your emotions and
prejudices rather than by rational analysis.
anal...@hotmail.com
suggestion: Irony 101 might do you some good.
>
> - Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
I was extending the hand of peace and what do I get - more of the same
vacuous bloviating superciliousness. Whatever you say.
Dušan Vukotic
> I humiliated you once before along these lines. I cannot answer for
> everything in a cited passage. I am only intrested in the alleged
> refutation of Sankrit's descent from another language called
> "(proto)Indo European"
PIE reconstruction is a kind of scientific imagery and it could be far
of any real ancestor language. I think that PIE never existed or, if
it existed, it could be reduced to a couple of "productive" (self-
generating) words. In ancient times people constantly were splitting
up into groups, making newer and newer tribes inside relatively small
and enclosed areas. Such "social groups" tended not to communicate to
the "outside world"; simply, they were completely occupied, trying to
figure out how to secure the life of their families (food supplies,
finding an appropriate shelter, keeping their living space warm etc.).
In fact, prehistoric and ancient people were as frightened from other
human beings as they were afraid of wild animals or natural
catastrophes.
I think that there were thousands of different languages (with a small
number of speakers) only in Europe, but they were "suppressed" and
reduced to a much smaller number after the first states
(commonwealths) started to be created and an "official" (standard)
language began to be imposed to all the subjects of a new
(significantly enlarged) "society".
As for Sanskrit, I am more than sure that none of the European
languages descended from Asia, but to the contrary, Sanskrit
"corrupted" its "speech essence" under the heavy influence of a
certain Euro-speaking "conquering" tongue.
DV
Peter T. Daniels
Omigod, the Phantom Lurker ploy!! It should make you proud that you're
recreating all the idiocies that were common coin in newsgroups ten
years ago!!!
> references and is going to surprise all of you. I intend to follow
> them all up when time permits and I am also lookig for gotchas such as
> trying to see if the PIE priesthood found cognates with Greek Latin or
> ProtoGermanic in classical sanskrit not found in Vedic - that would be
> some mega egg in the face of the PIE mafia wouldn't it?
How you figure? Is it your opinion that Classical Sanskrit is somehow
a subset of Vedic?
Harlan Messinger
Liar. You've gotten so many serious explanations that it's mindblowing
that you'd say this.
> Who knows - even as we speak perhaps some lurker is chasing down my
> references and is going to surprise all of you. I intend to follow
> them all up when time permits and I am also lookig for gotchas such as
> trying to see if the PIE priesthood found cognates with Greek Latin or
> ProtoGermanic in classical sanskrit not found in Vedic - that would be
> some mega egg in the face of the PIE mafia wouldn't it?
If the queen had balls, she'd be king, wouldn't she?
The funny thing is your implied belief that your "contributions" here
will come to anything important. This is a *Usenet newsgroup*. Usenet
newsgroups are not central forums of discussion in any field. Almost
nobody reads them. If anything is ever written that blows away an entire
field of study, Usenet is not where it will appear.
anal...@hotmail.com
These emotinal responses don't show you guys in a good light. What I
am denying is his claim of refutations of my postings. It is true
that some data and elementary principles have been posted but those I
can get myself but it is patently obvious that nobody really wants to
hear what I am trying to say.
>
> > Who knows - even as we speak perhaps some lurker is chasing down my
> > references and is going to surprise all of you. I intend to follow
> > them all up when time permits and I am also lookig for gotchas such as
> > trying to see if the PIE priesthood found cognates with Greek Latin or
> > ProtoGermanic in classical sanskrit not found in Vedic - that would be
> > some mega egg in the face of the PIE mafia wouldn't it?
>
> If the queen had balls, she'd be king, wouldn't she?
>
> The funny thing is your implied belief that your "contributions" here
> will come to anything important. This is a *Usenet newsgroup*. Usenet
> newsgroups are not central forums of discussion in any field. Almost
> nobody reads them. If anything is ever written that blows away an entire
> field of study, Usenet is not where it will appear.- Hide quoted text -
>
until now.
anal...@hotmail.com
> On Nov 24, 4:33 pm, analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
>
> > On Nov 24, 4:14 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> > > Nu, why do you never respond to the substance of the refutations of
> > > your postings?-
>
> > If and when that happens, I'll acknowledge it. All I am getting so
> > far is personal attacks and "lalalalalalalala.....I can't hear you!"
>
> > Who knows - even as we speak perhaps some lurker is chasing down my
>
> Omigod, the Phantom Lurker ploy!! It should make you proud that you're
> recreating all the idiocies that were common coin in newsgroups ten
> years ago!!!
Bottom line - my ideas are out there, the mob-attacks on them by the
regulars are out there and objective onlookers with an interest in the
field have been given sources where they can be exposed to unorthodox
ideas on relationships between languages.
>
> > references and is going to surprise all of you. I intend to follow
> > them all up when time permits and I am also lookig for gotchas such as
> > trying to see if the PIE priesthood found cognates with Greek Latin or
> > ProtoGermanic in classical sanskrit not found in Vedic - that would be
> > some mega egg in the face of the PIE mafia wouldn't it?
>
> How you figure? Is it your opinion that Classical Sanskrit is somehow
> a subset of Vedic?
Time.
Dušan Vukotic
> These emotinal responses don't show you guys in a good light. What I
> am denying is his claim of refutations of my postings. It is true
> that some data and elementary principles have been posted but those I
> can get myself but it is patently obvious that nobody really wants to
> hear what I am trying to say.
Would you mind telling us what exactly are you trying to say?
DV
Peter T. Daniels
> On Nov 24, 11:54 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > On Nov 24, 4:33 pm, analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
>
> > > On Nov 24, 4:14 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> > > > Nu, why do you never respond to the substance of the refutations of
> > > > your postings?-
>
> > > If and when that happens, I'll acknowledge it. All I am getting so
> > > far is personal attacks and "lalalalalalalala.....I can't hear you!"
>
> > > Who knows - even as we speak perhaps some lurker is chasing down my
>
> > Omigod, the Phantom Lurker ploy!! It should make you proud that you're
> > recreating all the idiocies that were common coin in newsgroups ten
> > years ago!!!
>
> Bottom line - my ideas are out there, the mob-attacks on them by the
> regulars are out there and objective onlookers with an interest in the
> field have been given sources where they can be exposed to unorthodox
> ideas on relationships between languages.
And yet another one!! (But you stole this one directly from Franz.)
There's usually a reason why "orthodoxy" is orthodoxy. All your
"ideas" were tried out 200 years ago and easily refuted.
> > > references and is going to surprise all of you. I intend to follow
> > > them all up when time permits and I am also lookig for gotchas such as
> > > trying to see if the PIE priesthood found cognates with Greek Latin or
> > > ProtoGermanic in classical sanskrit not found in Vedic - that would be
> > > some mega egg in the face of the PIE mafia wouldn't it?
>
> > How you figure? Is it your opinion that Classical Sanskrit is somehow
> > a subset of Vedic?
>
> Time.
"Further information is required."
Peter T. Daniels
> On Nov 25, 2:26 am, Harlan Messinger
> <hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
> > analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
> > > On Nov 24, 4:14 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> > >> Nu, why do you never respond to the substance of the refutations of
> > >> your postings?-
>
> > > If and when that happens, I'll acknowledge it. All I am getting so
> > > far is personal attacks and "lalalalalalalala.....I can't hear you!"
>
> > Liar. You've gotten so many serious explanations that it's mindblowing
> > that you'd say this.
>
> These emotinal responses don't show you guys in a good light. What I
> am denying is his claim of refutations of my postings. It is true
> that some data and elementary principles have been posted but those I
> can get myself
That's very true. Unfortunately, you have not bothered trying to get
them yourself.
> but it is patently obvious that nobody really wants to
> hear what I am trying to say.
Then quit "trying," and _say it_.
If you want to be understood, let alone accepted, you need to show
that you have already mastered the data and all the discussions that
have gone on over whatever your issues are for the past 200 years.
However, anything having to do with "AIT" has nothing to do with
linguistics, so if that's your only concern, you're simply in the
wrong newsgroup. If you manage to find a newsgroup where "AIT" is
considered valid, then you should be using the linguistic evidence to
_refute_ "AIT," not to claim that linguistics is "responsible" for
AIT.
If you would bother to learn something about the field, you would
discover that it is _linguists_ who generally lead the arguments
against inequality, prejudice, etc., since it is the linguists who
first took seriously the culture of the Other. It's very interesting
that in the 21st century, anthropologists seem reduced to squabbling
over "anthropological theory," as opposed to clinical descriptions of
the Other, whereas linguists continue to describe languages without
ulterior motive (other than the highly quixotic goal of translating
Scripture).
anal...@hotmail.com
(1) traditional comparative/historical linguistics points to Indo-
european linguistics as its crowning achievement.
That French and Italian are genetically related is a "ho-hum"
conclusion that nobody would bother disputing. The most interesting
claim in this field is the relationship of Sankrit with Greek, Latin
and Germanic.
(2) Although non-racist, non-nationalistic non-religious purely
academic methods as practiced today (any number of present day indian
scholars probably accept the orthodoxy) claim to prove this genetic
relationship - the relationship was already claimed for racist,
imperialistic reasons by William Jones.
"That which you desire will come to pass, for as you seek
so shall you find"
Where is the evidence that the earlier non-racist scholars looked at
the data ab initio - everything points to them merely wishing to
confirm what the zeigeist of the European colonial era had already
declared.
Indians never had a say in the profanation of Sanskrit that was busily
carried out by European scholars in the 19th century when white racism
and Christian denigration of Hinduism were as pervasive as the air
people breathed.
(3) William Jones had already announced that Sanskrit came to India
from conquerors. A lot of comparative linguists today want to
distance themselves from the various AITs (soft, hard, waves) - but
the fact remains that there would be no AIT of any kind without the
alleged linguistic evidence.
If Vedic Sanskrit = PIE that solves many problems but apparently thats
not the orthodox position. If Sanskrit is not PIE then AITs become
inevitable - and purely comparative linguistic scholars have to deal
with it and not merely pull the sheet over their head and pretend AITs
are not still being proposed by historical linguists.
(4) If PIE is proposed as a purely formal construct without claiming
that it (in any of its variant forms proposed by scholars) was ever
spoken by any people - that would be one thing. But if by genetic
relationship it is meant that there was a time in history when PIE was
actually spoken by some people and that later it was gone and that
this happened because the original PIE speakers split into groups that
lost contact with each other and naturally occurring sound changes
eventually made one language split into many - thats saying a lot.
If it is claimed that PIE was spoken at a specific location at a
specific time - then a homeland becomes mandatory. The present sorry
state of affairs with respect to the homeland tells us a story. Sound
correspondences are purely formal without the time element (time
enters indirectly because only the earliest occurring word for a
specific meaning should be used to infer genetic relationship) but an
actual time and place where PIE was spoken has to reconcile evidence
from many areas - archeology, stages of human technological
development, geography etc.
(5) All said and done what constitutes proof of genetic relationship
is only an assumption and is stated vaguely
Historical and comparative linguistcs by Raimo Anttila says
"Multiple agreement in the basic and rather unborrowable vocabulary
with sound correspondeces
considerable and frequent agreement in grammatical formants (endings
prefixes, auxiliaries) and sound correspondences"
provide evidence for genetic relationship, but
"agreements in the principles of syntax, morphology and sound system"
do not.
Tamil and Sanskrit have had enormous influence on each other and this
artificial divide obscures this relationship.
(6) I have proposed a more scientific way of looking for sound
correspondences - compare "meaning plexuses" and not words. For
example, "new" and "nine" showing sound corespondences across
languages in more than one meaning plexus seems really weird and all
these examples should be unearthed and analyzed.
For that matter I want to see a cognate word list for Sanskrit/Latin/
Greek/Germanic to be listed in one place in a reader-friendly format.
It almost looks like the proponents of PIE are pretty coy about the
evidence - in fact one Indian researcher alleges (IIRC) that Mallory
out and out misrepresented the number of cognates found for Swadesh's
100 word list.
(7) The tree model may be wrong (especially with respect to
Sanskrit). At any rate, the contact/genetic distinction is arbitrary
and a far more nuanced realtionship diagram should replace the
traditional tree diagram.
>
> DV
Harlan Messinger
> On Nov 25, 2:26 am, Harlan Messinger
> <hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>> analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
>>> On Nov 24, 4:14 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>>>> Nu, why do you never respond to the substance of the refutations of
>>>> your postings?-
>>> If and when that happens, I'll acknowledge it. All I am getting so
>>> far is personal attacks and "lalalalalalalala.....I can't hear you!"
>> Liar. You've gotten so many serious explanations that it's mindblowing
>> that you'd say this.
>
> These emotinal responses don't show you guys in a good light.
Lying, ignorance, and poor reasoning ability don't show *you* in a good
light.
>> The funny thing is your implied belief that your "contributions" here
>> will come to anything important. This is a *Usenet newsgroup*. Usenet
>> newsgroups are not central forums of discussion in any field. Almost
>> nobody reads them. If anything is ever written that blows away an entire
>> field of study, Usenet is not where it will appear.- Hide quoted text -
>
> until now.
Oh? You have singlehandedly turned Usenet into the central forum for
debate in a field of study? Are you claiming that your advent in this
group has triggered a readership of this newsgroup among the linguistic
research community that has reached the readership level of major
linguistic journals and attendance at international linguistic
conferences? You're...magic!
anal...@hotmail.com
<hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
> analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
> > On Nov 25, 2:26 am, Harlan Messinger
> > <hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
> >> analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
> >>> On Nov 24, 4:14 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> >>>> Nu, why do you never respond to the substance of the refutations of
> >>>> your postings?-
> >>> If and when that happens, I'll acknowledge it. All I am getting so
> >>> far is personal attacks and "lalalalalalalala.....I can't hear you!"
> >> Liar. You've gotten so many serious explanations that it's mindblowing
> >> that you'd say this.
>
> > These emotinal responses don't show you guys in a good light.
>
> Lying, ignorance, and poor reasoning ability don't show *you* in a good
> light.
You have every right to ascribe ignorance and poor reasoning ability
to me since its your judgement.
If you are saying I have lied - thats more or less an objective
statement of alleged fact that is clearly not true as can be verified
from the record.
I seem to have rattled you guys' cage pretty strongly as evidenceed by
all this loose, emotional condemnations of the person instead of what
he has to say.
Peter T. Daniels
> On Nov 25, 9:24 am, Harlan Messinger
> <hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
> > analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
> > > On Nov 25, 2:26 am, Harlan Messinger
> > > <hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
> > >> analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
> > >>> On Nov 24, 4:14 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> > >>>> Nu, why do you never respond to the substance of the refutations of
> > >>>> your postings?-
> > >>> If and when that happens, I'll acknowledge it. All I am getting so
> > >>> far is personal attacks and "lalalalalalalala.....I can't hear you!"
> > >> Liar. You've gotten so many serious explanations that it's mindblowing
> > >> that you'd say this.
>
> > > These emotinal responses don't show you guys in a good light.
>
> > Lying, ignorance, and poor reasoning ability don't show *you* in a good
> > light.
>
> You have every right to ascribe ignorance and poor reasoning ability
> to me since its your judgement.
Neither of those is a "judgment." They are objectively verifiable
observations.
> If you are saying I have lied - thats more or less an objective
> statement of alleged fact that is clearly not true as can be verified
> from the record.
True: you can only be said to have lied if you knew that you were
saying something untrue. Since you know nothing about these topics, by
definition you cannot lie about them.
However, you can easily lie about what has been said in this
newsgroup.
> I seem to have rattled you guys' cage pretty strongly as evidenceed by
> all this loose, emotional condemnations of the person instead of what
> he has to say.-
"What he has to say" has so far been beneath contempt, and has been
refuted at every turn.
Dušan Vukotic
> > Would you mind telling us what exactly are you trying to say?
>
> (1) traditional comparative/historical linguistics points to Indo-
> european linguistics as its crowning achievement.
All the IE languages undoubtedly appeared from the same source and it
seems quite normal that people would like to find out and see how that
SOURCE looked like!
> That French and Italian are genetically related is a "ho-hum"
> conclusion that nobody would bother disputing. The most interesting
> claim in this field is the relationship of Sankrit with Greek, Latin
> and Germanic.
Slavic also! I do not see why such a claim would not be plausible?
> (2) Although non-racist, non-nationalistic non-religious purely
> academic methods as practiced today (any number of present day indian
> scholars probably accept the orthodoxy) claim to prove this genetic
> relationship - the relationship was already claimed for racist,
> imperialistic reasons by William Jones.
The fact is that the white man could not imagine that his language
started somewhere by other race and was trasfered (borrowed) later
into his own yard. As it would be hard for a "Whity" to admit that his
ancestors played an inferior role in the development of language, it
would be (I suppose) also painful for other to acknowledge the same
thing. The question about the (genetic?) relation between Sanskrit on
one side and Greek, Latin, Germanic and Slavic on the other is
probably crucial for the understanding of the process of IE languages
evolution. I think, the most logical explanation for the relation
among Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages (especially those in
Europe) is the one which considers Sanskrit as a native language of
India (compare Southern and Northern languages of India; Dravidian,
sacred Pali, Sanskrit...) that was significantly changed under the
backbreaking burden of loanwords taken from their erstwhile Europian
conquerers.
> "That which you desire will come to pass, for as you seek
> so shall you find"
Citing the Bible? I do not think it could be of any help here.
> Where is the evidence that the earlier non-racist scholars looked at
> the data ab initio - everything points to them merely wishing to
> confirm what the zeigeist of the European colonial era had already
> declared.
The Zeitgeist of the old imperial dreams can do nothing to corroborate
the "colonial aspiration" and/or lessen "colonial lamentation"; in
this case we have all the languages of the world as witnesses of our
"brightness" and "impartiality", hundreds and hundreds of dictionaries
and thousends of valuable books written on almost any possible
linguistic subject. The emotions are the last thing we need in our
hunting for true documentation.
> Indians never had a say in the profanation of Sanskrit that was busily
> carried out by European scholars in the 19th century when white racism
> and Christian denigration of Hinduism were as pervasive as the air
> people breathed.
It seems you've got it all wrong. As I told you above, do not mix
noetic activity and emotions. Most of the 19th century scholars did
their job honestly without any other conception instead of a sincere
devotion to science and factual considerations. Nobody of the serious
and worthful 19th century's European lingual scientists had ever been
trying to denigrate anyone who did not belong to their breed.
> (3) William Jones had already announced that Sanskrit came to India
> from conquerors.
I do not know that William Jones ever said anything about invasion; as
far as I know he just concluded that Sanskrit is related to Greek.
Latin and German. Max Müller was the first to propose such a theory.
>A lot of comparative linguists today want to
> distance themselves from the various AITs (soft, hard, waves) - but
> the fact remains that there would be no AIT of any kind without the
> alleged linguistic evidence.
To be honest, AIT looks credible to me. I am a Serb and my nation
suffered a fiew centuries of slavery; it means I cannot be the one who
wants to confirm the Europen (or white) supremacy. It is true that
politics is still playing a certain role in linguistic science,
especially among not-yet-emancipated and frustrated nations. If you
say "alleged linguistic evidences" you must name those "falshoods"
concretely; otherwise we are just ruminating over and over our own
discontentment and bad internal (subjective) feelings, what has
absolutely nothing to do with neither science nor evidences.
DV
Harlan Messinger
> On Nov 25, 9:24 am, Harlan Messinger
> <hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>> analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
>>> On Nov 25, 2:26 am, Harlan Messinger
>>> <hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>>>> analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
>>>>> On Nov 24, 4:14 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>>>>>> Nu, why do you never respond to the substance of the refutations of
>>>>>> your postings?-
>>>>> If and when that happens, I'll acknowledge it. All I am getting so
>>>>> far is personal attacks and "lalalalalalalala.....I can't hear you!"
>>>> Liar. You've gotten so many serious explanations that it's mindblowing
>>>> that you'd say this.
>>> These emotinal responses don't show you guys in a good light.
>> Lying, ignorance, and poor reasoning ability don't show *you* in a good
>> light.
>
> You have every right to ascribe ignorance and poor reasoning ability
> to me since its your judgement.
Only in the sense that it's my "judgment" if I say that someone who
believes 2 + 2 = 5 doesn't know basic arithmetic. Most people would call
it "knowledge".
>
> If you are saying I have lied - thats more or less an objective
> statement of alleged fact that is clearly not true as can be verified
> from the record.
Here's the record:
You: "All I am getting so far is personal attacks and
lalalalalalalala.....I can't hear you!"
Me: "Liar. You've gotten so many serious explanations that it's
mindblowing that you'd say this." The record contains all these
explanations, so the record make sit plain that personal attacks and
"lalala" are not all you've gotten. Therefore, when you say that that's
all you've gotten, the record demonstrates that you were lying. Why
would you protest against being called a liar and then invoke in your
defense the record that shows what a lie you were telling?
> I seem to have rattled you guys' cage pretty strongly as evidenceed by
> all this loose, emotional condemnations of the person instead of what
> he has to say.
I called you a liar based on what you were saying. I didn't call you a
liar because you rattled any cages, I called you a liar because you were
lying. I have an idea: why don't you stop pretending to know what our
emotional reactions are to your nonsense, and why don't you stop
imagining your uninformed self to be this big scary threat that has
everyone quaking? You are no more of a threat than the person who thinks
2 + 2 = 5 is to mathematics.
Peter T. Daniels
> (2) Although non-racist, non-nationalistic non-religious purely
> academic methods as practiced today (any number of present day indian
> scholars probably accept the orthodoxy) claim to prove this genetic
> relationship - the relationship was already claimed for racist,
> imperialistic reasons by William Jones.
So what? Abraham Lincoln didn't believe in the equality of the "Negro"
and "White" races, yet he signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
> Where is the evidence that the earlier non-racist scholars looked at
> the data ab initio - everything points to them merely wishing to
> confirm what the zeigeist of the European colonial era had already
> declared.
Have you ever heard of William Dwight Whitney?
> (3) William Jones had already announced that Sanskrit came to India
> from conquerors. A lot of comparative linguists today want to
> distance themselves from the various AITs (soft, hard, waves) - but
> the fact remains that there would be no AIT of any kind without the
> alleged linguistic evidence.
You really do know nothing whatsoever about logic! From "If A, then B"
you cannot derive "If B, then A"!
> If Vedic Sanskrit = PIE that solves many problems but apparently thats
> not the orthodox position.
Obviously not. You can't derive Hittite from Vedic! (Nor Latin or
Greek or the others.)
> If Sanskrit is not PIE then AITs become
> inevitable - and purely comparative linguistic scholars have to deal
> with it and not merely pull the sheet over their head and pretend AITs
> are not still being proposed by historical linguists.
Only inevitable to very stupid people such as yourself.
> (4) If PIE is proposed as a purely formal construct without claiming
> that it (in any of its variant forms proposed by scholars) was ever
> spoken by any people - that would be one thing. But if by genetic
> relationship it is meant that there was a time in history when PIE was
> actually spoken by some people and that later it was gone and that
> this happened because the original PIE speakers split into groups that
> lost contact with each other and naturally occurring sound changes
> eventually made one language split into many - thats saying a lot.
Of course there was a unified speech community at some point, and of
course reconstructed PIE is only a vague approximation to what they
spoke.
> If it is claimed that PIE was spoken at a specific location at a
> specific time - then a homeland becomes mandatory.
There was a homeland. Its location is not a concern of linguists, but
rather of archeologists and (pre)historians. Linguists note only that
a region with great diversity among related languages is more likely
to be the homeland of that group than a region with uniform language.
> The present sorry
> state of affairs with respect to the homeland tells us a story. Sound
> correspondences are purely formal without the time element (time
> enters indirectly because only the earliest occurring word for a
> specific meaning should be used to infer genetic relationship) but an
> actual time and place where PIE was spoken has to reconcile evidence
> from many areas - archeology, stages of human technological
> development, geography etc.
None of which are the concern of linguistics.
> (5) All said and done what constitutes proof of genetic relationship
> is only an assumption and is stated vaguely
Once again, you write from ignorance.
> Historical and comparative linguistcs by Raimo Anttila says
>
> "Multiple agreement in the basic and rather unborrowable vocabulary
> with sound correspondeces
>
> considerable and frequent agreement in grammatical formants (endings
> prefixes, auxiliaries) and sound correspondences"
>
> provide evidence for genetic relationship, but
>
> "agreements in the principles of syntax, morphology and sound system"
>
> do not.
See if you can figure out what he means by distinguishing "agreement
in grammatical formants" (evidence) from "agreements in the principles
of ... morphology" (not evidence).
> Tamil and Sanskrit have had enormous influence on each other and this
> artificial divide obscures this relationship.
That's why linguists of Indian languages are very careful to
distinguish the influences from the inheritances.
> (6) I have proposed a more scientific way of looking for sound
> correspondences - compare "meaning plexuses" and not words. For
> example, "new" and "nine" showing sound corespondences across
> languages in more than one meaning plexus seems really weird and all
> these examples should be unearthed and analyzed.
What is "scientific" about that??
> For that matter I want to see a cognate word list for Sanskrit/Latin/
> Greek/Germanic to be listed in one place in a reader-friendly format.
> It almost looks like the proponents of PIE are pretty coy about the
> evidence - in fact one Indian researcher alleges (IIRC) that Mallory
> out and out misrepresented the number of cognates found for Swadesh's
> 100 word list.
You have been given references to IE lexicons over and over again. If
you're too lazy to go to the library and look at them, it's your own
fault.
> (7) The tree model may be wrong (especially with respect to
> Sanskrit). At any rate, the contact/genetic distinction is arbitrary
> and a far more nuanced realtionship diagram should replace the
> traditional tree diagram.
What is "the tree model ... with respect to Sanskrit"? Tree models
relate no fewer than three entities.
Again, if you would bother to learn something about historical
linguistics, you would know about "nuanced relationship diagram"s.
Didn't you bother to read anything of Anttila besides one paragraph?
anal...@hotmail.com
very simple. Its my judgement of the replies I got.
You can call it a lie that nobdoy actually used the words "I can't
hear you" - and "the gang" will probably descend to that level too
eventually. But the overall tenor of the replies has been to get me
to shut up.
I think my proposal to compare "meaning plexuses" is a serious
advancement of the field but it fell like rain on a buffalo's back -
was hardly noticed.
>
> > I seem to have rattled you guys' cage pretty strongly as evidenceed by
> > all this loose, emotional condemnations of the person instead of what
> > he has to say.
>
> I called you a liar based on what you were saying. I didn't call you a
> liar because you rattled any cages, I called you a liar because you were
> lying. I have an idea: why don't you stop pretending to know what our
> emotional reactions are to your nonsense, and why don't you stop
> imagining your uninformed self to be this big scary threat that has
> everyone quaking? You are no more of a threat than the person who thinks
> 2 + 2 = 5 is to mathematics.- Hide quoted text -
Look I am a veteran of usenet wars and believe you me - "the gang" in
no way shape or form is reacting to me in the manner of informed
savants dealing with a bumpkin. I was seriously concenrned at one
time that I was going to drive Daniels insane.
All this "liar" crap is a total waste of time and go ahead diminish
yourself more by pursuing this spiteful nitpicking - but its crystal
clear to me where this is coming from.
anal...@hotmail.com
please - if I am going to be insulted, may I at least ask for insults
at a level higher than kindergarten?
>
> However, you can easily lie about what has been said in this
> newsgroup.
>
Just can't stop weaseling can you?
> > I seem to have rattled you guys' cage pretty strongly as evidenceed by
> > all this loose, emotional condemnations of the person instead of what
> > he has to say.-
>
> "What he has to say" has so far been beneath contempt, and has been
> refuted at every turn.
bully for you.
Dušan Vukotic
> If Vedic Sanskrit = PIE that solves many problems but apparently thats
> not the orthodox position. If Sanskrit is not PIE then AITs become
> inevitable - and purely comparative linguistic scholars have to deal
> with it and not merely pull the sheet over their head and pretend AITs
> are not still being proposed by historical linguists.
Neither Vedic nor Classical Sanskrit are certainly not PIE and it
means that AIT was reality. The earlier we begin to understand it the
earlier we will be able to grasp the real mechanism of language
development.
> (4) If PIE is proposed as a purely formal construct without claiming
> that it (in any of its variant forms proposed by scholars) was ever
> spoken by any people - that would be one thing. But if by genetic
> relationship it is meant that there was a time in history when PIE was
> actually spoken by some people and that later it was gone and that
> this happened because the original PIE speakers split into groups that
> lost contact with each other and naturally occurring sound changes
> eventually made one language split into many - thats saying a lot.
Another big dilusion: no one will ever find PIE which was spoken by
a group of people. Whoever was really thinking that PIE existed as a
living language (used by all IE speakers) must had belonged to people
of anˇexuberant imagination. I already wrote about it in one of my
previous (above) posts.
> If it is claimed that PIE was spoken at a specific location at a
> specific time - then a homeland becomes mandatory. The present sorry
> state of affairs with respect to the homeland tells us a story. Sound
> correspondences are purely formal without the time element (time
> enters indirectly because only the earliest occurring word for a
> specific meaning should be used to infer genetic relationship) but an
> actual time and place where PIE was spoken has to reconcile evidence
> from many areas - archeology, stages of human technological
> development, geography etc.
Once again: PIE never existed in a form of a spoken language.
- Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -
> (5) All said and done what constitutes proof of genetic relationship
> is only an assumption and is stated vaguely
> Historical and comparative linguistcs by Raimo Anttila says
> "Multiple agreement in the basic and rather unborrowable vocabulary
> with sound correspondeces
> considerable and frequent agreement in grammatical formants (endings
> prefixes, auxiliaries) and sound correspondences"
> provide evidence for genetic relationship, but
> "agreements in the principles of syntax, morphology and sound system"
> do not.
> Tamil and Sanskrit have had enormous influence on each other and this
> artificial divide obscures this relationship.
> (6) I have proposed a more scientific way of looking for sound
> correspondences - compare "meaning plexuses" and not words. For
> example, "new" and "nine" showing sound corespondences across
> languages in more than one meaning plexus seems really weird and all
> these examples should be unearthed and analyzed.
Words "new" and "nine" are really closely related and it could be
proved semantically, step by step - beginning with the sky (nebula),
of course. I would add here the Greek and Latin words ναυτικός/
nautikos; nauta; navale; Eng. navy; even German Nabel is a distant
cognate of nine and new, but we must know the way in which the new
words were developed from those already existed.
> For that matter I want to see a cognate word list for Sanskrit/Latin/
> Greek/Germanic to be listed in one place in a reader-friendly format.
> It almost looks like the proponents of PIE are pretty coy about the
> evidence - in fact one Indian researcher alleges (IIRC) that Mallory
> out and out misrepresented the number of cognates found for Swadesh's
> 100 word list.
There is a problem to prove that these words are cognate of those
words if we are unable to see the complete historical development of
any of words in question. When we understood where a certain word
began and were it ended then we would be able to say which words are/
are not related by origine.
DV
anal...@hotmail.com
<repetitive, clueless kindergarten insults>
It is more entertaining when you go postal.
Harlan Messinger
Your judgment is comparable to the judgment of the person who states
that 2 + 2 = 5 and then characterizes the information he's given in
response to his uninformed jibe in response to yours in the same way
that you characterize the information that has been given to you.
Harlan Messinger
And still your response to being dismissed by people who know more than
you is to bitch and whine as you're doing about how people are treating
you? If you're such a veteran and it bothers you so terribly, why do you
persist?
> and believe you me - "the gang" in
> no way shape or form is reacting to me in the manner of informed
> savants dealing with a bumpkin. I was seriously concenrned at one
> time that I was going to drive Daniels insane.
If you were thus concerned, then you were deluded. As I've noted a
couple of times already, you have a penchant for imagining yourself to
have insight into how other people are reacting to you. For people to
react as you imagine, however, they'd first have to have taken you
seriously, which isn't happening because it's clear you don't know what
you're talking about.
> All this "liar" crap is a total waste of time
You're responsible for how you spend your time. If you chose to spend it
responding to me, and you consider that to have been a waste, then you
are responsible for the waste, and your issue is with yourself rather
than with me.
> and go ahead diminish
> yourself more by pursuing this spiteful nitpicking - but its crystal
> clear to me where this is coming from.
Of course it is. It's always clear to self-anointed fighters of evil
that their problems are never caused by their own behavior.
mb
> Waradpande bluntly states that a language called Indo-European is a
...
I still don't get it: How do you think quoting an already discredited
--in fact ludicrous-- nationalist kook famous for his kookery (who
gave you your own kooky ideas in the first place) help you convince
anyone?
The fact that you can't ring a single sale in all these moronic
threads you started might mean something to a sane person.
benl...@ihug.co.nz
> On Nov 25, 7:15 am, "Dušan Vukotic" <dusan.vuko...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Nov 25, 12:27 pm, analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
>
> > > These emotinal responses don't show you guys in a good light. What I
> > > am denying is his claim of refutations of my postings. It is true
> > > that some data and elementary principles have been posted but those I
> > > can get myself but it is patently obvious that nobody really wants to
> > > hear what I am trying to say.
>
> > Would you mind telling us what exactly are you trying to say?
>
> (1) traditional comparative/historical linguistics points to Indo-
> european linguistics as its crowning achievement.
One suspects that you represent it that way just so you can pretend to
have knocked off that crown.
> That French and Italian are genetically related is a "ho-hum"
> conclusion that nobody would bother disputing. The most interesting
> claim in this field is the relationship of Sankrit with Greek, Latin
> and Germanic.
It is interesting how when you decide you can't deny certain facts,
you nevertheless try to minimize their importance by referring to them
as "ho-hum", "childish", etc.
That the relatedness of French and Italian is obvious is irrelevant.
Its significance is that it provides a historically well documented
instance of the formation of a language family -- proto-language,
regular sound correspondences and all. This is an answer to people who
would otherwise be arguing that the PIE hypothesis was based on
completely imaginary processes of language history.
> (2) Although non-racist, non-nationalistic non-religious purely
> academic methods as practiced today (any number of present day indian
> scholars probably accept the orthodoxy) claim to prove this genetic
> relationship - the relationship was already claimed for racist,
> imperialistic reasons by William Jones.
Actually you have not established even that. In the celebrated
paragraph, Jones refers solely to linguistic evidence. Since you
refuse to believe in the existence of this evidence, you fill up the
vacuum with your own inferences based on your minimal historical
knowledge of Jones.
In fact this whole argument -- though it's clearly in the back of many
people's minds -- has never made much sense to me. If comparative
linguistics, or Indo-European, had been invented purely as a
superstructure for "racist, imperialistic" views, why would such
racist imperialists have wanted to claim any kinship whatever between
their European languages and those of India? And why would they have
included some Indian languages, but not others? Any attempt to explain
this fails to make any sense unless there is actual linguistic
evidence.
> "That which you desire will come to pass, for as you seek
> so shall you find"
>
> Where is the evidence that the earlier non-racist scholars looked at
> the data ab initio - everything points to them merely wishing to
> confirm what the zeigeist of the European colonial era had already
> declared.
Actually this "everything" is entirely in your imagination. You know
nothing of any of the early scholars, "non-racist" or otherwise.
> Indians never had a say in the profanation of Sanskrit that was busily
> carried out by European scholars in the 19th century when white racism
> and Christian denigration of Hinduism were as pervasive as the air
> people breathed.
I have no idea what you consider "profanation", and I doubt that you
know anything much about the activity of European scholars in the 19th
century. (Excuse me for being a bit repetitive here, but your manner
of pretending to know a whole lot about this subject is founded on
such utter falsity that it needs to be pointed out again and again.)
In any case this has nothing to do with comparative linguistics and
Indo-European.
> (3) William Jones had already announced that Sanskrit came to India
> from conquerors. A lot of comparative linguists today want to
> distance themselves from the various AITs (soft, hard, waves) - but
> the fact remains that there would be no AIT of any kind without the
> alleged linguistic evidence.
It's only you who thinks that "AIT" (for which we can read -- any sort
of migration hypothesis other than out-of-India) is an undesirable or
embarrassing consequence. The linguistic evidence requires that the
speakers of various IE languages have got to where they are (at
earliest historical attestation) somehow.
> If Vedic Sanskrit = PIE that solves many problems but apparently thats
> not the orthodox position. If Sanskrit is not PIE then AITs become
> inevitable - and purely comparative linguistic scholars have to deal
> with it and not merely pull the sheet over their head and pretend AITs
> are not still being proposed by historical linguists.
Vedic = PIE creates insoluble linguistic problems, as was realized as
early as 1870. As I pointed out above, only Indocentric ideologues
consider migration theories from outside India an intolerable
consequence. The only thing real comparative linguists object to is
the hostile caricature embodied in the continued use of the term
"AIT".
> (4) If PIE is proposed as a purely formal construct without claiming
> that it (in any of its variant forms proposed by scholars) was ever
> spoken by any people - that would be one thing. But if by genetic
> relationship it is meant that there was a time in history when PIE was
> actually spoken by some people and that later it was gone and that
> this happened because the original PIE speakers split into groups that
> lost contact with each other and naturally occurring sound changes
> eventually made one language split into many - thats saying a lot.
I don't mind saying a lot.
The "purely formal construct" idea seems to me just an evasion. The
"realist" option is a historical hypothesis which explains the
observed facts.
> If it is claimed that PIE was spoken at a specific location at a
> specific time - then a homeland becomes mandatory.
That is no more than stating what we mean by "homeland".
The present sorry
> state of affairs with respect to the homeland tells us a story.
Really? Why is it sorry, and what story does it tell us?
Sound
> correspondences are purely formal without the time element
Since you have repeatedly refused to learn the distinction between
sound correspondences and sound changes, this is either a truism or
nonsense.
(time
> enters indirectly because only the earliest occurring word for a
> specific meaning should be used to infer genetic relationship)
No idea what this is supposed to mean.
but an
> actual time and place where PIE was spoken has to reconcile evidence
> from many areas - archeology, stages of human technological
> development, geography etc.
Of course. The same is true for any proto-language.
> (5) All said and done what constitutes proof of genetic relationship
> is only an assumption and is stated vaguely
Apart from mathematics, there are not many fields -- especially
historical fields -- where what constitutes proof can be stated with
precision.
>
> Historical and comparative linguistcs by Raimo Anttila says
>
> "Multiple agreement in the basic and rather unborrowable vocabulary
> with sound correspondeces
>
> considerable and frequent agreement in grammatical formants (endings
> prefixes, auxiliaries) and sound correspondences"
>
> provide evidence for genetic relationship, but
>
> "agreements in the principles of syntax, morphology and sound system"
>
> do not.
>
> Tamil and Sanskrit have had enormous influence on each other and this
> artificial divide obscures this relationship.
Nonsense. In fact it helps to clarify the nature and history of this
relationship.
> (6) I have proposed a more scientific way of looking for sound
> correspondences - compare "meaning plexuses" and not words. For
> example, "new" and "nine" showing sound corespondences across
> languages in more than one meaning plexus seems really weird and all
> these examples should be unearthed and analyzed.
I have no idea what you are talking about here. You have come up with
a new nostrum every couple of weeks since you started, from "data
mining" to "mass comparison" to "areal diffusion" to "Nostratic" and
more, which you said would be a more "scientific" way of going about
comparative linguistics. You have not succeeded in explaining what you
would do with any of these, let alone showing how it would improve
upon our present understanding. They seem to be no more than phrases
you have picked up somewhere on the internet and thrown in just to
give the impression that you had some actual ideas to offer.
>
> For that matter I want to see a cognate word list for Sanskrit/Latin/
> Greek/Germanic to be listed in one place in a reader-friendly format.
Any other requests? Continental breakfast?
> It almost looks like the proponents of PIE are pretty coy about the
> evidence -
Complete crap. You have been told repeatedly where you can find this
information.
in fact one Indian researcher alleges (IIRC) that Mallory
> out and out misrepresented the number of cognates found for Swadesh's
> 100 word list.
There is hardly any limit to what Indian "researchers" will allege.
Unless you can present some actual evidence, comments like this are of
negative value.
> (7) The tree model may be wrong (especially with respect to
> Sanskrit). At any rate, the contact/genetic distinction is arbitrary
> and a far more nuanced realtionship diagram should replace the
> traditional tree diagram.
The distinction is not arbitrary.
As for "tree model does not fully represent historical reality",
probably a suitable Google search would net you 50,000 linguists
saying the same thing, over the past century or more. Ho hum. But the
"far more nuanced relationships", which you would find if you ever
decided to read some linguistics, go beyond what can readily be
expressed in diagrams. The family tree is still useful, once you
understand its limitations.
Ross Clark
anal...@hotmail.com
> that their problems are never caused by their own behavior.- Hide
You flatter yourself and "the gang" with the term "evil" - or with the
notion that "the gang" caused me any problems. I was hoping for some
useful debate and if there were going to be insults, witty apropos
ones - but I have mostly been disappointed and that just about sums up
my reaction to the reaction to my posts.
quoted text -
benl...@ihug.co.nz
We appear to be in the midst of a long and elaborate face-saving exit
performance from analys..., with songs and dances so far including:
"I Humiliated You"
"I Wanted Useful Debate"
"I Had Substantive Arguments"
"You Have Disappointed Me"
and probably more to follow
All about as real as a Christmas pantomime.
Ross Clark
mb
...
> We appear to be in the midst of a long and elaborate face-saving exit
> performance from analys..., with songs and dances so far including:
>
> "I Humiliated You"
> "I Wanted Useful Debate"
> "I Had Substantive Arguments"
> "You Have Disappointed Me"
> and probably more to follow
Surely "new" threads to follow, too, starting from scratch.
Harlan Messinger
"Problems" = all the stuff that you're bitching and whining about.
> I was hoping for some
> useful debate
You got it and then you showed your disdain for it. It'll do you no good
to hope for something you don't recognize when you see it.
> and if there were going to be insults, witty apropos
> ones - but I have mostly been disappointed and that just about sums up
> my reaction to the reaction to my posts.
Of course, this whole affair has been your exercise in manipulation, and
you thought it would play out as though you had marionettes on a string.
And now that you're discovering that the people here won't perform on
command, you're whining like a spoiled child who cries when the
entertainment isn't exactly what he was expecting.
Peter T. Daniels
Yes, we realize that you are impervious to facts and incapable of
learning.
Franz Gnaedinger
> from
>
> http://www.organiser.org/15oct2000/mus.html
>
> start quote:
>
> Waradpande bluntly states that a language called Indo-European is a
> principles of linguistics and examining--and ripping up--the guesswork
> of philologist after philologist, he asserts that presupposition of a
> mythical pre-vedic language called Indo-European is an outrage on
> logic. In fact in the 'linguistic' part of his thesis Waradpande
> brings to bear the full weight of his erudition. He quotes as many as
> 250 Richas from the Rigveda, examines the various meanings given to
> them by commentators from Sayana to Tilak, and delves into a detailed
> examination of the frequent assertion that the Rigveda contains
> abundant references to the Aryan-non-Aryan conflict.
>
> end quote.
>
> I assume that the reviewer is referring to PIE as "Indo-European".
How, then, is it possible that Michael Janda explains
features of the Rigveda on the sole basis of IE and
PIE, amazing features, the poems get understandable
owing to his work, at least some of them. What appear
as endless and tiresome repetitions at first become true
poetry and cosmology in Michael Janda's work, shining
light on the Rigveda via IE and PIE. How is that possible
if there was no connection? Read the Proceedings of
the Seventeenth Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference.
If you can't obtain the volume, you may tell me your postal
address via e-mail, and I'll send you fotocopies of Janda's
contribution.
Now for something else. Kooks are known for always
evading from a discussion to a meta- and meta-meta-
and meta-meta-meta discussion (also kooks on the
academic side of the fence, well understood). You
are doing this all the time. So please return to an
actual discussion. Show me a feature of the Rigveda
for which there is no parallel in the IE or PIE world.
I shall try to tell you about a parallel. If I fail, you win.
If you fail, IE and PIE win. (You are considering
discussions in here as a contest, so go for it).
Dušan Vukotic
> Kooks are known for always
> evading from a discussion to a meta- and meta-meta-
> and meta-meta-meta discussion...
Some of the kooks do not answer at all ;-)
DV
anal...@hotmail.com
wrote:
<we white boys rule this ng>
You just dropped your pants in public by entering a flame war that
didn't originally concern you.
anal...@hotmail.com
>
Not true. "The gang" is engaged in combat with me and I am playing
jiu jitsu with them.
it is you who are asserting that chalk and cheese (sanskrit and some
European languages) are related genetically. The burden of proof is
on you that
> owing to his work, at least some of them. What appear
> as endless and tiresome repetitions at first become true
> poetry and cosmology in Michael Janda's work, shining
> light on the Rigveda via IE and PIE. How is that possible
He brought out that Rigveda is poetty and cosmology through its
connection with IE and PIE? is that what you are saying?
God, the sheer effrontery of this is intiguing - yes I'll try to look
this gentleman's work up.
phog...@abo.fi
> On Nov 26, 2:59 am, analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
>
>
> > Indians never had a say in the profanation of Sanskrit that was busily
> > carried out by European scholars in the 19th century when white racism
> > and Christian denigration of Hinduism were as pervasive as the air
> > people breathed.
>
> I have no idea what you consider "profanation",
I have. The "profanation" is, of course, the fact that mere European
subhumans even touch anything written in the hallowed language. It is
a ritual purity thing. In a similar way, the problem "Analyst" has
with Indo-European is the suggestion that we lower-than-a-dog European
subhumans should have anything in common with noble Sanskrit-speaking
Aryans of divine ancestry.
It's simple Nazism, with us white honkies as Jews for a change.
phog...@abo.fi
I would be perfectly happy to give you some skinhead-gang-style racist
insults and threats. However, it would probably be illegal, so I
prefer not to.
anal...@hotmail.com
<hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
Thats your characterization of what happened.
When I couldn't get a debate (take it as read that "my stupidity,
ignorance etc. prevented me from recognizing the debate that was
offered") - i turned to a meta-debate.
I freely admit that my part in the meta-debate was and is a waste of
time - but claimimg "victory" in the meta-debate appears to be vital
interest to the gang.
phog...@abo.fi
The flame war against pure unadulterated evil (= you) concerns all
good people.
Harlan Messinger
That's still a lie.
Harlan Messinger
In other words, when you couldn't get people to agree with you. Debate
implies disagreement, and you dismiss out of hand anything that
disagrees with your preconceptions.
> (take it as read that "my stupidity,
> ignorance etc. prevented me from recognizing the debate that was
> offered") - i turned to a meta-debate.
>
> I freely admit that my part in the meta-debate was and is a waste of
> time - but claimimg "victory" in the meta-debate appears to be vital
> interest to the gang.
"The gang" is a bunch of individuals who have their own opinions, and
the only thing that makes them a "gang" in your eyes is that they all
tell you you're wrong, and since you're so convinced of your rightness,
you've come to see them as a monolith who have coordinated an effort to
beat you. Meanwhile, isn't "claiming victory" what you keep expressly
expecting to do? Making the walls of historical linguistics crumble,
etc., etc.? You've made it plain that you're in this for the glory.
>
Franz Gnaedinger
>
> He brought out that Rigveda is poetty and cosmology through its
> connection with IE and PIE? is that what you are saying?
>
> God, the sheer effrontery of this is intiguing - yes I'll try to look
> this gentleman's work up.
I never read the Rigveda. Nobody ever made
we want to read them. And now comes along
Michael Janda, tells me (and everyone else who
cares to read his work) that the Rigveda are not
just a religious mumble mumble, tiresomely
repetitive ritual formulas, but very precise
cosmology, finely shaded, most of it lost in
translation. All of a sudden I am interested in
the Rigveda. Owing to a scholar of IE and PIE,
and not owing to an Indian. That is amazing
to me. And it should wake you up as well. How
come that a scholar of IE and PIE can raise my
interest in the Rigveda, while you and others
fail? Mind you, I am challenging PIE myself,
as other people challenge the gradual evolution
proposed by Darwin, yet PIE is immensly more
reliable than your accusations.
Peter T. Daniels
If it's "lost in translation," he's not much of a translator.
Do you know the work of Dumezil?
Have you seen Calvert Watkins's *How to Kill a Dragon*? (He attempts
to reconstruct IE mythopoetics.)
benl...@ihug.co.nz
Wow! I thought that was going to be just an encore of "I Humiliated
You", but you did the dance while whistling "You Guys Are A Bunch of
Nazis" through angle brackets! Spectactular!
(I'm assuming the notation means "<I get to make shit up and you can't
stop me>")
M. Ranjit Mathews
> If Vedic Sanskrit = PIE that solves many problems but apparently thats
> not the orthodox position. If Sanskrit is not PIE then AITs become
> inevitable
No. You yourself once quoted Kalyanaraman's reference to Koenraad
Elst's paper in which Elst comes up with a scenario where PIE was not
Vedic and still originated in India. For a keyword search, try "buffer
language".
> - and purely comparative linguistic scholars have to deal
> with it and not merely pull the sheet over their head and pretend AITs
> are not still being proposed by historical linguists.
Are Dravidian scholars proposing DIT (a Dravidian Invasion Theory)
when they speculate that protoDravidian didn't originate in South
India?
anal...@hotmail.com
wrote:
Proto-dravidian refesr to nothing that exists or existed.
But heres an exercise you may want to ponder:
(1) Remove Sanskrit and its descendents from consideration and see how
it affects the cohesion of the so-called IE languages.
(2) Remove Sanskrit and Iranian and repeat the expt.
(3) Remove Sanskrit,Iranian and Greek and repeat the expt.
lora...@cs.com
As long as you don't remove Baltic, Celtic, Armenian, Greek, and
Latin.. there's no problem.
Franz Gnaedinger
>
> If it's "lost in translation," he's not much of a translator.
Michael Janda finds that the translations of the Rigveda
are wanting, basic concepts have not yet been understood,
similar words are translated into the same word, because
translators did not understand the cosmology involved.
Owing to Janda, we can attempt new translations.
> Do you know the work of Dumezil?
No.
> Have you seen Calvert Watkins's *How to Kill a Dragon*? (He attempts
> to reconstruct IE mythopoetics.)-
I have seen the work of others who rely on Watkins.
Is it about the dragon in the Rigveda? As far as I remember,
there is a myth of an inert primeval world surrounded by
a giant serpent. A hero appears, and slices the serpent
into an upper and a lower half, which become earth and sea,
and set the universe in motion. Older scholars have identified
the serpent with Greek Okeanos, but there was a linguistic
obstacle. Janda removed this and confirmed the opinion
that the Indian snake and Okeanos were the same,
moreover Janda found an ancient Greek vase with a
depiction of Okeanos with the winding body of a snake.
The Proceedings of the Annual UCLA Indo-European
Conference contain many more papers that reveal
parallels in Sanskrit and Greek and European cosmology,
mythology and narratives, I just mentioned Janda as an
example, also because he reaches down to Stone Age.
Peter T. Daniels
> On Nov 26, 7:20 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> > If it's "lost in translation," he's not much of a translator.
>
> Michael Janda finds that the translations of the Rigveda
> are wanting, basic concepts have not yet been understood,
> similar words are translated into the same word, because
> translators did not understand the cosmology involved.
> Owing to Janda, we can attempt new translations.
You're acting just like "analyst." You've happened on the work of one
scholar and decided that he's responsible for the entire edifice of IE
myth studies.
> > Do you know the work of Dumezil?
>
> No.
>
> > Have you seen Calvert Watkins's *How to Kill a Dragon*? (He attempts
> > to reconstruct IE mythopoetics.)-
>
> I have seen the work of others who rely on Watkins.
> Is it about the dragon in the Rigveda?
If there's a dragon somewhere in the Rgveda, then it's mentioned
somewhere in the enormous book. The book is about INDO-EUROPEAN
mythopoetics.
> As far as I remember,
> there is a myth of an inert primeval world surrounded by
> a giant serpent. A hero appears, and slices the serpent
> into an upper and a lower half, which become earth and sea,
> and set the universe in motion. Older scholars have identified
> the serpent with Greek Okeanos, but there was a linguistic
> obstacle. Janda removed this and confirmed the opinion
> that the Indian snake and Okeanos were the same,
> moreover Janda found an ancient Greek vase with a
> depiction of Okeanos with the winding body of a snake.
> The Proceedings of the Annual UCLA Indo-European
> Conference contain many more papers that reveal
> parallels in Sanskrit and Greek and European cosmology,
> mythology and narratives, I just mentioned Janda as an
> example, also because he reaches down to Stone Age.
Believe it or not, the Proceedings of the Annual UCLA Indo-European
Conference is not the only place where IE studies are published.
Franz Gnaedinger
>
> You're acting just like "analyst." You've happened on the work of one
> scholar and decided that he's responsible for the entire edifice of IE
> myth studies.
I saw many studies on parallels between Sanskrit and Greek
and other mythologies, but the one by Michael Janda impressed
me most. If you wish to know how and how strongly and to what
extent Sanskrit and Greek mythology are interlinked and run
parallel, you absolutely have to read Michael Janda's brillant
paper The Religion of the Indo-Europeans, in the Proceedings
of the Seventeenth Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference.
The conference was held in 2005. Janda's paper is a brief
and very concise summary of his book that he wrote in German
(which I also read) on some thirty pages. A must for everybody
in the field, and especially for our Indian friends who will learn
about amazing new insights in early mythology including the
Rigveda.
> If there's a dragon somewhere in the Rgveda, then it's mentioned
> somewhere in the enormous book. The book is about INDO-EUROPEAN
> mythopoetics.
Yes, it is mentioned in Watkins, as it apparently is
the central myth of the Rigveda. But Janda gives a more
up to date version. He links Okeanos with Vedic a-sayana
'lying on', an attribute suiting the dragon Vrtra. This, by the
way, is another test case of Magdalenian. I explain the name
of Okeanos thus:
AC EON NOS --- an expanse of land with water (ac) shore
(eon) mind (nos), mind of the shore land, personified shore,
personified in Okeanos with the long winding body of
a dragon (as on an early Greek vase shown by Janda),
then transformed into a myth of the origin, a giant dragon
lying around the inert primeval world, whereupon a hero
appears and slices the dragen into an upper and a lower
half that become land and sea and set the universe in
motion. If so, a-sayana would have been an overforming
of hypothetical AC EON NOS, or perhaps sort of a rime,
a beloved element of style in the Rigveda.
> Believe it or not, the Proceedings of the Annual UCLA Indo-European
> Conference is not the only place where IE studies are published.
Anything wrong with the publications of the Washington
Institute for the Study of Man?
anal...@hotmail.com
Another professor has shown that The Rig Veda can be combned with the
DaVinci code to predict Lotto winners - isn't that something?
mb
> This, by the
> way, is another test case of Magdalenian. I explain the name
> of Okeanos thus:
Good job.
After three posts without Magdalenian I was almost losing hope.
Peter T. Daniels
If you'll check the sci.lang archives, you'll find that there was a
bit of a kerfuffle because that Institute was at some point to some
extent funded by someone who also funded white supremacist
organizations. Someone thought that that meant that anyone who ever
published in JIES was a white supremacist.
Christopher Culver
> If you'll check the sci.lang archives, you'll find that there was a
> bit of a kerfuffle because that Institute was at some point to some
> extent funded by someone who also funded white supremacist
> organizations. Someone thought that that meant that anyone who ever
> published in JIES was a white supremacist.
It's that that simple. John V. Day, whose monograph on the physical
attributes of the Indo-Europeans (as he imagined) the Inst. for the
Study of Man published, also published in a white nationalist magazine
an article claiming that "race-mixing" is what caused Greek and Roman
civilization to fall.
The other authors published in that series are respectable. Lehmann's
monograph on Pre-Indo-European is fascinating reading.
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
peterpa...@hotmail.com
you straight.
Science has decided to reject cultural diffusion out of hand, whilst
at the same time accepting Homo Sapiens diffused out of Africa 150,000
years ago. Science has also decided to reject the role natural
catastrophes have played in the genesis of man. By doing this, it has
created a multitude of unworkable hypotheses in trying to understand
the complex interrelatedness of cultures around the world.
Only by accepting the content of legends describing our ancient
history and comparing them to genetic evidence along with
archaeological and linguistic evidence (in that order of importance)
can we begin to understand our past.
You may reject Graham Hancocks methodology, in his Book Underworld -
Kingdoms of the Ice Age, but in that book he touches on some very
important points regarding ancient India and academies of learning in
Tamil Nadu 16,000 years ago. Only by searching the continental shelves
of the world for Ice age towns and monuments will we begin to
understand our past.
The confusion over the settlement of America has been brought about by
an unwillingness to accept man's seafaring ability in the past. There
have been many periods in our past where globalization via seafaring
has occurred - usually folllowed by a natural catastrophe, isolation
and a reinvention of culture over time.
The first period of globalization may well have been 750,000 years ago
with Java man doing a bit of coastal navigation.
More importantly with regard to European genesis, during the last Ice
Age, Island based cultures may well have been where civilization
developed to their highest levels (dare I say Atlantis) - away from
barbaric tribes intent on bringing them down. Their isolation from the
large and dangerous animals of the continents would also have made it
easier to concentrate on the finer things in life. When Atlantis was
destroyed, the only remaining colony of this culture was along the
upper Nile - far enough inland not to be devastated by the massive
tsunamis that destroyed all coastal communities along the Atlantic and
Mediterranean seaboard. The only surviving people from this culture in
America were a few isolated hunting parties, hence the reason why
European Haplotype X of America is most similar to Caucasians of the
Western Indian Ocean/Persian Gulf - from this back migration from
Atlantis.
Then we have a very significant period of globalization via sea trade
during the Bronze Age. This is a time when genetic and cultural
diffusion is most evident around the world. Copper from Isle Royal to
Europe, old dynasty Egyptian heiroglyphs amongst the Micmac, Egyptian
heiroglyphs in Gosford NSW, Mayan genes amongst the Greeks, Greek
genes amongst the Peruvians, Indonesian and Japanese genes amongst the
tribes of South America, Cocaine and tobacco in Egyptian mummies,
Similarities in language between ;Algonquin and Gaelic, Basque and
Anasazi etc etc.
During the early period of this age of globalization (5-7,000 years
ago) according to Charles Hapgood, maps accurate to 1 degree were
drawn of the Antarctic and Greenland without ice (maps centred on
Alexandria) - during this particularly warm period when the NW passage
would have been open allowing the East Asian culture to migrate to
Scandinavia - hence the Asian Y DNA amongst the Finns as well as
hints of Austronesian in the Finnic language as well as similar
petroglyphs in NW Canada and Norway. This would also explain the
petroglyphs of outrigger canoes in Norway as well as the rounder Asian
type skulls found in coastal European gravesites from this time,
along with the 5,000 year old Japanese myami pendants found in Malta.
This migration out of East Asia from where a multitude of Megalithic
ruins lie on the seafloor around the Ryuku Archipelago is when Asian
genes entered America (6-8,000 years ago) and coincides when this area
finally went underwater. The migration to America would almost
certainly have been by sea via a great circle route which coincides
with the Kuroshio current.
So to cut a long story short, Sanscrit in European language may have
come from a time of globalization - 12-16,000 years ago or it may have
arrived in Europe with the Bronze Age traders.
To be offended by the extent of cultural sharing in the past can only
reflect the narrow minded nature of the individual taking offence.
Peter Marsh
www.polynesian-prehistory.com
benl...@ihug.co.nz
<crcul...@christopherculver.com> wrote:
> "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> writes:
>
> > If you'll check the sci.lang archives, you'll find that there was a
> > bit of a kerfuffle because that Institute was at some point to some
> > extent funded by someone who also funded white supremacist
> > organizations. Someone thought that that meant that anyone who ever
> > published in JIES was a white supremacist.
>
> It's that that simple. John V. Day, whose monograph on the physical
> attributes of the Indo-Europeans (as he imagined) the Inst. for the
> Study of Man published, also published in a white nationalist magazine
> an article claiming that "race-mixing" is what caused Greek and Roman
> civilization to fall.
>
> The other authors published in that series are respectable. Lehmann's
> monograph on Pre-Indo-European is fascinating reading.
>
The individual mentioned in the earlier discussions was Roger Pearson,
founder of JIES, who definitely does seem to have some unsavory far
right/racist associations. I think one has to admit this is at least
embarrassing, and makes an easy mark for antagonists, as in the recent
Hindutva witch-hunt against Michael Witzel, where they were trying to
demand he disclose all communications with Roger Pearson "or anyone
associated with the JIES"(!). Obviously guilt by association is no
problem for them.
Ross Clark
benl...@ihug.co.nz
Thanks for sharing with sci.lang a little of the wisdom with which you
have been illuminating sci.archaeology recently. However, if you had
paid even a little attention to the thread, you might have seen that
nobody was talking about "Sanscrit in European language". And nobody
was "offended by the extent of cultural sharing in the past".
So the last 10% of your message was as irrelevant as the rest.
Ross Clark
Franz Gnaedinger
>
> If you'll check the sci.lang archives, you'll find that there was a
> bit of a kerfuffle because that Institute was at some point to some
> extent funded by someone who also funded white supremacist
> organizations. Someone thought that that meant that anyone who ever
> published in JIES was a white supremacist.
So the amazing pictures of the Horse nebula in the
constellation of Orion taken by the Hubble telescope
are invalidated by the fact that the NASA was mainly
built up by Wernher von Braun?
Adlf Htlr believed the CroMagnons were a supreme race,
accounting for the supremacy of the northern Europeans.
In my opinion, the Ice Age triggered new inventions of all
kinds, which, by the end of the Ice Age, traveled eastward
and southward, reaching Goebekli Tepe, then spreading
to Asia Minor, Egypt, Iran, India. The great era of Europe
started only later, when the achievements of Asia Minor,
Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, India, etc., reached Europe.
Ex oriente lux - a formula the Nazi ideologers hated.
By the way: just a couple of days ago I read about the
result of a genetic study: one of ten Germans has Jewish
blood rolling in his or her veins ...
PS for mb: M Ma Mag Magd Magda Magdal Magdale
Magdalen Magdaleni Magdalenia Magdalenian
PPS for the killrating mob of sci.lang: the message of
an adept of Graham Hankook passes unrated? Yes,
that's understandable. I can't expect anything else from
you. In the late 1990s I fought the Hankook mania in
sci.archaeology, pointing out the racist fog in his work,
namely the assumption that the Egyptians were not
able to build the Great Pyramid without the help of
Atlantians. I show on my website what the Egyptians
really achieved. They were the first to systematically
calculate the circumference and area of the circle.
Over two millennia before Archimedes, using a
similar but more easily accessible method based
on the Sacred Triangle 3-4-5. And just for this,
killrating mob of sci.lang, I must be killrated again.
Ex oriente lux - that odious formula must be killed
killed killed
phog...@abo.fi
> On Nov 28, 12:32 pm, Christopher Culver
>
>
>
> <crcul...@christopherculver.com> wrote:
> > "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> writes:
>
> > > If you'll check the sci.lang archives, you'll find that there was a
> > > bit of a kerfuffle because that Institute was at some point to some
> > > extent funded by someone who also funded white supremacist
> > > organizations. Someone thought that that meant that anyone who ever
> > > published in JIES was a white supremacist.
>
> > It's that that simple. John V. Day, whose monograph on the physical
> > attributes of the Indo-Europeans (as he imagined) the Inst. for the
> > Study of Man published, also published in a white nationalist magazine
> > an article claiming that "race-mixing" is what caused Greek and Roman
> > civilization to fall.
>
> > The other authors published in that series are respectable. Lehmann's
> > monograph on Pre-Indo-European is fascinating reading.
>
> The individual mentioned in the earlier discussions was Roger Pearson,
> founder of JIES, who definitely does seem to have some unsavory far
> right/racist associations.
The same guy?
Dušan Vukotic
> AC EON NOS --- an expanse of land with water (ac) shore
> (eon) mind (nos),
Use your imagination: aqua; aqueanos, okeanos/ωκεανός; Serb. ukvašen;
Ger. waschen;
Serb. okovan fettered (from kovanje /Eng. coining/; cf. hoof, Serb.
kopito; Serb. uhvatiti (catch; uhvaćen caught!), ukotviti anchor...
Can anyone understand the relation between German fassen, gefangen and
ge-waschen on one side and Serbian vezan (bound, tied), uhvaćen
(cought) and ukvašen (wet, dampish, moist) on the other?
Here we have to deal with the deepest philosophical content: fettered
water!
Unfortunately, on this forum, no one seems to be able to cope with the
most profound wisdom hidden inside the words we are verbalizing in our
everyday life.
What a pity indeed!
DV
Peter T. Daniels
> On Nov 27, 10:21 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> > If you'll check the sci.lang archives, you'll find that there was a
> > bit of a kerfuffle because that Institute was at some point to some
> > extent funded by someone who also funded white supremacist
> > organizations. Someone thought that that meant that anyone who ever
> > published in JIES was a white supremacist.
>
> So the amazing pictures of the Horse nebula in the
> constellation of Orion taken by the Hubble telescope
> are invalidated by the fact that the NASA was mainly
> built up by Wernher von Braun?
You asked:
"Anything wrong with the publications of the Washington
Institute for the Study of Man?"
And I replied as above.
However, you decided that your original question was uninteresting and
snipped it, instead moving on to another fantasy.
Franz Gnaedinger
>
> You asked:
>
> And I replied as above.
Yes, thank you.
> However, you decided that your original question was uninteresting and
> snipped it, instead moving on to another fantasy.
I saw the implications of your answer and replied to the
rat tail of consequences. The general problem is the
question of science and racism. Academe is full of
racism, also schoolbooks, also the Usenet. In the late
1990s Brian M. Scott told me that before the Greeks
nobody was able of a theoretical insight. A plain racist
statement, and he never took it back. Ross Clark is
a friend of Eric Stevens, and this Eric Stevens is an
adept of a German Nazi and SS man who prolonged
SS archaeology into the post war era, giving a sugar
coated version of the Nazi ideology, according to which
the Greeks were Germans, and according to which the
old formula "ex oriente lux" is wrong - all originated in
the north. My aim is a fair history of civilization that
acknowledges all contributions, and when I attest an
important role to Ice Age Europe there is an all deciding
difference between me and the Nazi ideology: I say that
the evolution and development of civilization took many
turns, there is not a direct line between CroMagnons
and Aryans, the legacy of the Ice Age spread eastward
and southward, and only the great civilizations of Asia
Minor, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia and India made
ancient Greek, Rome, and Europe possible: ex oriente
lux. Considering all the racism in academe, in schoolbooks,
and in the Usenet, I can't find any trace of blatant racism
in the publications of the Institute for the Study of Man,
so I go on relying on the Proceedings of the Annual UCLA
Indo-European Conference. Now, killrating mob of sci.lang,
killrate my message while leaving the message of the
adept of Graham Hankook, another veiled racist, unrated.
phog...@abo.fi
>Brian M. Scott told me that before the Greeks
> nobody was able of a theoretical insight. A plain racist
> statement, and he never took it back. Ross Clark is
> a friend of Eric Stevens, and this Eric Stevens is an
> adept of a German Nazi and SS man who prolonged
> SS archaeology into the post war era,
And I am, perhaps, a Nazi too? Or maybe a crypto-IRA terrorist?
ranjit_...@yahoo.com
> wrote:
>
>
>
> > On Nov 25, 5:59 am, analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
>
> > > If Vedic Sanskrit = PIE that solves many problems but apparently thats
> > > not the orthodox position. If Sanskrit is not PIE then AITs become
> > > inevitable
>
> > No. You yourself once quoted Kalyanaraman's reference to Koenraad
> > Elst's paper in which Elst comes up with a scenario where PIE was not
> > Vedic and still originated in India. For a keyword search, try "buffer
> > language".
>
> > > - and purely comparative linguistic scholars have to deal
> > > with it and not merely pull the sheet over their head and pretend AITs
> > > are not still being proposed by historical linguists.
>
> > Are Dravidian scholars proposing DIT (a Dravidian Invasion Theory)
> > when they speculate that protoDravidian didn't originate in South
> > India?
>
> Proto-dravidian refesr to nothing that exists or existed.
You once referred to it as Tamil. You said IVC people spoke Tamil, had
peaceful interactions with Sanskrit speakers there and voluntarily
migrated to Tamilnadu. You should call that that a Tamil invasion
theory since you say that the expansion of the Aryan speech area
necessarily implies an Aryan Invasion Theory.
> But heres an exercise you may want to ponder:
> (1) Remove Sanskrit and its descendents from consideration and see how
> it affects the cohesion of the so-called IE languages.
> (2) Remove Sanskrit and Iranian and repeat the expt.
> (3) Remove Sanskrit,Iranian and Greek and repeat the expt.
That much removal wouldn't affect very much because there are so many
branches of IE available to make reconstructions from. It might remove
breathy/ aspirated consonants from reconstructed PIE but PIE's phoneme
inventory would probably remain unchanged with these consonants being
replaced by glottalic, ejective or implosive consonants.
This brings us to the question: before Jones examined Sanskrit and
said it appeared related to Greek and Latin, had he (or anyone else)
said that Greek and Latin appeared related to each other? Or was it
only after Sanskrit was philologically studied that anyone observed
that Greek and Latin must be related to each other?
Harlan Messinger
> On Nov 26, 4:32 pm, "M. Ranjit Mathews" <ranjit_math...@yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>> On Nov 25, 5:59 am, analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
>>
>>> If Vedic Sanskrit = PIE that solves many problems but apparently thats
>>> not the orthodox position. If Sanskrit is not PIE then AITs become
>>> inevitable
>> No. You yourself once quoted Kalyanaraman's reference to Koenraad
>> Elst's paper in which Elst comes up with a scenario where PIE was not
>> Vedic and still originated in India. For a keyword search, try "buffer
>> language".
>>
>>> - and purely comparative linguistic scholars have to deal
>>> with it and not merely pull the sheet over their head and pretend AITs
>>> are not still being proposed by historical linguists.
>> Are Dravidian scholars proposing DIT (a Dravidian Invasion Theory)
>> when they speculate that protoDravidian didn't originate in South
>> India?
>
> Proto-dravidian refesr to nothing that exists or existed.
Yeah, Latin never existed either. French and Spanish and Romanian all
just showed up independently one day.
António Marques
(What's SS archaeology?)
Harlan Messinger
> Now, killrating mob of sci.lang,
> killrate my message while leaving the message of the
> adept of Graham Hankook, another veiled racist, unrated.
I am so sick of this. Who is in this alleged "killrating mob" and what
makes you think that there is a whole group of people who even care what
ratings Google Groups shows for your posts?
I just looked at a number of your posts in Google Groups, and your
rating on each of them is based on a vote by at most two people. One of
them even gave you a rating of five stars. So has it occurred to you
that maybe you have just one sworn enemy, perhaps even a person who runs
a process that hunts down your messages and sends negative votes
automatically so that he doesn't even really think about it on a daily
basis? In any event, your repeated rants about a "killrating mob"
demonstrate how divorced your wild imagination is from reality. And if
it's that divorced *now*, imagine how divorced it is when you're
speculating on social customs among people who existed thousands of
years before recorded history.
phog...@abo.fi
> phogl...@abo.fi wrote:
> > On Nov 29, 12:04 pm, Franz Gnaedinger <f...@bluemail.ch> wrote:
> >> Brian M. Scott told me that before the Greeks
> >> nobody was able of a theoretical insight. A plain racist
> >> statement, and he never took it back. Ross Clark is
> >> a friend of Eric Stevens, and this Eric Stevens is an
> >> adept of a German Nazi and SS man who prolonged
> >> SS archaeology into the post war era,
>
> > And I am, perhaps, a Nazi too? Or maybe a crypto-IRA terrorist?
>
> (What's SS archaeology?)
Probably it has something to do with SS-Ahnenerbe, the SS centre for
fabricating Nazism-compatible archaeological and linguistic "science".
Among other things, they did some research into Celtic languages,
because they wanted to exploit Celtic nationalisms against Great
Britain in the war.
Peter T. Daniels
<ranjit_math...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> This brings us to the question: before Jones examined Sanskrit and
> said it appeared related to Greek and Latin, had he (or anyone else)
> said that Greek and Latin appeared related to each other? Or was it
> only after Sanskrit was philologically studied that anyone observed
> that Greek and Latin must be related to each other?-
For the umpteenth time, Jones was not a philologist! He never on any
occasion said _anything else_ about languages! There's just that
single "sprung from some common source" paragraph.
Jones was not, in fact, the first to recognize the kinship of European
languages (he may have been the first to add Skt. to the mix, because
he was one of the first Westerners to become acquainted with it).
Giuliano Bonfante has an article in the first volume of the Journal of
World History (ca. 1952) (published by UNESCO to support the work on
their first World History project -- five of the six volumes did
eventually get published and they're not bad) on IE before Jones.
The Greeks and Roman grammarians seem not to have noticed the
similarity, but the languages aren't particularly similar!
Franz Gnaedinger
>
> And I am, perhaps, a Nazi too? Or maybe a crypto-IRA terrorist?
Do you believe that the ancient Greeks were Germans?
Do you believe in Atlantis? Do you believe in Atlantis
in the north, origin of the Aryan Lichtmenschen? Juergen
SSpanuth does or did. And he found followers in sci.
archaeology, Harald Henkel, Eric Stevens, and others.
Personally I don't think you believe in Atlantis anywhere
let alone Atlantis in the north, but how about math history?
Do you share Brian M. Scott's opinion that before the
Greeks nobody was able of a theoretical insight? And
do you think the series
pi/4 = 1/1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + 1/9 - 1/11 + 1/13 - 1/15 ...
is justly called after Gregory, an English mathematician,
although the series was known to the Indians long before
the time of Gregory, and the Indian mathematician
Nilakantha knew at least three pi series, one of them
a fast one, again before Gregory? And do you find it
correct that my messages are killrated while the
Hankook nonsense passes unrated? The racists of
academe love the Hankook nonsense. They much
prefer that people think Atlantians designed the Great
Pyramid than attributing a mathematical knowledge
to the ancient Egyptians. And so do the killrating mob
of sci.lang.
Peter T. Daniels
The leading Assyriologist of the 20th century, Wolfram von Soden,
wrote a dissertation on -- well, who knows what -- ca. 1934 that was
published in two numbers of the Zeitschrift fur Assyriologie but was
later expunged from his bibliography. He apparently denounced his
teacher, the greatest of all Assyriologists/Sumerologists, Benno
Landsberger, as "der Jude" (Landsberger was one of hundreds of Jewish
scholars whom Ataturk invited to Ankara to establish an intellectual
life in the new Turkey, and he eventually came to Chicago). Von Soden
attempted to make amends in 1952 by dedicating his grammar of Akkadian
(still the standard reference) to his teacher, but they were not
finally reconciled until the 1968 Rencontre Assyriologique
Internationale held in Chicago, where, I am told, they spent several
hours together behind closed doors. (Landsberger died the next year,
so I never met him.)
The next Chicago RAI was in 2005, to celebrate the completion (well,
almost) of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary and also, as it turned out,
to bid farewell to Erica Reiner, who had been associated with it for
fifty years (including some 15 years as Editor-in-Charge), who died on
December 31 of that year, at the age of 81.
Franz Gnaedinger
>
> (What's SS archaeology?)
(Archaeology in the times of the Third Reich. Most of
them believed in Atlantis in the north, home of the Aryan
Lichtmenschen, and that the ancient Greeks were Germans,
which claim justified the especially brutal occupation of
Greece and Crete: There is one shelf full of 'archaeological'
books published by a certain Verlag at Tübingen in my
university library, and they all tell the same: the old formula
"ex oriente lux" is wrong, the light came from Atlantis in
the north, home of the Aryan Lichtmenschen who populated
Europe and came as far as Greece and Crete. Among them
Juergen Spanuth, an SS clergyman during the Third Reich.
He saved Nazi archaeology after the war, sugar coating
the above nonsense, and he had considerable success
with it, his book was also published in the USA and was
a good seller. And it was taken seriously in sci.archaeology
too. I had a very hard time debunking that nonsense. He
is the role model of a cult archaeologist. His followers
all convey racist stuff in disguise. In the case of Graham
Hankook the racism hides in the assumptions that those
primitive Egyptians were not able to design a Great Pyramid,
this must have been done by Atlantians.)
Dušan Vukotic
Opportunity makes a thief... and Nazi too! ;-)
DV
ranjit_...@yahoo.com
> On Nov 26, 4:32 pm, "M. Ranjit Mathews" <ranjit_math...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> But heres an exercise you may want to ponder:
> (1) Remove Sanskrit and its descendents from consideration and see how
> it affects the cohesion of the so-called IE languages.
The Handbook of Linguistics by Mark Aronoff, Janie Rees-Miller says
this about IE before Jones, by people who didn't know Indic
languages:
On the Scythian Hypothesis, Andreas Jaeger, 1686:
An ancient language, once spoken in the distant past in the area of
the Caucasus mountains [who knows how he chose this point of origin]
and spreading by migration throughout Europe and Asia, had itself
ceased to be spoken and left no linguistic monuments behind, but had
as a "mother" generated a host of "daughter languages" many of which
had in turn become "mothers" to further "daughters." (For a language
tends to develop dialects, and these dialects in the course of time
become independent, mutually unintelligible languages.) Descendants of
the ancestral languages include Persian, Greek, Italic (whence Latin
and in time the modern Romance tongues), the Slavonic languages,
Celtic and finally, Gothic and the other Germanic tongues.
Edward Lhuyd (1707) compared several Indo-European languages (Celtic,
Germanic, Slavic, Persian, etc.), presenting a long list of cognates,
sound correspondences and sound changes. He even discovered part of
Grimm's law long before Rask and Grimm made it famous.
Peter T. Daniels
<ranjit_math...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Nov 26, 5:52 pm, analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
>
> > On Nov 26, 4:32 pm, "M. Ranjit Mathews" <ranjit_math...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > But heres an exercise you may want to ponder:
> > (1) Remove Sanskrit and its descendents from consideration and see how
> > it affects the cohesion of the so-called IE languages.
>
> The Handbook of Linguistics by Mark Aronoff, Janie Rees-Miller
Did you enjoy my chapter?
> says
> this about IE before Jones, by people who didn't know Indic
> languages:
Actually, Lyle Campbell says this. Janie and Mark merely had the good
taste to ask him to write the chapter on history of linguistics.
ranjit_...@yahoo.com
> On Nov 29, 1:54 pm, "ranjit_math...@yahoo.com"
>
> Did you enjoy my chapter?
I found it on Google books. I didn't know you had an article in it but
I just looked at it. Only the 1st 4 pages of your article are on
books.google.com. You say a logographic script is not possible with
one character for every syllable. I don't see why not; a language can
have only a finite number of syllables - the longest in Hindi is 3
consonants and a vowel and the kshma in Lakshman can be written
virtually as a single grapheme. It's not clear how it can be known
that written Sumerian used pictures only for a few decades.
Peter T. Daniels
<ranjit_math...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Nov 29, 11:51 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > On Nov 29, 1:54 pm, "ranjit_math...@yahoo.com"
> > > The Handbook of Linguistics by Mark Aronoff, Janie Rees-Miller
>
> > Did you enjoy my chapter?
>
> I found it on Google books. I didn't know you had an article in it but
> I just looked at it. Only the 1st 4 pages of your article are on
> books.google.com.
Supposedly if you keep clicking "Surprise me!" it will eventually show
you the whole book. (Monkeys and typewriters, I suppose.)
> You say a logographic script is not possible with
> one character for every syllable.
I said nothing of the sort.
I said, "There can be no purely logographic script."
> I don't see why not; a language can
> have only a finite number of syllables - the longest in Hindi is 3
> consonants and a vowel and the kshma in Lakshman can be written
> virtually as a single grapheme.
Yet more evidence why the term "grapheme" should be abolished. Under
what theory of graphemics can a complex akshara be considered a single
grapheme??
> It's not clear how it can be known
> that written Sumerian used pictures only for a few decades.
I said, "It took a very short time -- measured in decades -- for the
recognizable pictures ... to turn into the patterns of wedges." Even
if the process took 15 decades -- 5 or more generations -- that's not
long enough to be measured in centuries. (Too bad we don't have a term
for 20-year periods.)
benl...@ihug.co.nz
I'm amazed to find my name mentioned on one of those rare occasions
when I actually look at one of Franz's posts. I had considered him an
incurable but basically harmless kook. Now he seems to have caught the
"Nazi-hunting" bug from analys... or somebody.
Just to put some factual checks on his free-associations: Eric Stevens
and I live in the same city, but we've never met, and only rarely
communicated off-line. All this Nazi/SS stuff that Eric is supposed to
be a follower of is news to me, after reading his posts for several
years.
As for "killrating", I hear the term but I have no idea what it refers
to. If it has something to do with those little rows of stars that
appear on Google Groups, I have never paid any attention to them, and
never so much as attempted to "rate" somebody's post. This seems to me
as pointless and childish as becoming somebody's "friend" on MySpace.
That's enough. I return to my normal policy of ignoring Franz.
Ross Clark
Brian M. Scott
"benl...@ihug.co.nz" <benl...@ihug.co.nz> wrote in
<news:4920518b-b43f-40fe...@s36g2000prg.googlegroups.com>
in sci.lang:
> On Nov 29, 11:04 pm, Franz Gnaedinger <f...@bluemail.ch> wrote:
[...]
>> I saw the implications of your answer and replied to the
>> rat tail of consequences. The general problem is the
>> question of science and racism. Academe is full of
>> racism, also schoolbooks, also the Usenet. In the late
>> 1990s Brian M. Scott told me that before the Greeks
>> nobody was able of a theoretical insight.
Either you're a liar, or you're incapable of understanding
what you read.
>> A plain racist statement, and he never took it back.
Can't: I didn't make it in the first place.
Likewise. I think that Eric's a bit of a kook, but Franz's
accusation is absurd.
[...]
Brian
Horace LaBadie
This accusation appears to hinge on the use of Jurgen Spanuth as a
source about Atlantis. Not much of a basis for the accusation of being
"an adept of a German Nazi." Kook, yes. Nazi adept, no.
phog...@abo.fi
> On Nov 29, 3:49 pm, phogl...@abo.fi wrote:
>
>
>
> > And I am, perhaps, a Nazi too? Or maybe a crypto-IRA terrorist?
>
> Do you believe that the ancient Greeks were Germans?
No.
> Do you believe in Atlantis?
I believe that there are widespread legends about an ancient island
which sunk into ocean.
Do you believe in Atlantis
> in the north, origin of the Aryan Lichtmenschen?
No.
phog...@abo.fi
wrote:
>
> As for "killrating", I hear the term but I have no idea what it refers
> to. If it has something to do with those little rows of stars that
> appear on Google Groups, I have never paid any attention to them, and
> never so much as attempted to "rate" somebody's post. This seems to me
> as pointless and childish as becoming somebody's "friend" on MySpace.
> That's enough. I return to my normal policy of ignoring Franz.
Actually, I sometimes make a point of "killrating" Franz with relish,
especially when he has been complaining about killrates.
anal...@hotmail.com
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Nov 26, 4:32 pm, "M. Ranjit Mathews" <ranjit_math...@yahoo.com>
> > wrote:
>
> > > On Nov 25, 5:59 am, analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
>
> > > > If Vedic Sanskrit = PIE that solves many problems but apparently thats
> > > > not the orthodox position. If Sanskrit is not PIE then AITs become
> > > > inevitable
>
> > > No. You yourself once quoted Kalyanaraman's reference to Koenraad
> > > Elst's paper in which Elst comes up with a scenario where PIE was not
> > > Vedic and still originated in India. For a keyword search, try "buffer
> > > language".
>
> > > > - and purely comparative linguistic scholars have to deal
> > > > with it and not merely pull the sheet over their head and pretend AITs
> > > > are not still being proposed by historical linguists.
>
> > > Are Dravidian scholars proposing DIT (a Dravidian Invasion Theory)
> > > when they speculate that protoDravidian didn't originate in South
> > > India?
>
> > Proto-dravidian refesr to nothing that exists or existed.
>
> You once referred to it as Tamil. You said IVC people spoke Tamil, had
> peaceful interactions with Sanskrit speakers there and voluntarily
> migrated to Tamilnadu. You should call that that a Tamil invasion
> theory since you say that the expansion of the Aryan speech area
> necessarily implies an Aryan Invasion Theory.
The emergence of idioms cannot be explained. The term AIT has now
stuck, because it serves a felt need to ridicule Europeans for their
racism in the colonial era that gave rise to this theory.
>
> > But heres an exercise you may want to ponder:
> > (1) Remove Sanskrit and its descendents from consideration and see how
> > it affects the cohesion of the so-called IE languages.
> > (2) Remove Sanskrit and Iranian and repeat the expt.
> > (3) Remove Sanskrit,Iranian and Greek and repeat the expt.
>
> That much removal wouldn't affect very much because there are so many
> branches of IE available to make reconstructions from. It might remove
> breathy/ aspirated consonants from reconstructed PIE but PIE's phoneme
> inventory would probably remain unchanged with these consonants being
> replaced by glottalic, ejective or implosive consonants.
>
You are missing my point
(1) First of all - genetic relatedness must be expessed quantitatively
- and not with a 0/1 score (1 = related 0 = not related), This idea
is Mark Hubey's - and I know that the bloods and crips in this ng.
have had their tussles with him - but its a good idea anyhow.
(2) let us focus on Skt, Iranian,Greek,Latin ,slavic and Germanic.
If a study of all 6 gives an average score of 0.7 for all.
If you now remove Sanskrit and Iranian and the average score for
Greek, Latin, Slavic and Germanic goes up to 0.8
and then if you remove Sanskrit,Iranian and Greek and the average
score for Latin, Slavic and germanic goes up to 0.9
That tells you something.
That would tell you that all similarities are because of contact -
Sasnkrit indigenous to the subcontinent - Sanskrit's words and grammar
influenced the Iranians due to early contact, Greeks in their turn
influenced by contact with Iranians and perhaps to a lesser extent
with Indians.
Greek is the primary source of Sanskritic influence on all of Europe's
languages. There might have been additional direct Indian influence
due to trade and travels by scholars both ways.
Europe didn't have anything to teach India way back when the European
languages were being formed - all the teaching was one way from India
to Europe.
> This brings us to the question: before Jones examined Sanskrit and
> said it appeared related to Greek and Latin, had he (or anyone else)
> said that Greek and Latin appeared related to each other? Or was it
> only after Sanskrit was philologically studied that anyone observed
> that Greek and Latin must be related to each other?- Hide quoted text -
If the similarity of Sanskrit to Greek and Latin kicked off the whole
enterprise, that would lend credence to the Indian complaint that
appropriating Sanskirt from the Indians and claiming it to be a
European bequest to India was the motivating force behind historical
and comparative linguitsics.
>
> - Show quoted text -
benl...@ihug.co.nz
Your felt need to ridicule interferes with your ability to think
rationally about the whole question.
> > > But heres an exercise you may want to ponder:
> > > (1) Remove Sanskrit and its descendents from consideration and see how
> > > it affects the cohesion of the so-called IE languages.
> > > (2) Remove Sanskrit and Iranian and repeat the expt.
> > > (3) Remove Sanskrit,Iranian and Greek and repeat the expt.
>
> > That much removal wouldn't affect very much because there are so many
> > branches of IE available to make reconstructions from. It might remove
> > breathy/ aspirated consonants from reconstructed PIE but PIE's phoneme
> > inventory would probably remain unchanged with these consonants being
> > replaced by glottalic, ejective or implosive consonants.
>
> You are missing my point
>
> (1) First of all - genetic relatedness must be expessed quantitatively
> - and not with a 0/1 score (1 = related 0 = not related), This idea
> is Mark Hubey's - and I know that the bloods and crips in this ng.
> have had their tussles with him - but its a good idea anyhow.
Explain what's so good about it.
> (2) let us focus on Skt, Iranian,Greek,Latin ,slavic and Germanic.
>
> If a study of all 6 gives an average score of 0.7 for all.
>
> If you now remove Sanskrit and Iranian and the average score for
> Greek, Latin, Slavic and Germanic goes up to 0.8
>
> and then if you remove Sanskrit,Iranian and Greek and the average
> score for Latin, Slavic and germanic goes up to 0.9
>
> That tells you something.
>
> That would tell you that all similarities are because of contact -
> Sasnkrit indigenous to the subcontinent - Sanskrit's words and grammar
> influenced the Iranians due to early contact, Greeks in their turn
> influenced by contact with Iranians and perhaps to a lesser extent
> with Indians.
>
> Greek is the primary source of Sanskritic influence on all of Europe's
> languages. There might have been additional direct Indian influence
> due to trade and travels by scholars both ways.
>
> Europe didn't have anything to teach India way back when the European
> languages were being formed - all the teaching was one way from India
> to Europe.
So you really are going to sit there and wait for others to conduct
the studies to provide the results to confirm your ethnocentric
prejudices?
>
> > This brings us to the question: before Jones examined Sanskrit and
> > said it appeared related to Greek and Latin, had he (or anyone else)
> > said that Greek and Latin appeared related to each other? Or was it
> > only after Sanskrit was philologically studied that anyone observed
> > that Greek and Latin must be related to each other?
The similarity between Greek and Latin was apparent to anyone who
thought about it from ancient times onward. However there was no
framework within which borrowing could be distinguished from cognacy.
The conventional view was that Latin was a kind of debased and
corrupted Greek.
> If the similarity of Sanskrit to Greek and Latin kicked off the whole
> enterprise, that would lend credence to the Indian complaint that
> appropriating Sanskirt from the Indians and claiming it to be a
> European bequest to India was the motivating force behind historical
> and comparative linguitsics.
It would lend credence only if one already held such a preconception.
Ross Clark
ranjit_...@yahoo.com
> If the similarity of Sanskrit to Greek and Latin kicked off the whole
> enterprise, that would lend credence to the Indian complaint that
> appropriating Sanskirt from the Indians and claiming it to be a
> European bequest to India was the motivating force behind historical
> and comparative linguitsics.
In your terminolology, the folks who founded historical and
comparative linguistics appropriated European languages from Europeans
and claimed them to be an Asian bequest to Europe.
Harlan Messinger
How does it feel to be a one-man mob?
Peter T. Daniels
> The emergence of idioms cannot be explained. The term AIT has now
> stuck, because it serves a felt need to ridicule Europeans for their
> racism in the colonial era that gave rise to this theory.
Only among racist Indians with an inferiority complex.
In your case, it appears to be well-deserved.
phog...@abo.fi
<hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
"I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I
contain multitudes."