Re: OT: Historical Linguistics Question

Hallo!

R A Brown wrote:

> Steg Belsky wrote:
>
> > On Sep 14, 2005, at 8:49 PM, Tom Chappell wrote:
> >
> >>
> [snip]
>
> >> I wish members closer to Oxbridge, or to places where Greek and/or
> >> Hebrew are L1s, will tell me whether and/or by how much, each of
> >> these  men is a cracked pot.
> >> And, who is Semerano, and did he or she (or possibly it or they)
> >> really revolutionize anything, or is Amedeo talking through his hat,
> >> as I frequently do?
> >> Thanks,
> >> Tom H.C. in MI
> >
> >
> > I have no idea who these people are, or what kind of crack they're
> > smoking.
>
> Nor have I any idea, but....
I sometimes say in such situation, "He must have smoked too many
mushrooms".  Of course, I've never heard of any psychedelic mushroom
that is actually *smoked* - one must indeed be quite crazy to smoke
mushrooms.

> > Hebrew is not related to Greek at all (except maybe at some  kind of
> > Nostratic or *Proto-World level).
>
> Yep - the two languages just ain't related, except - as Steg says - at
> some very remote prehistoric stage when some Urprache may have been spoken.
Nostratic may make sense or not - but even if it is real, that won't
make Hebrew a descendant of Greek.  Proto-Nostratic, whatever it may
have looked like (if at all, of course), is not Greek.  Nor is it
Hebrew.
Period.

> (Of course, there was a time a few centuries ago when it was seriously
> held that Hebrew was the language of Adam, and that all the earth's
> languages are ultimately derived from Hebrew - but I thought that idea
> was long dead)
Some maverick creationists one occasionally meets on the Web still
maintain that position.  But this guy apparently believes not that
Greek is descended from Hebrew, but the other way round.  And then
he adduces the similarity of the alphabets.  Yes, the *alphabets*
ARE related to each other - but it is not that Hebrew letters
descend from Greek letters: they have a common ancestor (Phoenician)
that is distinct from both.  And after all, alphabets aren't languages,
and there are many examples of unrelated languages written in related
scripts.

> Why do people come up with these crackpot ideas?  For the past few
> months I've been receiving emails from some guy who found my Eteocretan
> page and seems to claim that:
> - Eteocretan was a form 'Pelasgian';
Possible, but unknown.

> - that Pelasgian was essentially the same as Albanian;
Almost certainly not.  First, it requires that Pelasgian was an
Indo-European language (because Albanian is), and even if that is
the case, Albanian certainly changed a lot during the at least three
millennia that elapsed in between.

> - that Albanian is not an Indo-European language;
Patently false.

> - that both Etruscan and ancient Greek are derived from Albanian/Pelasgian.
Utter nonsense.  Greek is well-establishedly Indo-European but not
"derived from Albanian/Pelasgian".  Etruscan is a non-IE language
about which frustratingly little is known.  It may be the case that
Etruscan is related to Pelasgian, but in that case, neither Greek
nor Albanian can be related to it (unless, of course, Etruscan is
distantly related to *IE as a whole*, via Nostratic or otherwise,
but even then, it is impossible that both Etruscan and Greek are
descendants of anything recognizable as Albanian).

> How does one counteract such people?
It's futile.  You can direct them to some real scholarly textbooks
and such - but then they claim that the common scholarly opinion
was a "vast conspiracy".  Sigh.

Greetings,

Jörg.

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