Re: Fakelangs

Adam Walker wrote:

>--- Christian Thalmann <cinga@...> wrote:
>
>
>>(Feel free to coin a better word for "fakelangs"...)
>>
>>
>>
>  I've decided that /gwi:n/
>
>
>>should mean
>>"cattle" and that /'hajro/ is either the name of a
>>Goddess or
>>the language itself.
>>
>>
>>
>
>Which, of course, proves beyond shadow of doubt that
>this language is a blending of Latin and Greek
>elements with the expected semantic drift.  Gwin,
>meaning cattle, is clearly a corruption og the Latin
>equine, meaning horse, and proves that, at the point
>in time when the word was learnt that the practice of
>eating horseflesh was still common among the Hairo.
>
>
Oh dear, oh dear, the pseudo-linguistic nonsense. While it is evidently
Indo-European (from the root *g_wou), it is not Latin or Greek. This is
surely obvious by the fact that it did not go through the g_w>b shift,
as Latin and Greek did. Compare, for instance, Latin 'bos' with English
'cow'. I suggest that it is most closely related to the Indic languages.
Compare with Sanskrit 'gauh/'(???), or the Balto-Slavic languages
(Latvian 'govs'). However, it obviously borrowed(or diverged from the
line) at a phase before the labialisation was lost. I suspect the
following- *u>*y>*i. *o>*@(another sign of its relation to the Indic
languages). *@i>*i. Evidently, the accusative case was borrowed (hence
the nasal ending), probably as cows are rarely referred to in the
nominative. It shows that the Hairo have been well travelled.

>The name Hairo may be applied either to the people
>themselves and thus their language or to their chief
>goddess.  This name is clearly taken from the Greek
>hieros, meaning sacred, a word which should be quite
>familiar to the audience from the common usage in
>hieroglyph, sacred writing.
>
>Now, some have argued that, due to the antiquity of
>Hairo inscriptions compared to extant inscriptions in
>either Greek or Latin, that the borrowing must have
>gone the other direction.  This is clearly not
>possible.  One may easily find examples of mixed and
>barbarous tongues today among the savage tribe of
>Indie and the isles of the Pacific as well as the Gold
>Coast and other areas of Africa.  One, however, does
>not find examples of barbarous folk teaching civilised
>to distill their own strange tongues into two or more
>languages of refinement and beauty.  The logic of
>those who sponsor such views is to be seriously
>questioned.
>
>. . . excerpted from the Oxford lectures of Prof. E.
>G. Head
>
>
>
Personally, I'm shocked that such an esteemed scholar as Professor Head
could come up with such Nonsense.

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