Re: Conlangs in History

Barry Garcia wrote:

> CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU writes:
> >Yep.  There are a couple tens of languages which, though studied in some
> >detail, cannot be provably related to any other.  Basque in particular
> >gains great attention from cranks who use it for their theories, like Saharan
>
> This reminds me. I was thumbing through a book on Celtic Legends I had to
> buy for my world mythology course last year, and in it, they say the
> evidence for the link between the Celtic languages and Egypt is because
> the syntax is similar to Hamitic:
[...]

> What do you all think? My mind thinks "Oh, just another author who wants
> to link yet another culture to the Egyptians to make them seem more
> "noble"".
You mean, aside from the fact that Celtic languages share, like, virtually
*no* lexical items and their systems of morphology and phonology are
totally different?   :-)  Honestly, that stuff shoud not be printed for a university
course.  As for making them seem more noble, perhaps.  People have been
trying to do that since Herodotos and Solon before him.

There's this great book I used to have around, 'Atlantis:  The Antediluvian World'
written by Ignatius Donnelly in the 1880s or so.  It was great reading!  I really loved
the theory that the Basques and the Iroquois were related because they had originally
been colonists of the Atlantean Empire. He was quite serious about it.  Donnelly
went to great lengths to show that Basque and 'Iroquois' were also related to
'Native American'.  It was like the written equivalent of a magic show or
somethin'.  Real entertaining!

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Tom Wier   |     "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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