Re: What's your favorite crank theory?

On Nov 28, 12:51 pm, Marc Schütz <nob...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"All Indo-European languages in Western Europe were invented by Benedictine
linguists."

I remember that one. Fantastic.

"The Indian people of the Arctic call themselves the Dene; dena in Basque
means "all of us" and is the same word as in Denemark."

Dena means 'all' (not 'of us'), but that's beside the point...

"Consider the name of the river Rhine. [...] It is not surprising that the
Basque word for fish is arrain. Put "ar" in front of "Rhine" and you know
where the name came from."

There's another group where someone keeps going on about Iberian being
closely related to Basque. He talks like it's a foregone conclusion, a
tone which (in my experience) gives someone away as being a crank.

http://www.buber.net/Forum/viewtopic.php?t=304

He posts under "Balkiadin Balkibil."

Here's one post in reply to the finding of supposedly ancient Basque
writing (3rd/4th cent) at the Iruna-Veleia excavation.

======
The Iruña-Veleia ceramic inscriptions are of the first importance for
the following reasons:

(1) They represent the oldest recorded writing in a Vasconic language
in the Roman script. The Upper Garonne texts, and the various
inscriptions of Galicia, Asturias, Lusitania, etc, which contain
Vasconic personal and deity names, are older, but all of them are in
Latin. There are many texts in what we call the Iberian language which
are up to 700 years older than Iruña-Veleia, but they are all in the
East, South and Ionian Iberian scripts.

(2) They do to death the always unlikely theory, promoted by Michelena,
Trask, Collins and others, that Basque was introduced to the Western
part of the Basque Country from the East during the early Reconquista
period.

(3) They demonstrate that pre-Christian Basque personal names were
formed in much the same way as Iberian personal names: ie, everyday
words were coupled at random, irrespective of meaning and word order.

So we have URDINISAR "blue/star", which is actually the wrong way
round! In Iberian, both U(R)DIN "blue" and SARR "star" are frequent
personal name compound elements.

(4) Basque and Iberian are shown to converge in one instance where they
have subsequently diverged, but to have remained distinct in another.

ATA "father" is identical to the usual Iberian form, ATA (as in
ATABELS, a magistrate of Ampurias, and the supplicants, ATABERAI and
AMABERAI). AITA may be a later development, or a dialectal variant
which has become general.

Basque ISAR "star" retains its anterior vowel extension, which was
missing in Iberian - SARR (with cognates in Caucasian, Burushaski and,
believe it or not, Sumerian!).

(5) The absolute prohibition against final -M is seen in MIRIAN for
MIRIAM. In Iberian, final -M makes occasional appearances, but is only
found fossilised behind vowel extensions in Basque. (In one Iberian
text only, N becomes M before B.)

The statement that Joseph, and not God, is Jesus's father, is
interesting, and should raise some eyebrows. Were the Visigoths not
Gnostics? Did they believe in Jesus's divinity?
========

The mere mention of Sumerian puts this guy pretty far out there. In
another post he told me that English "starling" and Japanese "tori"
("bird") are cognates.

You get the picture.

I have some questions though: re 2) - did Trask say that Basque was
introduced during the Reconquista period? I'm taking "reconquista" to
mean the expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian peninsula. re 3) Are
Iberian personal names random couplings of everyday words? "Hi, my name
is Table-air." "Nice to meet you, I'm Shelf-hot." Sounds like the most
ridiculous thing I've ever heard, but I don't know anything about
Iberian, so... does anyone here have any hard facts about Iberian - how
much about it is really known, etc.?

Marc

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