So… the tribesmen around the River Tiber consciously developed their own language by ripping off Basque but deliberately hiding [del]all[/del] almost all traces because… they hated linguists? They thought historical linguistics was the Devil’s work?
Oh, and he has some great little decodings of Latin words. It was not a peaceful process:
No, conlangs are very common in the world. Successful conlangs are pretty much Esperanto, simplified versions of English, and, by some measure, modern Hebrew. Esperanto is not the first, nor is it the best, but it is the only made-from-scratch conlang to achieve anything that even smells like mainstream success.
I have seen some suggestions that Basque may be the oldest language in Europe, and it’s possible there were some borrowings. But linguists agree that Latin and Greek have too much in common with Proto-Indo-European to come from anywhere else.
… I’m thinking this guy is so nuts he may not even be able to get funding from the Academy of the Basque Language… If he was an almond tree, we’d have enough almonds to feed the world!
Some years ago I came across some website that showed a . . . Hebrew(!) origin for Basque. It’s been so long I don’t recall whether the person was serious or whether it was a parody.
What the heck kind of schools would be teaching that to anybody, anyway?
Edo Nyland: Yes, yes, I may be mad–mad I tell you!–but there are other people whom I just made up who are equally mad in the opposite direction, so it all balances out, you see!
Or did schools actually teach kids that “Basque is mostly borrowed and distorted Latin” back in Franco’s day or something?
I actually skipped past this little gem when I was putting the OP together, which is why I didn’t riff on it, but it’s just as crazy as everything else he’s saying: Basque is the textbook example of a linguistic isolate. It’s the language people point to when they want to demonstrate that there are still mysteries left in the world of historical linguistics.
Nyland seems to have a linguistic pareidolia: He sees patterns in languages that nobody else in the world sees. His problem, though, is that he clings to them, and demands that they be right even in the face of all historical evidence to the contrary.
