spin

As you were in the sharing mood you should have provided the ammunition so we could sink you those two notches.



(Ergative verbs link "sink" are so much fun.)

Roger Pearse

Sorry to hear that. Sympathy.

Zwaarddijk

It is entertaining. The same way a sit-com is.


Not only is Acharya's theory a mythicist theory of Jesus - I would say that's the least of the major claims she's making; she also claims that
- homo sapiens has been around for at least 2.8 million years
- there have been at least one great high-culture which has done works *around the world* in times we would consider prehistoric
- this culture was the culture of African Pygmies

- Ireland has been colonized by Hindus or Buddhists during antiquity
- Indian civilization is at least 100 000 years old
- the Indo-European theories that posit an Indo-European invasion of India from the North is a colonialist ploy made up by European thinkers who couldn't accept the idea of civilization having apepared in India without European contributions

This is but a sample of her claims. It's clear she sympathizes with some rather nationalist Hindu history-writing (surprisingly evemerist of her, taking grandiose claims of a civilization spanning hundred of thousand years seriously!), weird theosophic ideas of the past having advanced civilizations comparable to the modern world, and so on. As she herself concedes (or actually claims is an argument for her view), extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Considering her persistent demands that academia take her seriously and even set up departments of astrotheology and so on, e.g.
"As concerns my credentials and continuing education, I would like to consider my books Suns of God and Christ in Egypt in particular a PhD thesis in the subjects of comparative religion and astrotheology. In this regard, I sincerely hope that these important subjects become increasingly popular and taught in colleges and universities, and that others may be able to obtain relevant and appropriate credentials therein." ( http://www.truthbeknown.com/credenti...l#.ULYMwXiSF3g ) - more examples, even shrill ones - do exist. The sad thing is people do take her claim as to her credentials being equal to that of a PhD seriously. If this kind of stuff passes for a PhD, academia is overrated.

Haven't actually read Allegro, but I have a hard time imagining he'd be any worse than Acharya is.

My foot's been hurting at random times - and a rather intense pain at that - so I can't dance as actively as I used to any more. I have to do something with the time that went into that (about 10 hours a week); in addition, the course load at uni right now is light, and I am only doing a part-time job.

lpetrich

What gives you that idea? Where's the evidence?

Those are NOT primary sources, or even good secondary sources. Shoddy "research" is shoddy "research", and no amount of whining about the orthodox being oxen will change that.

lpetrich

Robert Tulip, LOTS of names have VERY prosaic meaning. Look in Behind the Name: Meaning of Names, Baby Name Meanings some time. Acharya-S-thumping is NOT a legitimate argument.

What's her evidence?
But are you familiar with comparative and historical linguistics? Can you describe some of the sound correspondences between the Indo-European branches?

Do you know *how* they are linked? Describe it to us without referring to anything in Acharya S's works.

WHAT earthquake? Where's the geological evidence? Yes, geological evidence.

Seems to me that this Abraham-Brahma bit is a coincidence.

Abraham - from Hebrew - "father of many"

Brahma / Brahman - likely cognate with Latin flâmen, a kind of priest
Ancestral Indo-European form: *bhlaghmn

The -mn is a common Indo-European suffix, having cognates like
Latin -men, -min-
Greek -ma, -mat-
Sanskrit -man
A common word contains that suffix: *(H)nômn -- "name" -- and it has cognates across most of Indo-Europeandom, all with that meaning, including the English word itself.

lpetrich

Seems like something after-the-fact.

Correlative cosmologies were common in premodern times. Both Western and Chinese astrology and alchemy made heavy use of correlations, though they had different ones. For a rather general sort of discussion, see http://www.safarmer.com/neuro-correlative.pdf at Steve Farmer article download page.

To me, my favorite example is Francesco Sizzi's argument that Jupiter's moons do not exist. He was a contemporary of Galileo, who had recently discovered them with his telescope. The seven traditional planets, the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, all correspond to openings in the head, the two eyes, the two nostrils, the two ears, and the mouth, and also to the seven days of the week and various other sevens. So Jupiter's moons won't fit, and they therefore do not exist.

Zwaarddijk

Linguistic coincidences happen all the time, of course.
Above I presented just a tiny bit of the (flawed) evidence that English really is Finnic. Such coincidences happen, and the fact that I've compiled a list like that is proof of nothing except the fact that without rigorous regular sound correspondences, we cannot make conclusions like that. My list of words even confuses the dating of words - English finger definitely predates Finnish vinkkari, which even then is a word of recent and certain Germanic origin...

One cannot just churn out lists like these and believe they prove anything; with regard to Sanskrit and Irish, the most likely theory, really, is that once upon a time, tribes in central Asia expanded southwards and westwards. Later on, they formed new tribes elsewhere.

A tribe expanded from roughly Switzerland or somewhere in several directions and became the celts, leaving traces in Anatolia, various parts of Europe (including France, Iberia, the Balkans, the British Isles). They assimilated into other groups everywhere except the British isles, wherefrom Celts later reoccupied Bretagne.

Meanwhile, another offshoot of the Indo-Europeans expanded into India, where they ran into Dravidians.

It is pretty clear that these shared roots accounts for everything without having to invoke buddhist colonization of Ireland.

lpetrich

OK, here's how to do Real Comparative Linguistics, with the help of the likes of
PIE Correspondences.

Sanskrit brahman ~ Latin flâmen
Hat = long vowel

Latin f corresponds to Sanskrit bh or dh. Since the Sanskrit word starts with b without the h, I think that it's tolerably close. So we have
b ~ f ~ *bh

The next one is easy.
r ~ l ~ *l

Then
a ~ a ~ *a or *H2e

The next one is more difficult. Sanskrit h ~ PIE *gh ~ Latin h. So we must have Latin *flah- > flâ- giving
h ~ (vowel lengthening) ~ *gh

The rest is easy: -man ~ -men ~ *-mn (n as a vowel)

Thus, we get
brahman ~ flâmen ~ *bhlaghmn

Semantically, it's also a good correspondence: priest ~ priest

Zwaarddijk

The problem, of course, is to convince people like Robert Tulip of these correspondences. How do linguists know these correspondences are accurate? Well, they do because it explains a lot, and the fact that sound changes tend to be regular is widely attested even in changes that have occured in the last 100 years, e.g. the North Cities Vowel Shift and a variety of other shifts in dozens of languages. The final thing that clinches the deal is that whereas the likelihood of chance similarities are huge, the likelihood that you can come up with a reconstructed language with regular changes that ends up obtaining the attested languages using just a few changes - and in fact just a few sound changes are needed to derive languages that were not known at the time the reconstruction was carried out (Hittite, Tocharian) is very convincing evidence indeed. (An even more impressive thing regarding PIE and Hittite, was how Saussure's reconstruction got the distribution of the laryngeals right even before any actual tangible evidence of their existence had been found - the discovery of Hittite confirming the theory.)

The source Acharya uses for the Buddhist Ireland theory was an author who lived and died before the neo-grammarian school was established, and thus had no idea of how sound changes worked, he just saw random correlations between words, and did not bother to compare a wider set of languages or anything. Yet this is the kind of source Tulip wants us to believe! This very same source admits to not using any consistent method whatsoever in his attempted historical linguisticking.

lpetrich

Another success was the decipherment of the Linear B language as Mycenaean Greek. Though the Linear B syllabary did a poor job of distinguishing the voicing of the stop consonants, it nevertheless distinguished their points of articulation (where the sound is made), and its distinctions matched what one would expect from Proto-Indo-European.

PIE stops by articulation point: T, P, K', Kw or T, P, K', K, Kw
K' is palatalized

Mycenaean Greek had symbols corresponding to reconstructed T, P, K, Kw with vowels a, e, i, o, u

However, Classical Greek had only T, P, K, with
*T > T
*P > P
*K > K
*Kw > K, P, T depending on what sounds are nearby

Myc i-qo *hikkwos > Cls hippos, hikkos "horse"
Myc qe-to-ro *kwetwores > Cls tettares, tesseres, pettares, ... "4"
Myc qo-u-ko-ro *gwoukoloi > Cls boukoloi "cowherds"