S.Kalyanaraman asks:
> http://www.igs.net/~acsokai/history/controve.htm#III. THE SUMERIAN
> QUESTION
>
> Is this a new thesis?
All sorts of hypotheses floated among academic circles in the early to
mid 19c. Then the real historical/comparative linguists took over. All
sorts of rubbish gets revived for political reasons. You can sometimes
get rich publishing such rubbish. Type in 'Atlantis' on amazon.com and
see how much horse-manure comes up.
I've read stuff describing how the Hungarian-speaking academics of the
earlier 19c really were baffled by their language. As I recall, there
is some 18c Jesuit who is credited with first relating Finnish to
Hungarian, but this did not become a verity for 100 years or so. While
the rest of Academic Europe joining into the IE gabfest, comparing "my
version to your version of the PIE word", the Hungarians were left out
cold.
When it was proved that Hungarian was indeed related to Finnish and
that the Uralic family indeed existed and that it was *indeed*
European, the whole field of historical and comparative linguistics
got bigger (and more liberal). We had to consider not just IE and what
are now call Afro-Asiatic languages, but also Uralic as 'civilized'
languages.