On Sun, 07 Dec 2003 13:59:19 +0100, Piotr Gasiorowski
<
piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
>Thus, anyone who doesn't believe that PIE
>was spoken in the Indus Valley will be called a "Eurocentrist" or an
>"Aryan invasionist" by Indian autochthonists
I've also seen it argued that the revision of PIE phonetics that started
with the discovery of the law of the palatals (and by which Schleicher's
tale changed from "avis, jasmin varna: na a:st, dadarka akvams" to "owis,
jesmin w&l&na: ne e:st, dedork^e ek^wons"), was merely a Eurocentric
conspiracy to make PIE look more like Greek.
Some autochthonist Greeks, on the other hand, claim that there never was
anything like the "invented language" PIE. The so-called Indo-European
languages are just debased forms of Greek.
And the Turks were in Turkey before the Greeks, which is why Mr. Tuna wrote
a book deriving Turkish from Sumerian.
I could go on and on. An inordinate amount of webspace is taken up by such
ultra-autochthonist "theories", often disguised as "linguistics".
Romanian autochthonist tendencies led to the theory that the Romanian
language stems in an unbroken line from the Latin of the Roman colonists in
Trans-Danubian Dacia. The theory was, in my opinion, too often
uncritically accepted (also outside of Romania), but at least it makes
sense linguistically. For some ultra-autochthonists, however, this
apparently wasn't autochthonous enough, and something had to be done to
make the Romanians autochthonous even *before* the conquest of Dacia in AD
117, lest the Hungarians should come up with some crazy theory that *they*
were already living in Transylvania before that time [*].
That's why all of a sudden Romanian is just Dacian with a coat of Latin,
and why we're stuck with Alex on this mailing list :-)
[*] Of course this is not just paranoia, see sci.lang message
<
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=g:thl2112786205d&dq=&lr=&selm=4uugil%249u0%40news.inforamp.net>
Note especially the sentence "Thus the Hungarians are not a Finnish-type
people but instead are more likely to be one of the Scythian/Persian/
Turanian equestrian peoples and settled in the Carpathian Basin from
Scythia **before the founding of Rome** [emphasis added --mcv].
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...