Roots... (Re: Dacian - /H/ -> seems possible)

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "m_iacomi" <m_iacomi@...> wrote
(Referring to Alex):

>
> He might not be aware of that. Actually he came from the very
> beginning on some speciality Romanian list with the declared
> program to prove Romanians are Dacians, then when one has pointed
> out Romanian _is_ a Romance language, he simply dedicated his
> enthusiasm to demolish that well-established fact. I think in
> some sense that one remark of mine (that Latin could be related
> to Dacian only at PIE level) made him look on the web and find
> this list which deals with IE issues. It fits well his purposes
> since one basical point of Romanian "autochtonist" agenda is to
> prove all IE are in fact nothing else but modified Dacian and PIE
> homeland is nothing else than Carpathian area where from all IE
> people spread out, changing by the same token their languages
> (unlike PIE ~ Dacian which had the mysterious propriety of
> conserving itself over millenia up to Romanian, only with some
> minor changes).

Kalyanaraman and company started in much the same way. Upon
learning that modern linguistics proved their O.I.T theories
impossible, they launched a slur campaign against linguistics
and linguists, thus his demand for a "paradigm shift". He
also spent many years keying in all the lexica of Indian
languages he could lay his hands on, after which he compiled
his own linguistically uninformed comparisons of what he thinks
to be words with similar form and meaning, his so-called
"semantic clusters", which often cross the language-family
boundaries as defined by the mainstream. Over the years, and
obviously influenced by his vague understanding, and more often
misunderstanding, of what he's been told on this list and others
such as the Indology and Indo-Iranian lists, he's modified his
approach in various ways, but the one constant throughout is
his insistence that mainstream linguists have got it all wrong
and need to clean up their act, and that despite the fact that
what he offers in lieu often changes weekly.

David