Dear List,
Some time back Felice Vinci's theory about "Homer in the Baltic" was briefly discussed here. In this connection, I have now uploaded in the List's Files section a Word document entitled "Felice Vinci's linguistic comparisons.doc". You can access the document from the announcement message archived at
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/64043
or else directly from the Files section.
This document represents my personal contribution to the deconstruction of sixteen among the most relevent linguistic comparisons proposed by Felice Vinci in his book _The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales: The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Migration of Myth_ (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2005). Such linguistic comparisons between Homeric personal and place names on the one side, and Scandinavian and Finnish toponyms on the other, are called "homotopes" in Vinci's book. They are claimed to represent place names from Vinci's putative Baltic original homeland of the Indo-Europeans that were later on "remapped" by Proto-Greek speakers onto their new homeland in Greece and the lands surrounding the Aegean Sea.
The casual look-alike relationship between words from the same language family (such as Greek and Scandinavian languages) or from different language families (such as Greek and Finnish) noted by Vinci represent the most glaring example of his constant attempt, throughout the book, at implanting unsubstantiated suggestions into the reader's mind. Vinci's attempts to show linguistic matches between names and locations from the Baltic/Scandinavian area and the eastern Mediterranean betray a distressing lack of philological analysis, and far too often the author confines himself to annotating similar-sounding names, the demonstration of whose linguistic cognacy is philological absent simply because of its impossibility.
While searching on the Web for materials that could help me deconstructing Vinci's fake "homotopes", I noticed to my dismay that Vinci's linguistic comparisons are treated as plain truths in dozens and dozens of Web pages and discussion fora (these people are, of course, ignorant of historical linguistics). By now a great damage has been done by Vinci and his fans. Try, for instance, to search through Google for any of the Homeric place and personal names mentioned in Vinci's book, and you will immediately get among the results a great number of sites in which these Greek words are compared linguistically to Scandinavian/Finnish toponyms after Vinci's insane suggestions. I can no longer tolerate all this. Not even the (very few) academics who have apparently given their support to Vinci's theory have ever cared to check whether his "homotopes" are linguistically possible. Shame on them: they will be exposed for this sooner or later.
The language issue is the weakest part of the theory of the author, who reportedly always avoids it during the conferences he participates in. It should be clear to any dispassionate reader of his book that Vinci has zero knowledge not only of historical linguistics, but even of the modern languages of Scandinavia and Finland, whose toponyms he so senselessly compares to names found in Homer. It is apparent from the whole series of his so-called "linguistic comparisons" that Vinci does not know what he is talking about.
And what is worse for Vinci is that, if one erases his linguistic comparisons from his theory, the latter tumbles down like a house of cards. And, as the undersigned has tried (I think, for the first time *ever*) to show in the document posted at the List's Files section, Vinci's linguistic comparisons can be *easily* erased from the scene at any time.
Your feedback on this question would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks and best regards,
Francesco