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Ana Bosch's avatar

Super interesting as always, Konstantin. One question remains... where do you find all these freaks?

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Geoff Nathan's avatar

Actual theoretical linguist here. I'm astounded at how many of these are attempts at historical linguistics. They're all tin-hat level conspiracy theories, but it's interesting how many cranks think they've discovered connections between totally unrelated languages, or decided that their native language is the 'ur-language'.

This seems particularly common among Tamil speakers--I get tons of Quora questions about how Tamil is the origin of Sanskrit, which is like saying Hebrew is the origin of Latin. Of course in the seventeenth century respectable scholars also believed the latter.

I guess the idea is that 'if you speak a language you're an expert on all languages'. Sigh...

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