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EDO NYLAND’S
INSPIRATION *
IN LANGUAGE AND
HUMAN MIGRATIONS
(Contact)
Some
Interesting Observations
All this research into the Ogam
inscriptions and the Saharan/Basque origin of the "Indo-European" and
other languages started with a talk about Homer's Odyssey. The
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation regularly features the "Ideas
Program" and on November 5 and 6, 1984, historian Edward Furlong gave a
talk entitled "Where Did Odysseus Go?" He pointed out various
happenings and climatic conditions described by Homer, which did not fit at
all in the Mediterranean and obviously belonged in the North Atlantic. After
many years of study, he concluded that Odysseus had visited Ireland, Scotland
and Norway. I was intrigued by his reasoning and visited Ireland and Scotland
several times to see the areas he suggested and to learn more about the
subject. I soon became convinced that Furlong's conclusions were correct:
part of the Odyssey had taken place in Ireland and Scotland. A Linguistic
Odyssey
The Odyssey epic was written down
some 2700 years ago by Homer and ever since has been endlessly discussed,
dissected and researched. Numerous locations in both the Mediterranean and
the Atlantic have been suggested for the places he visited; yet the
researchers could agree on next to no specifics. Would it be possible that
all of them had missed some information, contained in the epic, which could
shed new light on what really happened so long ago? The only possible place
this could be true appeared to be in the names supplied by Homer,
because, to my knowledge, nobody had tried to translate them. So I searched
for a distinctive name which could have a hidden meaning. My linguistic
Odyssey started with the name "Laistrygonian" (Odyssey Book 10,
line 106), the name of the people of the "wonderful" harbour where
Odysseus lost 11 of his 12 ships to thousands of giant rock-throwing
cannibals. I tried the Latin, Greek and Celtic dictionaries, all to no avail.
But then Dr. Cavalli-Sforza from Stanford University wrote an article
entitled: "Genes, Peoples and Languages" (Scientific American.,
Nov.'91). He pointed out the high concentration of individuals with Rh-negative blood among the peoples of Morocco, the
Basque Country, Ireland and Scotland; all four countries with people having
at least 25% of their members with that blood peculiarity. The only people
among these four populations still to speak their Neolithic language were the
Basques. Cavalli-Sforza also commented that this distribution represented an
ocean born migration and the Basques were the epitome of the sea farers.
Could it be that the peoples along the Atlantic coast of Europe had belonged
to the same migration and that all these had spoken the same Neolithic
language we now call Basque? To test this idea I tried the Basque dictionary
on "Laistrygonian" and very quickly there appeared
"lai-istri-goni-an". Using the full Basque words: laino-istripu-gonbidatu-aniztasun, meaning: fog-accidents-invites-many,
or "fog invites many accidents". Indeed the excellent geographical
details provided in the epic, and the entrance problems hinted at in the name
perfectly fitted only one place on the west coast of Ireland: Killary Harbour
in northern Conamara. The linguistic adventure was off to a good start. The Ogam Script
While in Scotland visiting the
places pointed out by Edward Furlong, I saw some standing stones and
artifacts with Ogam writing on them. They were described by Dr. Anthony
Jackson in his book called "The Symbol Stones of Scotland", which I
found in a small bookstore in Stornoway. I was intrigued when I read that the
inscriptions had not been deciphered and suggested that they were not
linguistic at all, but numerical. This didn't sound right to me because of
the careful way in which the script had been carved; so decoding the
recalcitrant inscriptions became a challenge to me. This research went on at
the same time that I followed Odysseus' travels. I believe to have decoded
and translated most of the Ogam inscriptions in Scotland and many of the
Irish ones. The solution of the Ogam decoding problem provided the foundation
for all research into the origin of languages. Linguistic
Archaeology
As the Ogam research results were
accumulating, it became clear that I was dealing with a new field of
linguistics which was not being considered or taught at any of our
universities. The name "Linguistic archaeology" had
earlier been proposed by Bob Quinn in his book "Atlantean,
Ireland's North African and Maritime Heritage", page 88 (Quartet Books,
New York, 1986) when he discussed the linguistic research done by the Swiss
linguist Dr. Heinrich Wagner 1976. A
linguistic archaeologist digs for the very roots of our languages, many
millennia before writing was invented. He or she considers all the different
possibilities of language development and has to be suspicious of anything
taught as "fact" in our universities. This person must be free to
bring totally new ideas forward about languages origins, unaffected by dogma
or tradition. It is a rather lonely position to take but it has its
advantages. Having no formal education in linguistics turned out to be both
very helpful and also a big drawback. It was helpful because I avoided what
Martin Bernal described as: "It is customary for students
to be introduced to their fields of study gradually, as slowly unfolding
mysteries, so that by the time they can see their subject as a whole they
have been so thoroughly imbued with conventional preconceptions and patterns
of thought that they are extremely unlikely to be able to question its basic
premises. This incapacity is particularly evident in disciplines concerned
with ancient history. ..... Their study is dominated by the learning of
difficult languages, a process which is inevitably authoritarian: one may not
question the logic of an irregular verb or the function of a particle. At the
same time as the instructors lay down their linguistic rules, however, they
provide other social and historical information that tends to be given and
received in a similar spirit. ..... While this facilitates learning and gives
the scholar thus trained an incomparable feel for Greek or Hebrew,
such men and women tend to accept a concept, word or form as typically
Greek or Hebrew without requiring an explanation as to its specific function
or origin" (Black Athena,
Vol.1, p.3, 4) In other words, linguistic students
tend to be brainwashed in our Universities and are trained to reject other
ways of looking at a subject, because other views are inherently inconsistent
with their training. Now The Whole World Spoke One Language (Genesis 11:1)
Every time new research results
are made available about the activities and thinking of our distant
ancestors, these results remind us that we have acquired the habit of grossly
underestimating, even denigrating our ancestors' knowledge and abilities in
many fields of endeavor. One such field is linguistics. Almost all academics
working in this "science" have unquestioningly adopted, and
religiously defended, the family tree model for linguistic change, the
so-called Stammbaum model. Any other approaches to the development of
languages are being brushed aside saying that they are not scientifically
provable because they are incompatible with the model and the comparative
method. Because of this thinking many, if
not most of our university linguists, have become the guardians of the status
quo and are disdainful of anybody embarking upon a relentless search for
academic truth. They refuse to admit that many of the very early scholars may
have been able to do things that are now considered impossible, such as
language invention of major languages and their introduction. My work shows
that, instead of staunchly defending the genetic model of naturally evolving
languages, very early scholars are likely to have been responsible for
inventing all major languages existing on earth, without exception. It
appears that highly skilled professional linguists have been busy over a
period of ca 4,000 years developing a large number of artificial languages.
If this is correct, then the immediate result is that the Stammbaum model
must be relegated to the study of primitive, natural languages and the
comparative method is to be drastically overhauled or scrapped entirely. This
of course means that our modern linguists will have to also re-examine
critically what Heinrich Koppelmann so aptly called "das Heiligtum der
Indogermanischen Isolierung". In the following articles, I will
show many major languages which were invented by formulaic distortion and
manipulation of the ancient language which Genesis 11:1 described as: "Now
the whole world had one language". This was followed by Genesis
11:7, which instructed the religious leaders of the day: "Let us confuse
their language so they can no longer speak to each other". That is
exactly what happened, all over the world. The world has never seen a more
scholarly project of such magnitude and impact as the language-invention
and language-introduction projects, carried out with enormous energy,
dedication, including even unbelievable brutality and almost without interruption
during some four millennia, until very recently in Canada among its native
population. The world will never see such a project again because the same
would not be possible any more. In the following pages, I will show that our
modern "science" of Indo-European linguistics, as taught in
Universities, is solidly founded on the biblical command of Gen. 11:7, with a
bit of academic substance thrown in. A Retirement
Project
Now why would someone with formal
training in forest and land administration, surveying, aerial photo
interpretation, wildfire suppression, forest ecology, botany etc. venture
into fields as remote as linguistics, Homeric studies, Irish Ogam inscription
translation, pre-Christian religion and archaeology? Because here was obviously
a wide-open and interesting field of study, which, for centuries, had
attracted many non-academic outsiders who made great contributions to the
science, they chose to work on. Thomas Kuhn in his book: "The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions" wrote: Almost always the men who
achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have either been very
young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change. (p. 90) As forestry is probably the most inter-disciplinary subject taught at our Universities, even more so than geography, I was trained to look at problems from many different perspectives and disciplines, without being brainwashed in any field. This, combined with my previous experience in botany (taxonomy), medicine, the difficult wartime occupation years in Holland and the war in the Pacific, it soon became a habit and the results show in this homepage. |
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For further detail, please
refer to:
Nyland, Edo. 2001. Linguistic Archaeology: AnIntroduction. Trafford Publ., Victoria, B.C., Canada.
ISBN 1-55212-668-4. 541 p. [ see
abstract & summary]
Nyland, Edo. 2002.
Odysseus and the Sea Peoples: A
Bronze Age History of Scotland Trafford Publ., Victoria,
B.C., Canada.
307 p. [see
abstract & summary].
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