Godless Linguistics

[porphyry]

 This post is aimed esepcialy at the classicists on our friends list.

This article offers proof positive that eveything we thought we knew about the origin of languages is a lie. You simply must it read and come to the same soul-destroying realization of the truth I have.

Comments

[lordtangent.livejournal.com]

Answer this one eggheads if your fancy French descended from Latin then why are there still Latins?

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Yeah! And you can't tell me the ablative absolute isn't irreducibly complex!

[petrusplancius.livejournal.com]

This is a new one to me. Raises all kinds of enetertaining questions. Did God create Anglo-Saxon and Old High German, for instance, at the beginning and allow them to evolve into modern English and German, or did he re-create the languages at different stages of history? Or perhaps their evolution was directed by a sort of divine guidance. That God should have invented Dutch, and doubtless Zumerzet too, shows at least that he has a sense of humour.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Malkhos always says that Dutch is the closest thing to animal sounds in human speech, which seems weird to me, but of course I don't know Dutch and so can neither agree nor disagree.

At first, I thought this post was serious, and I was going to admonish Malkhos ("Where do you find these crazy people?") but then I realized it was parody.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Actually the story I was told by William Maltby (naming him just so it doesn't seem like an Urban Legend) was that while he was the guest of the then Duke of Alba y Beriwck, he had occaion to attend a party at the royal palace in Spain (I don't think the Spanish Kings still live in El Escourial) where a very drunk Dutch Ambassador told him that of all animal noises the closest to human speech was Dutch.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I am surprised you don't know this, but it msut be that after Babel one of the lost tribes of Israel already spoke Old English and as they wandered for 4000 years over northern Europe (no more wonderful than wandering around the Sinai for 40 years) preserved it until their kings Hengest and Horsa brought them to the promsied land.

[lordtangent.livejournal.com]

Wonderful of the Lord to plant the Anglo-Saxon homeland far across the North Sea, away from the land of the utterly distinct and specially created Frisians.

Middle English is just a ruse, however. The people of England were just babbling away in West Saxon all those centuries until God wrote the King James Bible and effected a miraculous saltation on the English tongue. The works of Chaucer et al. were later cobbled together by pagan philologists to fill in the missing gaps in their theory.

[petrusplancius.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's only a parody, that's a disappointment. I'm very fond of Dutch, it's such an improbable language, full of peculiar sounds; I don't find it ugly.

[petrusplancius.livejournal.com]

'People don't like to hear about hell. But I'm here to tell you that if Jesus is not your Lord and Savior, you are on your way to hell...Hell may not be a politically correct topic these days, but many people enter hell everyday. Out of the 120,000 people that die everyday, most end up in hell. Hell is a real place despite the fact that people laugh and say that they want to go there. They simply don't understand how terrible hell is. Just because you've never seen hell doesn't mean it doesn't exist. We have a searing, accurate description of what hell is like in God's word. Hell is awful and if you don't believe in Jesus, you'd better get on the stick or else that's going to be your eternal destination...Sinner, you will either TURN from your sins to Jesus or you will BURN for your sins. If you reject the Lord Jesus Christ, you will be tormented in the flames forever without a single, solitary hope. The biggest fool in the world chooses hell. No need to argue with me about this. God said hell is real, your argument is with Him and you won't win that one. You have been warned. Repent or perish.'

(I don't think that's a parody)

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Doesn't seem like one, no, but the rhetoric is so... trite. Ill-reasoned. Doesn't inspire one to want to dwell in heaven with the saved.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

We have seen a few foreign films with English subtitles whose characters spoke Dutch, but it didn't strike me as particularly ugly, either.

For some reason, I love listening to Italian best of all, just for the pure beauty of its sound, though I must admit I haven't heard all that many languages compared to how many there actually are.

[petrusplancius.livejournal.com]

It's from the site that lordtangent linkes to in the preceding comment; it is set against a red background of hellfire, but the author kindly offers an alternative white background for those who want to print it out. Perhaps one should pin it up on the wall as an awful warning.