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EDO NYLAND’S INSPIRATION * IN LANGUAGE AND HUMAN MIGRATIONS Dr. Erich Fred Legner University of California ----Please CLICK on desired underlined categories [to search
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Some Interesting
Observations
Edo Nyland concluded that all the 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. Nyland 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. Nylandsoon became convinced
that Furlong's conclusions were correct: part of the Odyssey had taken place
in Ireland and Scotland [Also see: Human Migrations & Language]. 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, few had tried to translate them. So Nyland searched for a
distinctive name, which could have a hidden meaning. The 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. He 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
Nyland 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, Nyland 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 he found in a small bookstore in Stornoway. He was
intrigued when reading 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 he followed Odysseus'
travels. He also 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 Nyland 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 Nyland 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. Nyland's 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, are shown many major languages that were invented by formulaic
distortion and manipulation of the ancient language which Genesis 11:1
described as: "Now the whole world had one language".
Genesis 11:7 followed this, 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, Nyland demonstrated
that our modern "science" of Indo-European linguistics is 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 an inter-disciplinary subject taught at our Universities, even
more so than geography, Nyland was trained to look at problems from many
different perspectives and disciplines, without being opinionated in any
field. This, combined with a previous experience in botany (taxonomy) and
medicine, the difficult wartime occupation years in Holland and the war in
the Pacific, it soon became a habit. |
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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,
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