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Come on, it's lovely weather for a sleigh ride together... (Pre-History)
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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The first modern humans to populate Europe, were not Indo-Europeans arriving in the south, but circum-polar reindeer herders arriving in the north, at the height of the last glaciation.

As the ice receded, they jumped on their sleighs and followed the reindeer herds into Britain, bringing their neolithic culture and language with them... a language little changed over the millennia and surviving into the modern era.

"Yes we know all this" I hear you say... but here it is again (from a slightly different viewpoint):

http://aberfeldy.wikidot.com

http://lochearnhead.wikidot.com

http://lochearnhead.wikidot.com/archaic-gaelic

These are links to three books (in various states of completeness) that are jam packed with wonderful, well researched information.

The sharp-eyed amongst you may remember (but chose to ignore at the time) that I posted the third of these links on page 13 of Scotching the Scotch : from the east or from the west? but nobody's interest was aroused.

However, over on the Megalithic Empire site, a similar link (posted by macausland) has stimulated quite a bit of interest.
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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The author, Sheila McGregor (aka Alexander Aberfeldy) has a very healthy disregard for both orthodox linguistics and archaeology... and her approach in recognizing and deconstructing paradigm errors is straight out of the Applied Epistemology Handbook.

Her work (as she admits herself) is centred very much on indigenous Scottish culture, but her linguistic analysis is applicable throughout northern Europe... and beyond.

{Dan would love this... anyone in touch with him?... innit}
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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According to orthodoxy the aboriginal inhabitants of Scotland (the Picts) spoke a Brythonic language similar to Welsh. Then in the dark ages they were displaced by invaders from overseas leaving little trace of Pictish culture or language.

An almost exact parallel to the situation in England, only this time the invaders were Irish rather than Anglo-Saxon.

Ms. McGregor's refutation is an almost exact parallel to that outlined in THOBR, regarding the English.

The Picts spoke an archaic form of Gaelic which had remained little changed since the Mesolithic (and was still spoken in the remote Highlands until the clearances of the seventeen hundreds). They were an illiterate people who relied on an oral tradition.

The Irish mass invasion didn't happen. There was an influx of literate Irish monks who recorded events in Irish, a language related to (but by no means the same as) Archaic Gaelic.

The rural Highlanders continued to speak the language they had always spoken -- Archaic Gaelic (not something akin to Welsh).
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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The most significant congruence between Ms McGregor's ideas and my own may lie in the 'northern' origin theories. My own assumptions are laid out in the closing chapters of The Megalithic Empire but older readers will recall that the origins of Modern Man (aka Cro-Magnon) is obscured by the (unobserved by orthodoxy) fact that glaciation always totally blots out the previous fossil evidence.

Since Britain, and especially Scotland, was given the blotto treatment up to c 12,000 years ago it follows that Britain and especially Scotland is prime territory for being the origin of Modern Man. Not that I have ever pursued such claims -- for fear of frightening the horses -- and for sure it is just as likely, ie it still fits the facts, that these 'Lappish' cultures of northern Eurasia spread west as the ice retreated, as opposed to the putative Scotch Lapps retreating eastwards as the ice advanced.

Ms McGregor does suffer from one Applied Epistemological handicap and that is she is a native Gaelic-speaker (or at any rate a McGregor, the most Gaelic of the clans -- nobbut a bunch of criminals say all the others) and is therefore unconsciously wedded to Gael-first theories. Of course as an English-speaker I might be thought just as unconsciously wedded to an English-first paradigm but I am a trained Applied Epistemologist and therefore above such base considerations.
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Grant



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As I have mentioned somewhere before, the Finns are craniometrically closest to Cro Magnon skulls. Google "Finns closest to Cro Magnon"
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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So what do we make of her Radical Linguistics with its emphasis on hunting terms?

She has been able to decode many folk tales and fables... and interpret many place names and landscape features using key word roots, traced back to the Mesolithic via an archaic form of Gaelic.

Many of these roots can also be found in English and other northern languages.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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So what do we make of her Radical Linguistics with its emphasis on hunting terms? ... Many of these roots can also be found in English and other northern languages.

Which makes a change from the orthodox linguists' obsession with finding the roots of agricultural terms to tell the story of Indo-European evolution. And I do mean "tell the story" of course.

It would be interesting to hear Ms McGregor's opinion of the Applied Epistemological view that the Gaelic languages are not Indo-European. [It is an AE view because the assumption is that a) only Gaelic-speakers know anything about Gaelic languages and b) early Gaelic scholars were over-anxious to get their language family into the prevailing Big Time of Indo-European. Everyone has taken it as read ever since.]
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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PS It would probably be equally AE for the current crop of Celtologists to seek to show that the Gaelic languages (it is significant there isn't an agreed term for Welsh, Breton, Scots and Irish Gaelic) are not Indo-European.

However this would run into a problem that Gaelic linguists -- as otherwise orthodox linguists -- would be hard pressed to deal with: the Linguistics Industry has not even begun on a statistical method for evaluating how to define language families. An obvious starting point for a properly scientific subject but too much like hard work and too likely to turn up closet skeletons. Careful ignoral to the fore!
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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In my view Ms McGregor's contribution is to do for hunting what Ms Jacob did for the city.

The fact that I cannot fully resolve this, or even reconcile it with THOBR, is certainly not Ms McGregor's fault, who makes a zippy case for the Gaels..
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