Linguistic Archaeology: An Introduction

by Edo Nyland

This book is about the invention of ancient names and words. Virtually everyone's name hides an agglutinated shorthand sentence which can in most cases be recovered, as is explained with hundreds of examples. The technique of decoding and translating many Ogam inscriptions found in Ireland and Scotland is explained. Invented languages are discussed in detail and their relationship with the universal language of the Neolithics is shown.

Genres: Linguistics

574 pages, Paperback

First published April 26, 2001

Reviews

[J Earl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Linguistic Archaeology from Edo Nyland was a disappointment on almost every level. There are far too many leaps of faith to take the entire argument seriously. His methodology is sketchy at best and he is not so much refuting accepted scholarship (that would actually be useful and hold the seed of possible breakthroughs) as he is ignoring that which he doesn't understand and creating a bridge out of fantasy ideas to cover those areas.

I am not part of the "academic establishment" in linguistics so I am not defending any particular position. I am, however, defending good methodology and conclusions that come from rational hypotheses. This work falls very short in that regard. I even saw one person refer to this as an academic text. No, this is just the musings of someone written in an academic manner, though far easier to follow than many academic texts. There is nothing here that is hard to understand, by which I mean it is not hard to understand his arguments and the portions that put forth an argument. What is lacking is an underpinning beyond mere conjecture and guessing (albeit disguised as research and "proof").

I had hoped for an interesting and plausible exploration of a perspective other than accepted thought. What I got was a wild fantasy with little grounding in, well, anything. It was, however, an interesting read even if it was mostly due to gaping holes in linking ideas and proof or even suggestive data. I'm afraid I can't really recommend this at all.

Reviewed from a copy made available through Goodreads First Reads.

[Sharon Gallup · Rating 4 out of 5]

This folks is one of my free giveaways books contest. it is amazing how so many languages can be the same but with just a little difference in the spelling, the wording etc it can have a total different meanings. i was mostly interested in the Egypt section and it made understanding the old language so much easier. Very well written , easy to understand, and easy to read. (i am going to donate this book to our public library as i am sure others will find it just as interesting)

[Pam · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was tough to make myself finish, and I did make myself! I had thought it to be something entirely different than it is. The author has an outlandish theory regarding language. I could almost begin to think there was something to it, but there was not enough factual information, very few references to recognized authorities, especially in the archaeology parts. There were a lot of statements made by him as though fact...it appears he has a bit of an agenda as well. All that is fine, and he did a lot of work and research. But some of his statements are far-fetched. Especially the idea that a group of religious men could possibly cooperate so well as to make up languages in order to control the main population. We are talking here over millennia, with different groups of people, usually men, in different locales. He also discusses how the various religions came about, the male-dominated supplanting the female-Goddess. Some of that is likely true, but he does make some statements without qualification. But I did read it through, and it was interesting, if nothing else.

[Beth Medvedev · Rating 2 out of 5]

So there is some interesting info in here to kind of think about, but it's not related back to any actual research. Which is weird and off putting.

[NormaCenva]

Very excited about this book, hope to get my hands on it! A fascinating subject.