A popular science book by a major Russian linguist debunking the “New Chronology” and affirming the value of science
A. A. Zaliznyak at the annual lecture on birch bark documents sofunja.livejournal.com
The largest Russian linguist, scientific methods who proved the authenticity of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”, explained in a popular style how a linguist recognizes a fake, and described how an ordinary person can avoid falling for the bait of falsifiers.
Cover of the book by A. A. Zaliznyak “From Notes on Amateur Linguistics” coollib.com In this book, Andrei Anatolyevich Zaliznyak, the discoverer of the Old Novgorod dialect and the compiler of a unique grammatical dictionary, appears as a true enlightener; The academician is extremely persuasive and writes in an accessible language. And, although Zaliznyak speaks to the general reader, the phrase “amateur linguistics” does not actually mean “linguistics that anyone can do”: it means exactly the opposite. “Amateur linguistics” appears here as the antonym of the concept “professional”: only a specialist who has studied the basics of science for a long time can judge the origin of words. In later speeches, Zaliznyak spoke more directly not about “amateur”, but about “false” linguistics: it is better for an amateur not to take on etymology.
The main part of the book consists of the defeat of the “New Chronology” of mathematician Anatoly Fomenko, who suggested that almost all sources on ancient and medieval history are fake, and who offered his own “reconstruction” of history, which turned out to be more compact. Zaliznyak showed that many of Fomenko’s constructions are based on linguistic convergences, only carried out absolutely illiterately, associatively, contrary to the existing and long-discovered laws of language. There is a lot of anger in Zaliznyak’s criticism, but even more wit: “Deprived of linguistic cover, these constructions<А. Т. Фоменко>appear in their true form - as pure fortune telling. TO scientific research they have about the same relation as reports of what the author saw in a dream.”
“I would like to speak out in defense of two simple ideas that were previously considered obvious and even simply banal, but now sound very unfashionable:
1) truth exists, and the goal of science is to search for it;
2) in any issue under discussion, a professional (if he is truly a professional, and not just a bearer of government titles) is normally more right than an amateur.
They are opposed by provisions that are now much more fashionable:
1) truth does not exist, there are only many opinions (or, in the language of postmodernism, many texts);
2) on any issue, no one’s opinion weighs more than the opinion of someone else. A fifth grade girl is of the opinion that Darwin is wrong, and it is good form to present this fact as a serious challenge to biological science.
This fad is no longer purely Russian; it is felt throughout the Western world. But in Russia it is noticeably strengthened by the situation of the post-Soviet ideological vacuum.
The sources of these currently fashionable positions are clear: indeed, there are aspects of the world order where the truth is hidden and, perhaps, unattainable; indeed, there are cases when a layman turns out to be right, and all professionals are wrong. The fundamental shift is that these situations are perceived not as rare and exceptional, as they really are, but as universal and ordinary.”Andrey Zaliznyak
The above quotation is from a speech delivered at the acceptance of the Solzhenitsyn Prize (the book in which this speech was published was published in the prize series); this speech is entitled “Truth Exists.” And it is not surprising: the main meaning of Zaliznyak’s “Notes” is not in the debunking of Fomenko and the Fomenkovites, it is in the pathos of affirming the value of science.
Zaliznyak A. A. From notes on amateur linguistics. - M.: Russian World: Moscow textbooks, 2010. - 240 p. - (Series " Literary Prize Alexander Solzhenitsyn")
“Hydra and otter are words that come from the same root” and “Lipstick is a word formed from the Russian verb “smear”.” What's the difference between these two phrases? For a person far from linguistics, these are just two statements. The first seems very strange: what do the ancient monsters and the animals of central Russia have in common? And the sounds are completely different: in the Russian word there are [v] and [y] - and in Greek there are [g] and [i]. The second statement is more likely to be true: after all, they really do put lipstick on their lips. In fact, the first of them is a connection proven by scientists, and the second is an example of so-called “amateur linguistics,” that is, reasoning not justified by anything other than the imagination of its author. And to understand why this is so, it is worth reading the recently published book by academician Andrei Anatolyevich Zaliznyak, “From Notes on Amateur Linguistics.”
From it the reader learns that any statement by etymologists is based on many painstaking linguistic observations. For example, scientists compared data not only from Russian and Greek, but also from many related languages and found that there was also the Lithuanian word udra - “otter” or the ancient Indian udras - “water animal”, suggesting that the original meaning of this word was just a “water animal”. Moreover, if in Russian the connection between the words “otter” and “water” is not at all obvious, then in Greek it is easily traced (gidor - gr. “water”). In addition to searching for “relatives,” words had to be considered historical changes languages, primarily phonetic. But the arbitrary connection between the words “lipstick” and “smear” is not supported by anything. It relies on the assumption that the sound [z] somehow became the sound [d], which has never happened in the history of the Russian language. In the French language, from where the word “lipstick”, according to scientists, penetrated into Russian, the word is divided into the root “pomme” (that is, “apple” - the first lipstick was made from apples) and the suffix “ade”, which we, by the way, we often find it in French words (see “brav-ada”, “ball-ada”, etc.). How, from the point of view of “amateur linguistics,” can one explain the fact that the word is perfectly explained within the framework of French? No way: the author of the version of the “Russian origin” of the word “lipstick” was simply too lazy to look in the dictionary. And I didn’t even think about the fact that the borrowing of cosmetic innovations came from France to Russia, and not vice versa.
This simple example is very indicative because it demonstrates a serious problem that Russian philology has faced: “amateur linguistics” has long become a “trend” of pseudoscience, the same as “torsion fields” and “memory of water.” Tons of waste paper are also written on this topic and end up in bookstores in the “Philology” section.
The rules of the game, masquerading as linguistic research, boil down to the children's game of “what does it look like”: the players come up with a beautiful combination of letters, which they agree to find wherever they can. Take, for example, the syllable “ra”. It can be identified not only in the words “paradise” and “joy”, but in many other places: “dawn”, “Samara”... Yes, it is not at all necessary to limit yourself to the Russian language! If this syllable is often found in Sanskrit (chak-ra, mant-ra, aur-ra and even Kamasut-ra) or in Greek (kultura, gita-ra, sati-ra, opera-ra), then it means how one famous satirist and a big fan of false etymological concepts noted on Channel One, they originated from Russian! He said, not at all embarrassed by the fact that the Greeks did not go to the opera, but to the theater, and played not the guitar, but the cithara (opera is a borrowing from Italian, and the guitar is from Spanish; however, what’s the difference - that means the Italians are The Spaniards descended from us!).
Every educated and literate person understands perfectly the absurdity of all these constructions. However, sometimes he does not have enough knowledge to get through the quasi-etymological jungle into which they are trying to lead him: school course Russian language bypasses the origin of words; there is offensively little information in dictionaries (we mean widely available explanatory dictionaries: etymological dictionaries are designed for specialist philologists, and not for the average reader), and popular books on this topic ceased to interest publishers after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But a holiday has come on the street of the seeking reader with the publication of the book “From Notes on Amateur Linguistics.” Academician Zaliznyak is widely known not only as a remarkable specialist in the grammar of the Russian language and a researcher of Novgorod birch bark letters, but also as a popularizer of science, truly able to explain complex things simply and clearly. To be convinced of this, it is worth reading his lectures on historical linguistics and amazing stories about the history of the study of birch bark letters. In addition, Academician Zaliznyak is one of the few humanists fighting at the forefront of the fight against pseudoscience: he criticized Fomenko’s pseudo-etymological studies, and also showed that “Veles’s book” is “ scripture“for Russian nationalists, peppered with words taken from “The Tale of Igor’s Host” (such as “Rusichi”), and the names of Aryan gods (Indra, Suriya, Krishna, etc.) is an extremely crude fake.
This time, Andrei Anatolyevich undertook to study not the miraculously surviving fragments of text on birch bark and not the types of declension of nouns - the object of his research was “amateur linguistics” as a separate phenomenon of our society. The academician was not changed by his brilliant style: as always, he writes clearly and witty. At the same time, he manages not to fall into “simplification”, but actually explains the laws to a reader who is far from linguistics historical development languages. Exploring “amateur linguistics,” he explained what exactly he meant by this term and identified the main “research methods” in this pseudoscience: attempts to bring together words that have a vaguely similar sound shell (such as “copper is an adjective from the word honey, because the metal resembles honey in its color and consistency (!)), “reverse reading” (which easily turns “Rome” into the Slavic word “world”), etc. Further, Academician Zaliznyak shows us how these “methods” are used: you can read geographical names so that the most distant cities turn into native ones to our ears (Brazil - “silt coast”, Venice - “Vinnitsa”, Glasgow - “Glazov”, etc.), interpret written monuments of the past “in an amateurish way”, Moreover, they can be read in modern Russian, even if these are inscriptions on Etruscan or Cretan vessels.
So Andrei Anatolyevich leads the reader to the conclusion that amateur linguistics itself is not just a separate “branch” of pseudoscience, stewing “in its own juice,” but a tool for proving crazy ideas and substantiating conspiracy theories, according to which it is the Russians (option: Slavs) - the highest nation that once ruled the world and left traces of this dominance in languages and geographical names of all peoples. For example, the list of words that the same pseudo-scientist (in this case, A.T. Fomenko) considers to be “distortions” of the word “Rus” and evidence that “Rus” dominated these territories cannot fail to impress: Arizona , Arezzo, La Rochelle, Rochefort, Mar Rosso (i.e. the Red Sea), Brussels, Prussia, Paris... So, quasi-etymological constructions are a weapon in the ideological struggle. And the author correctly notes that the fascination with such delusional concepts is characteristic feature precisely today's man in the street, tormented by imperial complexes.
However, Academician Zaliznyak’s new book has a serious drawback - it ends too quickly. Having outlined the main areas in which “amateur linguistics” is applied, Andrei Anatolyevich, in fact, stops there: only the studies of A. T. Fomenko are analyzed in detail. But what about a number of equally popular and odious names? For example, Mr. Chudinov, who reads Cretan inscriptions in modern Russian - this fact itself slips through, but his last name is not given and detailed analysis should not be, although there is something to be made out here. Or the same “Veles’s book”, so brilliantly analyzed by the academician in a public lecture, is simply mentioned here. Zaliznyak only tells us that it is a grammatically monstrous mixture of all Slavic languages. All. There is not a single example of a grammatical or substantive inconsistency, although there are plenty of them in this text. The author himself entitled his work “From Notes...”, thereby justifying the small volume and fragmentary nature of the book and leaving the reader with the hope that the notes will sooner or later develop into more full research. And it is extremely necessary: books like this have not been published for a very long time, and the lack of publishing interest in them is the topic of a separate article. In conditions of a general decline in the prestige of science and the quality of education, publishing houses prefer to publish pseudo-etymological tales about the ancient and glorious (ancient) Russian people - the ruler of the world, instead of disseminating real scientific knowledge.
P. S.: Academician Zaliznyak’s book was published in the “Alexander Solzhenitsyn Literary Prize” series, which, according to the regulations for its award, is given to authors whose work “contributes to the self-knowledge of Russia.” It is no coincidence that the phrase confuses you when you try to comprehend it: you find yourself in the same intellectual dead end when you learn some other facts about the award. Thus, the greatest scientist V.N. Toporov, a specialist in comparative historical linguistics, mythology, and semiotics, was awarded this prize “for his fruitful experience in serving philology and national self-knowledge in the light of the Christian tradition,” which unforgivably narrows the idea of the researcher. Academician Toporov, among other things, is the author of a dictionary of the Prussian language and the Pali language, co-author of the encyclopedia “Myths of the Peoples of the World,” with which he could hardly “self-recognize” anything in line with the “Christian tradition” attributed to him. Along with famous scientists, the Solzhenitsyn Prize was calmly awarded to the real pseudo-scientist who considered himself a philosopher and political scientist - Alexander Panarin, who was a regular contributor to the newspaper “Zavtra” and a champion of “Orthodox civilization” as a saving ark in our globalized world. Which is very logical: in pursuit of the latest ideological trends, he “self-identified” Russia with all his might, going from an ardent liberal to an equally ardent soil activist... Against this background, the appearance of the book “From Notes on Amateur Linguistics” cannot but look like a happy one accident...
On December 24, 2017, at the age of 83, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, doctor, died in Moscow philological sciences Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak, a leading specialist in the history of the Russian language and Novgorod birch bark documents. He was known throughout the world as an outstanding Russian scientist.
We decided to briefly talk about its main scientific discoveries and achievements and why they matter.
1. Substantiation of the authenticity of the famous “Tale of Igor’s Campaign”
The problem of the authenticity of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” has been actively discussed in the history of literature and linguistics. The manuscript with the only copy of the work was discovered at the end of the 18th century by the famous collector and Chief Prosecutor of the Synod, Count Alexei Musin-Pushkin, but it burned in his palace during the Moscow fire of 1812, which gave reason to doubt the authenticity of the work. For example, French Slavic philologists Louis Léger ( late XIX century) and Andre Mazon (1930s). In their opinion, “The Lay” was created at the end of the 18th century according to the model of “Zadonshchina”. During the long debate, many arguments for and against were expressed.
Today it is believed that A.A. put an end to the protracted discussion. Zaliznyak. His most convincing arguments are presented in the book “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign: A Linguist’s View” (2004, 2nd ed. 2007, 3rd ed., supplemented, 2008). He showed that a hypothetical forger of the 18th century could write this work only if he possessed precise knowledge, which was obtained by linguistics only in the 19th and 20th centuries. Everything that we know today about the history of the Russian language and the laws of its change indicates that the Lay was indeed written in the 12th century and rewritten in the 15th–16th centuries. Even if a hypothetical imitator wrote on a whim, intuitively after long reading of analogues, he would still have made at least one mistake, but not a single linguistic error has been identified in the monument.
Zaliznyak’s general conclusion is that the probability of the “Word” being fake is vanishingly small.
2. An exhaustive formal scientific description of the laws of change in Russian words
Back in the appendix to the Russian-French dictionary of 1961, intended for the French-speaking user, Zaliznyak gave his first masterpiece - “A Brief Essay on Russian Inflection.” After all, foreigners learning the Russian language find it especially difficult to inflect and conjugate Russian words with their complex endings, which are very difficult to remember. The essay very logically sets out the main formal schemes according to which Russian inflection occurs (that is, declension and conjugation). Zaliznyak also came up with a convenient indexing of these schemes.
He summarized his findings in the famous monograph “Russian Nominal Inflection” (1967), which was included in the golden fund of Russian and world linguistics. We can say that before this book there was no exhaustive and complete (!) scientific and formal description of Russian inflection.
3. Compilation of the “Grammar Dictionary of the Russian Language”
Today, the phrase among scientists “look at Zaliznyak” has become the same formula as “look at Dahl”
A.A. Zaliznyak also compiled the absolutely outstanding “Grammar Dictionary of the Russian Language.” In it, for each of more than one hundred thousand Russian words, all its forms are given. Work on the dictionary lasted 13 years and ended with the release of the first edition of the dictionary in 1977. The dictionary immediately became a big event in linguistics and Russian studies. It is necessary not only for Russian scholars, but also extremely useful for everyone who uses the Russian language. In 2003, its fourth edition was published. Today, the phrase among scientists “look at Zaliznyak” has become the same formula as “look at Dahl.”
4. Deciphering birch bark letters
A.A. Zaliznyak is an outstanding researcher of Novgorod birch bark letters, many of which he deciphered, commented on and published for the first time. In his famous work “Ancient Novgorod Dialect” (1995), he cites the texts of almost all birch bark letters with linguistic commentary. He also laid the foundation for the study of the Old Novgorod dialect.
For some letters, he was the first to establish their correct meaning. For example, earlier the phrase “I am sending pike and tongs” was read in such a way that far-reaching conclusions were drawn about the development of blacksmithing in the Novgorod region and even about the proximity of the fishing and blacksmith settlements in Novgorod. But Zaliznyak established that it actually says: “I’m sending pike and bream”! Or, let’s say, the phrase “doors of a cell” was understood as “doors of a cell.” But it turned out that it actually said: “The doors are intact”! What was written was read and pronounced exactly like this - “kele doors”, but the correct understanding is “the doors are intact”. That is, in the language of the ancient Novgorodians, our “ts” was pronounced like “k” and there was no so-called second palatalization (softening of consonants resulting from raising the middle part of the back of the tongue to the hard palate), although previously scientists were sure of the opposite.
5. Establishing the origin of the Russian language
Having studied the living everyday language of birch bark letters, Zaliznyak established that there were two main dialects in the Old Russian language: the northwestern dialect, which was spoken by the Novgorodians, and the south-central-eastern one, which was spoken in Kyiv and other cities of Rus'. And the modern Russian language that we speak today most likely arose through the merger or convergence (convergence) of these two dialects.
6. Popularization of science
A.A. Zaliznyak was a remarkable popularizer of science, giving public lectures on linguistics and birch bark letters. Many of them can be found on the Internet. It is noteworthy that when in September Zaliznyak lectured at the Faculty of Philology. M.V. Lomonosov about new birch bark letters found in the summer in Veliky Novgorod, the phrase was written on the blackboard in the audience: “Friends, become more dense.” It was difficult for the room to accommodate everyone.
From a scientific point of view, Zaliznyak harshly criticized A.T.’s “New Chronology”. Fomenko as a completely amateurish and anti-scientific work, built on primitive associations.
Zaliznyak’s lectures are widely known on “amateur linguistics” - pseudoscientific theories concerning the origin of the Russian language and its individual words. Criticism of such ideas is detailed in his book “From Notes on Amateur Linguistics” (2010).
Outstanding scientists about A.A. Zaliznyak:
We are lucky that Zaliznyak does not deal with semantics, otherwise we would have nothing to do
Yu.D. Apresyan, linguist, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences: “We are lucky that Zaliznyak does not study semantics, otherwise we would have nothing to do.”
Philosopher V.V. Bibikhin: “Signs are only pointers. You always have to walk the path yourself outside the signs. So, after a long and successful work with birch bark letters, Andrei Anatolyevich Zaliznyak confidently says: it is impossible to read them if the meaning is not guessed. Only when the reader somehow already knows What stated in the document, he begins to identify the problematic risks on the birch bark with the letters. It is vain to hope that one can begin by recognizing letters and move from them to words; the icons themselves will turn out to be wrong.”
A.M. Pyatigorsky, philosopher and orientalist: “A linguist, by the grace of God, by genes, by nature, is Andrei Anatolyevich Zaliznyak. He's just a genius. I would consider learning from him the highest good. I love him very much. The best linguist(I mean specific, not applied linguistics) I don’t know. The man who rediscovered the Russian language, who rewrote everything we knew about the Russian language.”
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE:
Andrei Anatolyevich Zaliznyak was born on April 29, 1935 in Moscow in the family of engineer Anatoly Andreevich Zaliznyak and chemist Tatyana Konstantinovna Krapivina.
As a boy, Zaliznyak himself asked to be baptized
As a boy and while visiting relatives in Belarus in the 1940s, Zaliznyak asked to be baptized.
In 1958 he graduated from the Romance-Germanic department of the Philological Faculty of Moscow state university them. M.V. Lomonosov. In 1956-1957 he trained at the Ecole normale superieure in Paris. Until 1960, he studied at graduate school at Moscow State University.
In 1965, at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences (USSR Academy of Sciences), he defended his dissertation on the topic “Classification and synthesis of Russian inflectional paradigms.” For this work, Zaliznyak was immediately awarded the degree of Doctor of Philology.
Since 1960 he worked at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences as chief research fellow Department of Typology and Comparative Linguistics. He was engaged in teaching at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University (professor since 1973). In the 1960s and 1970s, he took an active part in the preparation and conduct of linguistic Olympiads for schoolchildren. He taught at the University of Provence (1989-1990), the University of Paris (Paris X - Nanterre; 1991) and the University of Geneva (1992-2000). Since 1987, he has been a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and since 1997, an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Member of the Spelling Commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the editorial boards of the Dictionary Old Russian language XI–XIV centuries and Dictionary of the Russian language of the 11th–17th centuries.
He died on December 24, 2017 at his home in Tarusa at the age of 83. The employee of the Russian Language Institute who reported this Russian Academy Sciences (RAS) Dmitry Sichinava
“From notes on amateur linguistics” by Andrey Zaliznyak
The main part of A. A. Zaliznyak’s book “From Notes on Amateur Linguistics” consists of articles in which the linguistic hypotheses of the creator are analyzed in detail and destroyed “ new chronology"A. T. Fomenko.
The interest—almost dramatic—of the book lies in the very combination of these two names. A. A. Zaliznyak personifies the understanding of humanities as the common work of many generations of scientists seeking the truth; he is the largest modern linguist, creator of the Grammar Dictionary of the Russian Language, author basic research on the history of the Russian language. Each of his works is an example of rigor and clarity almost unique in the humanities.
A. T. Fomenko portrays the humanities as a self-serving centuries-old deception, the work of many generations of falsifiers; he declared the entire history of Antiquity and the Middle Ages to be a huge falsification, with the help of which Western Europeans tried to erase the memory of the worldwide Russian-Horde Empire: “In order to prevent the restoration of the Empire, it is necessary for peoples to forget the very fact of its recent existence.” When reading these types of statements, it is unclear whether the speaker is a madman or a cynic. Zaliznyak suggests that in Fomenko’s books, the speaker is someone who “from the position of a superman, conducts a large-scale human science experiment and tests the boundaries of thoughtless gullibility,” that is, both a madman and a cynic at the same time. But in fact, what is interesting is not so much the motives of the author of the books, but the mindset that made their mass success possible. It seems that the basis of the reader's gullibility is a deep and vague feeling of general deception and burglary: we have been deceived, we just don’t know how; They stole from us, we just don’t know what; and therefore we are ready to believe anyone who explains this to us.
Linguistic reasoning in Fomenko’s books is a combination of arbitrariness, fantasy and ignorance. Each of them individually still causes laughter (“Perhaps the name BRUSSEL (BRUSSELS) is a slight distortion of the word B-RUSSES, that is, White RUSSIANS”), but after reading several such statements in a row, it is no longer funny, but sickening. Zaliznyak examines all these constructions calmly, correctly, time after time showing their absurdity, sometimes accompanying, but never replacing the argument with ridicule or indignation. One of the polemical techniques is well known to readers of his recent, but already classic book, “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign: A Linguist’s View”: Zaliznyak suggests imagining what information and skills the notorious falsifiers should have, and when we imagine this, “nothing for us.” there is no choice but to recognize the supposed inventor of Latin as having truly superhuman omniscience.”
Another technique is even simpler: Zaliznyak suggests imagining that a foreign amateur linguist will behave in the same way as domestic ones and begin to find traces of his language on our native land: “To feel what an outrage on language such “interpretations” represent, imagine that an English amateur, as ignorant and tendentious as ATF, undertook to interpret the name Red Square and “solved” it this way: this name is a slightly distorted English crusty plot, “crusted area of land.” It is not difficult to imagine how such ingenuity of foreign amateur linguists would have aroused among the Russian public, especially if each of them had declared that it was his national troops who stood on Red Square when it was given such a name. But the ATF does not expect approval in Venezuela. It is enough for him to arouse enthusiasm among the simpletons in Russia.” It is this simple polemical device that, it seems, should cause special concern among Fomenko’s fans: to those who believe that they have been deceived, humiliated, cast into darkness, it always seems that they see everyone, but no one sees them, that they cannot fall neither someone else's gaze nor the light of reason.
In Zaliznyak’s book, the light of reason, as always with him, shines evenly and strongly, everything is clear, understandable, convincing, with the exception of only one point. Who is it addressed to? Those who are receptive to his arguments, built on facts, logic and the laws of linguistics, do not need to prove the absurdity of Fomenko’s constructions, they do not take them seriously anyway, and for Fomenko’s fans, on the contrary, it is impossible to prove anything, they know in advance that all the “official science,” including linguistics, is part of a conspiracy of falsifiers.
Zaliznyak himself admits this, but still believes that there are those “who see a scientific concept in the work of the ATF and, therefore, are ready to determine their position by weighing the arguments for and against, and not on the basis of general feelings like “like / dislike” like". We would also like to help those who meet with natural doubt the cascade of incredible innovations that descend on the reader from the writings of the ATF, but do not undertake to determine for themselves whether the facts to which the ATF refers are reliable, and whether the conclusions that it actually follows from them does."
There may be a number of such people, but it’s still not about them. Even if there were not a single such reader in reality, Zaliznyak’s book would still be necessary. Not for the sake of clarifying someone’s minds, but simply so that at least once the boundary between the light of reason and the darkness of an imagination offended by the whole world can be clearly drawn. This book is such a border.
I recently read a book by the outstanding modern linguist Andrei Anatolyevich Zaliznyak, “From Notes on Amateur Linguistics” (Moscow, 2010). The collection of articles by the academician is very useful, interesting, and understandable.
Amateur linguistics is the thinking of inquisitive non-professionals about the origin of words. The school teaches grammar and spelling native language, but do not provide insight into how languages change over time. And inquisitive people want to know where, when and how a certain word appeared. They want to know if there is a connection between similar words. They want to know what the original meaning of the proper name was. Many people get answers to these questions through their own guesses, without looking in etymological dictionaries.
The author of the book gives many examples of false folk etymology and explains the mistakes of amateur linguists. The external similarity of words is not evidence of a historical connection between them. Amateur linguists do not know how language changes over time. Historical linguistics has long established that in the course of time constant changes occur at all levels of language. The rate of change varies from era to era, but no language remains unchanged. Ancient and new form one word may not even have a single common sound.
Changes in language in a particular era are natural. For example, phonetic changes occur not in one word, but in all words of a given language, where the changed sound was in the same position. “This requirement for the universality of any phonetic change (in a given language at a given period of its history) is the main difference between the professional study of the history of a language and the amateur one.” An amateur linguist will say that in Latin “father” is “pater”, and in German it is “vater”: this means that this is an example of the transition of the sound “p” to “f”. A professional linguist will check whether there was a general transition from “p” to “f” (“pl” to “fl”) in the history of the Russian language and find out that there was no such transition. When researching the origins of a word, a linguist considers the earliest form of the word recorded in the written tradition. An amateur linguist does not have the necessary knowledge; he takes words in their modern form for comparison.
The consonance of words from different languages has two sources: 1. the historical connection between these words (either the words originated from one word of an ancient ancestor language, or a borrowing occurred of this word); 2. chance. Purely external coincidences of words are not so rare. Amateurs also don't pay attention to morphemic composition words.
Amateur linguists often use the “reverse reading” technique. For example, an Arab sees the word "Tula" and reads it (from right to left) as "Alut". But the word "Tula" is written in Russian, and the Arab reads it in his own language. Amateurs exaggerate the role of the written form and do not understand that any living language is a means of oral communication.
Several chapters of the book are devoted to the analysis of amateur linguistics by Academician Fomenko. A. Zaliznyak very wittily, convincingly and funnyly refutes the “linguistic postulates” of the mathematician.
I recommend this fascinating and interesting book both professional linguists and non-professional lovers of language riddles.