First Contact. That's what the Etics call it. When a Civilization, or a Reality, collides with another Civilization - or Reality - usually under the cover of Ignorance, at least for one of them, they call it First Contact. For Christianity, 1st Contact came with the awful discovery of the "others." Peoples not mentioned in "The Book" - the Bible. When the Portageeze & the Spics - looking for India - bumped into all them Injuns & Wogs it was a cold slap across the Christian Face and Faith. Who the hell were all these little dark peoples? What fuckin' Tribe of Israel did they escape from? Because if the Bible is True - that is, a book of history - of Geschichte - and not just a book of Sacred Koans - Heiligeschichte - then all them Yeller & Rouge & Braun peoples had to be diasporic Jews what fell off the radar. They had to be. If the Bible had any Truthiness to it at all. So Western Kiki Priests & Profs tied themselves in logical knots as they tried to shoehorn all the "Others" into their Weltanschauung, their Innenwelt, and their Christian Reality. But the lil' brown bastards wouldn't fit. And then along came Jones. Oriental Jones. Sir William Jones. (1746-1794) English Philologist and Scholar of ancient India. His old man was a brilliant but odd duck who thought in Mathematics and gave the world the Symbol for "pi ". Little Billy Jones was born a Linguistic Prodigy and learned Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi-Persian, and the basics of Chinese before he hit puberty. By the time he died, Sir William Jones knew 15 Languages fluently and could get laid, drunk, and Tattooed, in another 30. The Etics labeled him a Hyperpolyglot. Cool Greek Word. Or actually 3 words: Hyper [over and above], Poly [many], Glot [tongue]. It was Jones who discovered that Greek, and nearly all Western Languages, were related to and descended from Sanskrit and older Indian Languages. And Slovak languages. And Persian languages. And Celtic. And about half the other 7,000 languages on earth. Oriental Jones was a medium for First Contact.
Jones did Oxford, B.A. & M.A. Then became the tutor of Princess Diana's Sippe, the Spencers. He wrote a bunch of books on Persia, Turkey, and the Middle East. He studied Law, became a Jurist, and a circuit Judge in Wales. After he and Ben Franklin failed to solve the British problem of the American Revolution, he was appointed a judge on the Supreme Court of Bengal. So he married him up a Bishop's elder daughter and the blissful couple split for the Raj. He arrived in Calcutta, India in 1783. India bit him hard and he sank himself into its culture, its history, peoples, smells, spices, and especially: its languages. Its Tongues. He wrote so many essays, books, and pamphlets on all things Subcontinent that he became known as: Oriental Jones. Don't look any further for the source of Lucas's Indiana Jones - this is it. But don't waste your time on any link with Pooler Jones - there isn't any. Within only a year or two, Jones had made the discovery or which he is most famous: He noticed and noted that the Indian tongue of Sanskrit was too much like Classical Greek and Latin to be a Happy Accident. The languages, he knew, must be somehow related. He wrote that all 3 of those Languages must, in fact, have a common root - an Ur-Tongue - now "dead" - that is, not spoken anymore - but still, nevertheless, camoed-in and hiding in plain site. He called that Ur-Language: Proto-Indo-European. William Jones was the father of Comparative Linguistics and Indoeuropean Studies. Take a long look at the chart to the right. It follows the Indoeuro root: wid [to see, to know] thru time and tongues as it migrates Out of India and into English where the root is still present in the modern terms: wise, wit, witty, and everything related to the concept of "Know." Look at the chart below and see how our modern "Latin" alphabet is related to Sanskrit alphabets.
"The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic, and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family."

- Sir William Jones - 1786
The books which Jones wrote on the Orient were so popular that the entire Romantic Movement in Poetry - Byron, Keats, Coleridge etc. - were influenced by his glimpses into the exotic east. Many a Twit Scholar or adventurer signed up to serve in the Raj because of something they had read from Oriental Jones.
Since no Christian White Man had ever researched and written down these relationships before - no one had, as of yet, been able to make such a startling claim stick. It is impossible for us today - who take these things for granted - to feel and understand what a Cultural Bombshell his IndoEuro Discovery was. During the life of Oriental Jones, most Christians, both Emics and Etics, firmly believed that the bible had revealed to man the last word on world languages. As well as the last word on World Peoples - or what we call "Races." And here we come to the world's biggest misconception and fallacy - because there is no such thing as "Race." The term and its meaning were unknown until about the time of Sir William, "Oriental", Jones. You see the Bible says nothing about Race or Races. We invented the word and the territory the word is supposed to cover. "Race" is what the Etics call a "Social Construct:" - "A social construction (or social construct) is any phenomenon 'invented' or 'constructed' by participants in a particular culture or society, existing because people agree to behave as if it exists or follow certain conventional rules. One example of a social construct is social status. Another example of social construction is the use of money." Wikipedia itself, is a 3rd example, as is any Dictionary or Encyclopedia which attempts to abstract and define actions, concepts, and memes while they deal with Meaning - such definitions must be "agreed upon" to be relevant or efficient. Thus all of Language is a Social Construct because words have no independent "meanings" outside the Language Set. They are a group, or "social", construction - even when used (as Birdsong) to seduce. Though Skippy will argue that language used to Seduce Sexually is more akin to a "Call System," then a Language.
Actually, Bitches love long, slow, deep vowels and the basso-profundo to produce them.
The stunning shock for the Postpost Monkey is that until very recently the only explanation that Kikidom had for the world's different languages was the idiocy of the story connected with this fantasy to the left. God, Kikiman is told, saw that men were approaching heaven - or metaphorically reaching beyond heaven's grasp - and so he decided to confuse them in their "science" by suddenly creating a bunch of different languages and spraying these into the collected crowd which was building this tower - this bridge - between the world below and the world above. And thus there are different languages and further thus, there are the different "Races" which these tongues manifest and create in their speakers. So all the world's peoples used to be One until the Babel of Tongues drove them apart and created separate "Races." Neat Story.
The problem with a Just So Story like this is that it makes god look like either an Idiot or a very, very lazy Deity. Because, as Jones discovered, half the world's languages share a lot of things in common: vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and even spellings. So god didn't really create different tongues from One Ur-Tongue, he simply bent the One. Over and Over. If you believe the Babel tale then you must also believe that god is a miserable failure at Novel Creativity and instead just opts for Clones. Studies of "Race" did not begin with Biology, but with Linguistics. Philology, in Racist hands, "led to conclusions regarding religion, society, and morality. Racism had a Linguistic and Cultural Genesis." Etics argue that it was the decline in the 17th century of the Authority of Scripture which "opened up an ideological space for the uninhibited articulation of racialist sentiments." Thank you Sexy Sue Heschel. If Skippy knew Sanskrit, he'd be all over the Bitch.
“The search for an Urheimat, a primordial homeland of nation, culture, and Völk, characterized early German writings on race.” Indology - which Slick Sue points out is “characteristic of early 19e German Romanticism offered an alternative to the biblical accounts of Eden, Babel, revelation, and divinely ordained Diaspora. Not Mesopotamia or Palestine, but India became the geographic font of the West, as Sanskrit replaced Hebrew.” Here we are talking about the writings of Friedrich and Wilhelm Schlegel, Franz Bopp, and Friedrich Rückert, et al. “Just as divine action occurred thru speech, philologists viewed language as the vehicle for religion, and indeed, for salvation.” Philology, like all academic disciplines, was at this time and place, dominated by the “romantic understanding of religion not as a set of propositions whose truth and falsity can be evaluated, but as an ineffable, prelinguistic experience expressed in language and symbol.” Tongue me, Sue! Tongue me! So Sanskrit and other Ur-tongues, as well as the “cultic rituals of Zoroastrian or Buddhists were mined for the ineffable experience they encoded.” They were treated as “windows into a putatively deeper level of religiosity...” These were thought to be “interchangeable with Kiki symbols and languages, since they considered the experience, not the symbol, as bearing truth and meaning.” Oh jesus, I'm all wet.
Finding the Urheimat - the Homeland - of Proto-Indoeuropean became an obsession, not only with the Nazis but with everyone included in the Term "Aryan." Over the past 150 years every piece of solid ground between China and the Atlantic has been "proven" to be that Holy Ground. You can play the game to, and you don't have to go any deeper than Lexicon. Here's the theory: half the world's tongues are descended from Proto-IE and you can see this thru Etymology - the study of the Roots of words. If two languages share common terms thru common roots they must both stem from a common ancestor - in this case: Proto IE. So if IndoEuro tongues have terms in them like `Snow' - coming from a common root [sneigwh] then you should not look in the tropics for the homeland - you need to find a place where there is Snow. Since IndoEuro languages have common root/words for Snow, Beech, and Birch, but not for Palm Tree, Tiger, Parrot, or Sea. we may deduce that the Urheimat of Proto-IndoEuro was Temperate and Inland and not Tropic and Coastal. Since IndoEuro tongues have common roots for: grain, cherry, apple, pear, as well as: bear, beaver, and fox, we can narrow the Heimat to only those places whose Flora & Fauna will support those things. Since IndoEuro languages also share roots for: horse, cattle, pig, goat, sheep, and dog we can extrapolate from those that those animals had already been domesticated in the Homeland before the tribes set off on the great Indo-European Migrations which would bring them to the ends of Eurasia. Ditto for the common roots around: wool, weaving, wheel, mill, wagon, carpenter, plough, copper and bronze. All these tell us something about the state of technology in the homeland. The word `Technology' by the way, comes from the IndoEuro root: teks - to weave, whose earliest meaning was not about wool but about making a hut from interwoven mud and wattle. Textiles come later, as does Technology.
The game goes deeper. The earliest level of Proto-IE can be reconstructed and placed at around 4,000 BCE. We know these ancestors lived in a Patriarchal and Patrilineal society as well as being Patrilocal. The 1st means: Men Rule. The 2nd means: Lineage is derived from the Father's Family. The 3rd means: Women leave their family and go to live with the Male's. We know these things, from a people who left exactly NO written records, because our Family Relationship Terms evolved from theirs. All of our Kinship terms: Father, Mother, Daughter, Son, etc come from IE roots. Every language is also a Philosophy whose themes and theories can be divined thru Lexicon - thru Vocabulary. Don't look for the term: `Existential' in Navajo, or `Internet' in Old Frisian. Those terms belong to us and they help paint a picture of us and the types of things we believe and find important. So when Sir William Jones uncovered the Histories of Western languages and their relationships with the ancient roots of IndoEuropean a lot more than just Linguistic History was laid bare. The new study of Comparative Linguistics led inevitably to fallacies about Race and Religion and that led inevitably to places like Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Men mistake Prior for Primitive and that leads them into madness. Men can only go where their Verbal Forms can take them, so when we come to a tongue like Hebrew, or Navajo, which do not share Verbal Formations with IndoEuropean tongues then our minds cannot wrap themselves around any commonalities in the declensions of Actions. And that's a formula for misunderstanding, misinterpretations, and a formula for a disaster in Classification. `Us' gets smaller. `They' gets bigger. Language is built on Definitions and to Define is to build walls around. To Define is to Discriminate. To define is to Control. Language is what the Monkey has wrought from that Apple in Eden and it's a Left-Handed-Gift from the Old Dragon. The gold Mask next to this `Text' has been constructed from artistic forms of Sanskrit syllables. So much of the Universe is exactly like that - a Social Construction from the Lincoln Logs of Language. The Chinks have a rubric which applies: Do not mistake the pointing finger for the moon.
Do not click on the Green Crosses. That too is Forbidden.
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