Crazy Linguistic Theories (ft. Lichen, Babelingua, and Agma Schwa) 

edo nyland is so real like, basques walked so the alpidoid macrogroup could run

"Oh look, something interesting with Basque" "Every language is fake!" Well, that escalated quickly.

Considering the Finno-Korean Hyper War, which without a doubt happend, Finnish being Proto-World appear to be highly sensical, which is why I choose to believe in it.

If we are talking about crazy language-related people, then I have one more to the collection. There is a Polish guy called Benon Szałek, a self-proclaimed “heuristics specialist”, who has published at least a dozen of books describing how every language is related to either Tamil or Japanese, and saying that everything comes from now-nonexistent Dravidian empire in Central Asia. He even claims to have undeciphered the Linear A, Indus Valley and Rongorongo scripts, all of which of course depict a Dravidian language, because how can they not. I’m currently working on a video about him myself, because that guy genuinely caught me off guard when I was looking through the university library linguistic section.

My favourite crazy linguistic theory is that the Beach Boys time-travelled by accident while performing Barbara Ann, and the Ancient Greeks thought "wow, these guys are weird" and reused the sounds to make what we now know as the word "barbarian"

I like the part where nyland couldn't deal with chinese because it was the only tonal language he bothered with

My personal theory is that the Basque-Icelandic pidgin was an original language that separated into Basque and all Germanic languages, which evolved backwards for a small period of time

I spoke with Nyland. He was “dedicated” to his theories (read: blinkered and obsessive). The main issue (aside the insanity of it) was loan words in Basque. They got used in his “decoding” process along with native words. So, a lot of his work was flawed before you even process the fact it was bat s**t crazy.

Agma Scwa's reading was so intense I almost wasn't distracted by the Lapis Lazuli waifu pillow.

5:56 The theory is bad enough on its own, but wow did he even read the Odyssey? Paris isn't a place, he was a prince of Troy lmfao

Ogham is well known to be ancient Irish, and is well understood. Did Nyland simply ignore anything that didn't suit his thesis?

The idea that someone ever had any success getting people to speak a conlang is the most ridiculous part of this whole ordeal, as any conlanger can attest

Talking about John Lily and saying "LSD was involved" is always an understatement

OOF I straight up forgot we even recorded this. 11/10 video

After all these years it's finally here 🙌

As a flemish guy it is so funny that Nyland wanted to destroy Flemish, which is not even a language and just a particular Dutch dialect, but wanted to combine other languages. Don't be shy about your dutch it sounds good, if a Dutch guy says your g is not throathy enough, just say you like the flemish accent more and you are earning that.

12:22 "All highly developed languages on Earth except for *possibly Chinese* have been shown to be developed from the original Saharan language" Well that was just random, lol.

the amount of pure pain i was inflicted at 7:35 when he said Germany and showed a Belgian flag is indescribable

Ah yes, my fave genre of RU-vid is stickman PowerPoint presentations based on entertaining facts and knowledge of the world mixed with a side of humor. And I will always love it no matter what.

the reading of Edo Nyland's hypothesis makes me feel like im being assaulted

This video took me a year to make and is the reason I got burned out and made nothing last summer :P

That last one was a hell of a ride. Somehow dude convinces himself that the Homeric epics actually took place in Scotland, then this leads him down a rabbit hole where the Basques are the last remnants of a lost Saharan master race and every other language in the world is a conlang created by monks to enforce the patriarchy.

Years ago I read a scholar-like article by an American Indian activist who rejected the Out of Africa theory. He argued all human beings originated in the Amazon Basin and spread from there across the world. His evidence: linguistic families which put English into the same family as Chinese. The proof: "How are you?" and "Ni Hau?" have the same "word" pronounced "haw." Et cetera. His motive was to uphold American Indian myths which insisted the indigenous nations of the Western Hemisphere *originated* in their current homelands. I've been kicking myself ever since, because I didn't print up this article when I encountered it, or at least record the man's name. He was a professor in an Oklahoma college, I believe. Anyone out there know anything about this gem?

Im Basque and cried when I saw the word "merezi" which is very clearly a romanic loan world lmao

I'm surprised the sun theory, which claims all languages are from Turkish isn't here, especially that unlike the ones here, it was taught and encouraged by the government for some time because apparently Ataturk was believer in the theory. Also Pan-Turks, especially their Azerbaijani nationalist kind, often make weird claims such as claiming Sumerian, Finnish, Basque, Etruscan, Median and many other ancient or living languages to be Turkic.

Every word of this is absolute insanity 10/10 would conspiracy again

Humans cannot speak without their vocal chords either. A sane version of the dolphin experiment would be to genetically engineer lab mice to have human vocal chords or a parrot (like) syrinxes.

As a basque person it’s always fun to see people struggle with the basque ‘z’

Just a sidenote; "Nyland" (If you're somewhat generally linguistically proficient as an English native speaker, you can pretty much guess what it means; "New Land") is a Swedish last name used by Finland-Swedes (it's the second most common last name among them), but you'll of course find non-Swedish speaking Finns today bearing the name as well, although it does mean that they are originally Finland-Swedes. So both the Swedish and Finnish pronunciation of the name are correct. Since we're on the subject of linguistics I figured I'd point that out. Although if said in English, the pronunciation you went with would be the "correct" way of anglifying the pronunciation of the name.

"brought with them a matrilinealy organized society, a nature-based goddess religion" hmmm someone's been reading The White Goddess

I can’t count the number of interactions ve had with people trying to connect some language with Sumerian. Turkic, Hungarian (and Uralic in general), and Dravidian being the most frequent. Also Albanian for some weird reason. It’s mind-numbing after awhile.

Most crazy linguistic theory; Altaic

MATE i cant believe you didnt mention cymru-glyphics (the ancient egyptians were welsh ofcourse)

16:16 this is so funny because it's wrong in so many levels: first of all, "zerbitzatu" ("zerbitu" is not conisdered correct) is a loan word coming from Spanish verb "servir" (to serve), which is so obvious but I guess this guy flipped the whole loanword situation around. However, the funniest part is that the ending "-tu" is just the infinive marking for most of Basque verbs (e.g. "ikutu", "apurtu", "lotsatu", "asmatu"), so it has nothing to do with the specific meaning of the verb "to serve"

This makes me think about a conlang that was written in high school, strategically placed and manipulated to form a religious language to get off class on Tuesdays

My ultra-detailed language theory: Humans have been using language for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years. The first language was likely a pidgin of quick sounds to coordinate hunts, label objects, and teach children the ways of the world. These pidgins evolved over time into more complex words and grammar, and new words were created as people migrated and encountered new things. And then languages kept evolving, drifting further and further apart, until they were completely unrecognizable. To the point that we can’t tell how some languages are related anymore. The only reason that we have large language families like indo-European is because of major migrations relatively recently (8,000 years ago). Even then, languages like English and Hindi are so different that it’s barely possible to see their relationship. So yeah, all languages are related, but the relationships are so ancient that we can’t see them anymore.

2:05 thank you for correctly depicting England and the Aral sea.

Wettenhovi-Aspa also thought that the Swedish "människa" (person) comes from Finnish "maanussija" (ground fucker) even though I wouldn't count that as a real word.

Not the Steven Universe bodypillow

1:04 Lol the kiki bouba experiment reference is golden

Well it took ya a year but you made this linguist very happy. Subscribed

you crossing out Hungary at 17:20 is the best part of the video, laughed for like 5 minutes 💀💀

I get the point he makes at the end but I don’t want Scottish Gaelic to die, it’s an important art of my identity

One thing I wish Nyland was right about is the number of Ainu speakers. BTW, your comparing of his crackpot theory to a work of art reminds me of a Polish artist, mainly sculptor (quite good and iteresting one), Stanisław Szukalski, who developed his own pseudohistorical theory, involving linguistics. It's called Zermatism, and it makes Nyland look sane in comparison.

10:20 Body pillow: out Gamer lights: on Volume: 10 morbillion Fucking wild

Nyland thought he could pull a sneaky on us, but Connor ain't having it!

17:17 the erasure of Hungarian speaking areas lol

As a non- english/dutch- native- speaker, it's really eye opening to see how incredibly biased Nyland (and others) are/were when it came to language development by their mother tongue. Sure, english is the easiest language to learn, gendered nouns are nonsensical and illogical, abugidas only exist to mess with people and all languages write their verbs with "to" in front of them when they are written out of context.

I am surprised that you didn’t mention Sun language theory

Now we just need artifexian and biblaridion and we’ll have the all of the conlang RU-vidrs in one video

Yes all Finns are Indonesian🇮🇩🇮🇩🇮🇩🇮🇩

Kashubian mentioned LETSGOOOO!

It was just yesterday I was telling a friend about the story of Tartalo, and how close it is to Polyphemus in the Odyssey! As a child, I used to confuse both stories a lot. I am a native Basque speaker and live in the Basque Country! If you have questions, I can answer them!

I like that Nyland has batshit takes beyond linguistics, dabbling into batshit theology by saying that the scattering of languages at Babel is a commandment to be enacted rather than a divine punishment that already happened

Is Jovan Deretić on the list? He’s the unfortunate embarrassment who thinks Serbs are the Proto Indo Europeans. His method is finding any toponym with [S/Z][optional vowel][R/L][B/M/N/V] and claiming it means the current or ancient inhabitants of the area are or were descended from the Serbs regardless of how other supposed SRB related toponyms from the same language look or how that fits into sound changes in other cognates, real or imagined, between that language and a Serbian, so like he might claim that Zrn and Sulv are both one language’s cognates of Srb. Also the Pope, and the Byzantine and Habsburg empires and today the English and Americans are conspiring to hide this and the Serbs had a massive ancient empire, no relation to the real Serbian empire. [edit: sadly he is not]

I watched one of your videos and thought you are a multimillion subscriber channel cuz your videos are so well made

Your map is awesome. That sad Aral sea and lack o e*gland. :D

wow those r amazing theories, and great dutch :p

I love to come across Basque in these niche linguistics videos on RU-vid :) But it's so funny to me because most of the example words used on the video don't really exist (like "mudapen", "tara" or "kiritu"), so I have no idea where Nyland supposedly took them from and their translations to English are obviously wrong.

I didn't processed a single word of the agma schwa clip because the vibes were just too overwhelming

chad agma schwa with the body pillow in the background

Love that you listed "Independence days" as a major English export. Fun trivia fact: 10% of the world's population lives in countries that declared independence specifically from Elizabeth II, and she only missed India and Pakistan by a couple years.

Can’t wait for next year’s video

I love this, this is like sam o'nella but instead of history it's linguistics. So awesome. Subscribed.

Nikolai Marr "A New Doctrine of Language." 1. Language originated from "labour cries" as a result of "sound revolution" and is connected with the beginning of human labour activity. 2. All words of all languages have a common origin (monogenesis), namely from the "four elements" - the original labour cries SAL, BER, YON and ROSH 3. A pre-language cannot divide into several new languages; languages can only interbreed.

it's like... the Basque version of New Chronology lol i love it

Hi Conner I just found your channel and was wondering if you had ever looked into the koasati language and if would be willing to do a video on it, it's spoken on the Alabama-Couashatta and the Couashatta reservations in Texas and Louisiana respectively.

Here's my crazy theory: Crimean Gothic is derived from Anglo-Saxon. We know without a doubt that Anglo-Saxons did migrate into the lands of the Byzantine Empire following the conquests of William of Normandy. It is reasonable, if not certain therefore, that Crimean Gothic is just an advanced form of the Anglo-Saxon English.

Nyland is pronounced as if it were IPA. Also it means “new land” The way you said it sounds like “nylon”

To be fair, the idea that Macedonian is merely a dialect of Bulgarian is one presented by legitimate linguists too. I’m not sure, I don’t speak either so I’m not familiar with the differences but as a speaker of a relatively similar language (Serbocroatian) they do sound very similar to each other, but that doesn’t really prove shit since obviously they are more similar to each other than to anything else so they’d seem about the same to an outsider.

As a flemmish person I would like to mention the voiced velar fricatives to be a recent evolution of the dutch language as it was historically (and still is in flanders where this horrendous shift hasn't taken place) an approximate instead of a fricative.

this needs more likes

Awesome video. I do want to point out tho, that the fine syllable in "benedictine" is pronounced with a short "i" and not a long one

I just now noticed that agma schwa sounds like Krimson Rogue

IMO the closest macrofamily to be widely accepted in the near future would be Austro-Tai (rather than Dene-Yeniseian), actually. Like, the list of core cognates is pretty robust, and the regular correspondences are plenty, including even the tones of Kra-Dai languages with the final consonants of AN...

These kinds of conspiracy theories are weird, because they always weave little bits of truth into them, isolated from context. Yes, there was a late migration out of Africa, one associated with the spread of the Afroasiatic language family, which could have some connection to Neolithic languages in Eurasia. It's true that pre-Bronze Age societies were more equalitarian-but the emergence of patriarchy cannot have been a special effort by a single religion, rather a series of deimic migrations and invasions, like the Indo-European expansion. Essentially people who love conquering their neighbours are typically obsessed with male warriors. The rest is crackpot nonsense, of course, but that's how conspiracy theories get you: by sprinkling it with just enough truth to make it appear plausible to those who don't know any better.

Okay, there was some freaky shit goin on in that dolphin experiment.

cool intro!

That was inspiring. If he was Swedish (which he probably isn't) it would be more like Nü, but with the growing trend in l-vocalisation, the l would become like w, then we could nasalise the an and I don't know what the d is doing there anyway. So his name would then sound like a passing motorbike. In Basque.

barely into the vid but a monthly schedule aint bad at all

0:12 That's actually a pretty good upload schedule. Don't feel ashamed.

love you buddy

Ya know there's a stadium in Knoxville, Tennessee. The stadium is called Neyland Stadium. It's pronounced like Knee-land

14:30 as a Dutch man, I love how this wasn't even close to /ui/ Also, yeah, together with /ij/, the Dutch just love having vowels that no foreigner can pronounce. We're not xenophobic, we just really, really, really, really want to discourage you from learning our language. (Which is why we are always very honoured whenever people do try and learn our language and do an actual decent job at it.) The /g/ was kinda good though, ngl. At least it was in the right direction. EDIT; 14:59 THE DUTCH SHOULD SUFFER, yes random evil monk, yes we should, I 100% agree And yes, if you're failing at Dutch pronunciation, not being Dutch is a skill issue

Some basque words you use as examples in this video came fron latin or spanish language, I advise you serch the origin of each words you will use in future videos about languages to make sure is a valid exaple. Other than that this video is one of the most informative videos I've seen about the teories of the origin of the basque, congratulations. Nothing more to say, greetings from the spanish basque country.

Theo Vennemann has gotta be in here somewhere

24 seconds and i love you

Wonderful video! I have another crazy pseudolinguist I need to mention. Nikolai Marr was a Georgian academic who promoted a "Japhetic Theory" before and after the October Revolution. He claimed that some Caucasian languages were related to Semitic languages, having a common origin from which (of course) Basque also originated. So far, so standard bad linguistics, right? But no, it goes much further. Marr fully supported the Soviets, and so became the USSR's top linguist in the 20s and 30s. Promoted for his "proletarian", not "bourgeois" science, he started to develop loonier ideals. Taking the Marxist perspective that nationalism is used by the ruling classes to sow discord between workers and foster "false" (i.e., non-class) consciousness as a starting point, Marr began to propose that this applied to language as well. The belief that workers and capitalists of a nation spoke the same language was considered a pernicious myth. A consequence of this idea would be, say, an Ethiopian worker and a Dutch worker understanding each other better than an Ethiopian worker and his Ethiopian employer. Taking the Marxist view of history and its end-goal of full Communism, Marr believed that, as classes would become indistinct, so would different languages. All of the world, under Communism, would evolve to speak a single language. This spurred an odd latinisation campaign amongst USSR's minorities' scripts. Other weird bits include his belief that the primordial proto-world contained four "diffused exclamations": sal, ber, ton, rosh (apparently), which can be paleontologically seen in every language, in accordance with its "development". Marr died in 1934, though his students continued his idras until the 60s. Hilariously, Stalin thought his work was garbage and called it "anti-Marxist" in a 50s essay about linguistics (stopped clocks and all that). While most cautionary tales and morals can be derived from other Soviet manglings of science (see Lysenkoism and "sluggish schizophrenia", to name a few), this guy probably did the least real harm out of all of them.

my personal favorite as a learner of chechen is that ancient greek is not, in fact, indo-european, but vainakh. Prometheus - Pxarmat Lykos - Borzosh Ego - So Su - Xo Auta - Uish yeah this theory is bullshit

I tjought you were gonna talk about Homer in the Baltic and the baltic origin of the Greeks :( but this is still more than I can take lol

0:15 *Altaic.*

Ayyy go bills. Great vid tho!

Thank you for the video! One mistake you made though about the Dutch use of grammatical gender. We did not actually drop all our genders. There used to be neuter, feminine and masculine but we dropped the feminine and replaced it with masculine. Feminine “Den” got replaced by “De” Meaning that “Het paard” has always been “Het paard”

It gets me mad, how much some people still try use the Bible as a science book. Just stop. 🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️

0:13 - That **raises** the question.

Except for possibly Chinese killed me

15:01 i just wanna mention how northumbrian english has a uvular fricative

For anyone looking to find out more about insane human-dolphin studies, highly recomend one of my alma mater's most famous alumni's book "wet goddess"

Dolphin beastialty

A little on the nose implying Chomskians quacks, though Edo Nyland obviously is.