“Sameer” – The Most Dishonest “Scholar” on the Internet
Those who are acquainted with my blogs will be acquainted with the Shatterer, (https://x.com/dxrsam_0 ) the internet clown who claimed that he had “shattered” my article on the Elephant. I had dealt with the rantings and ravings of this pompous, and apparently completely lost-to-shame, fool in my following articles:
https://talageri.blogspot.com/2022/08/indian-fauna-elephants-foxes-and-ait.html
https://talageri.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-shatterer-again-on-leopards-rather.html
I have been told that, after getting completely shattered by my above articles, he had been lying low for a long time and trying to avoid coming on my radar. But, in the last few weeks, perhaps egged on by fans, he has again been trying for some troll comments about my “etymologies” on Twitter. However, since I do not believe in kicking a fallen and wounded foe, I did not react.
But yesterday I posted a short article to highlight a funny exchange of tweets on Twitter, titled “Twitter (X) Trolls, Nilesh Oak and Myself”, in which I wrote: “now, I have stopped reacting to troll tweets of the second type, since I realize that when people have nothing concrete to say, they descend to vulgar personal abuse, and resorting to personal abuse without having anything concrete to say is the surest sign of the troll having accepted that he stands defeated [...] Rather than reacting indignantly to tweets abusing or criticizing me, nowadays I find myself amused even by the most abusive of them.”
Rather like Jayadratha in the Mahabharata who thought it was now safe to come out from hiding when he thought the sun had set, this coward thought it was now safe for him to come out of hiding and to tweet lies about me without any fear of retaliation or any other consequences. Yes, I will generally stick to my inclinations to not waste time on trolls, but just this once, and since this troll has been constantly raising points about my “etymologizing”, let me talk about etymologies.
Apparently, in the last few
weeks, he has been trying to give what in Mumbai slang is called “हूल देना” (to
give tentative provocative shoves to test the ground to see if it is safe to
attack). But today, he has apparently been emboldened to write as follows:
https://x.com/dxrsam_0/status/1900147466076373023
“Talageri claimed that Hindi yār comes from
Sanskrit jārá, neglecting the phonetic development of native words and the
dynamics of Persian influence on Hindi. An indefensible etymology. Talageri
does this so often that all etymologies given by him are automatically
suspicious.”
5:00 PM·
Mar 13 2025
Mr. Clown, I fully understand the “dynamics of Persian influence on Hindi”, but you do not understand the “dynamics of Sanskrit-Iranian connections”. After searching through all my writings, if this is the only “wrong etymology” that you could discover, then you are really a pathetic object to be pitied. There is a direct connection between Sanskrit and (through Avestan) Persian. Thus Sanskrit yajña = Avestan yašna = Persian jashan, Vedic Mitra = Avestan Miθra = Middle Persian Mihr = Later Persian Mehr (and indeed the Sanskrit name Mihir is a borrowing from the Persian form of an ancient Vedic word), and countless other common words can be cited. Even the Muslim word namāz is derived from the Persian root nam- cognate to Vedic root nam- (which is why fundamentalist Muslims object to the word and insist on using the Arabic word salāt).
In the medieval period, there was plenty of “Sanskrit-Iranian” dynamics flowing around in North India, and in the Hindi-Urdu-Hindustani speech of the common people, so that Sanskrit-origin words were alternately used in their Sanskrit-derived forms or their Persian-influenced forms. Thus, although we know that the original Sanskrit word for “week” is saptāha, and that the Avestan/Persian form derived from it is haftā, both the words are alternately used in common Hindi speech, and in fact, in many cases (including this one), the Persian-influenced form is used more frequently. That does not mean that the word is not related to the Vedic word, and that connecting it to the Vedic word represents wrong etymology.
It is exactly the same with the word yār, which is the Iranian form of the Vedic word jāra. As this word has not played any important role in my OIT theory, it is pathetic that he could have found nothing better to fall back on in his desperate attempts to show that I indulge in wrong “etymologyzing”.
Which is not to say that I have never made any mistakes at
all in the matter of etymologies. But, whenever any such mistake has been
brought to my notice, I have accepted it, and there has been no such mistake
which has ever affected the validity of my OIT thesis.
On the other hand, this fraudulent textbook-worm who regularly spouts etymological jargon in his writings and tweets, has indulged in the most ridiculously flawed etymological reasoning in debating AIT-OIT interpretations with me in the past. Before he dares to set himself up as an expert in etymology-spouting, let him confess to his extremely foolish etymological claims in his earlier debates with me, which genuinely lead to the conclusion that “all etymologies given by him are automatically suspicious.”
I will only take up the most blatantly foolish claim made
by him in his debate with me about the etymology of the IE words for elephant.
During the debate, I had asked him these questions which this Jayadratha hiding
in the shadows has never dared to answer. At the end of the first above
article, I wrote:
“In fact, the logic seems to be: "anything goes" or "anything but a PIE word in India". There is no need for specific rules of phonetic change to show the changes from the non-IE sources to the IE languages, and no need to even specify the particular non-IE source words or even the non-IE source languages. Sameer goes so far as to breezily tell us: "words for “elephant; ivory” were getting borrowed around in the area in antiquity. The ultimate origin might be an Afroasiatic (or another African) language, or it might be India, or a mixture of both". Earlier, about the "wanderwort" for the ape/monkey, also, he tells us: "The ultimate source could be Afroasiatic; India cannot be ruled out either". Here, everywhere, he means "pre-Aryan" India when proto-Indo-Aryan was supposedly still in the Steppes or somewhere on the way! The fact that there is no non-IE Indian language which has any word for the elephant which could even remotely be suggested as the origin of these alleged "wanderwörter" is not important: it is all a matter of "multiple leaps of faith".
Most astounding is his claim that the "wanderwörter" could be "a mixture of both": i.e. of both African and Indian origin! It would be extremely interesting to see how he shows the sound changes which combine to jointly produce multi-origin "wanderwörter" originating in a mixture of originally African and Indian words (especially seeing that he sees no need to even specify the African and Indian origin words themselves, or the languages which produced them, and the exact path by which they jointly reached the PIE area from two different directions)!”
At the end of the second article, when he was still jumping
around, I wrote:
“He refuses to accept that the four Indo-European words are derived from *ṛbha/ḷbha (ivory, elephant), from an original root (I am giving the Vedic form of the root rather than reconstructing a "PIE" one) *rabh/*labh: Vedic ibha, Latin ebur, Greek erepa/elepha, Hittite laḫpa, each of the four words individually bearing a distinct resemblance to the word *ṛbha/ ḷbha.
But his pretence to be a textbook citer gets completely shattered when he is not able to explain how these four Indo-European languages happen to have such similar words for ivory/elephant when the elephant was not found either in the Steppes or in the historical areas of any of the branches other than Indo-Aryan. Then, without bothering to cite a single scholar, without giving a single protoform (or even a group of different protoforms) from Africa or "pre-Aryan" India, and without showing how and by which rules of phonetic derivation these words were derived from any such protoforms, he very breezily informs us that "words for “elephant; ivory” were getting borrowed around in the area in antiquity. The ultimate origin might be an Afroasiatic (or another African) language, or it might be India, or a mixture of both".
For someone who so very pompously and superciliously rejects the derivation from *ṛbha/ḷbha, in spite of (a) the very close resemblance of the four Indo-European words to *ṛbha/ḷbha, (b) the parallel semantic example of hastin, and (c) the connected etymology of the Vedic ṛbhu from *ṛbha/ḷbha, in a show of being a stickler for strict phonetic rules of derivation, Sameer does not find it necessary to be equally circumspect when suggesting alternate derivations.
So, I again put it as follows: the discussion can only proceed further (although I can sense many people yawning already and wondering when this quibbling will end), and/or Sameer can only save his face, by providing textbook quotations from other scholars of such words which are "mixtures" of "both" African and Indian words, and giving the specific African and (non-IE) Indian words which got "mixed" together to produce these four Indo-European words for ivory/elephant, and naming the specific African and (non-IE) Indian languages from which those words arose. A short description of the way in which those diverse words met together before getting "mixed" and the phonetic rules explaining these "mixtures" would also help.
It is not my call to "reconstruct PIE". It is his call to reconstruct the "mixtures" of "non-Aryan" Indian words and African words, to point out which Indian and African languages they came from, how they managed to join together and get "borrowed" only by four IE languages (but not by the Caucasian, Uralic, Altaic, Sumerian, etc. languages), and so on. While going about it, he could also reconstruct one common PIE word for "fox", explaining all the anomalies.”
So this modern Jayadratha does not have to keep searching out innocuous words (not having to do with the AIT-OIT debate) in my writings to try desperately to show that he is the King if Etymology (and my etymologies are suspicious).
All he has to do is produce the correct etymologies for the IE words for the elephant as per his atrocious and absurd claims. Or else, go back in hiding. The sun has not yet set. But then avoiding answering those questions and trying to raise lame new ones is all he can do.
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