Yajnadevam on the
Elephant
Shrikant G. Talageri
Someone just sent me a tweet by Yajnadevam which confirmed that I had been right in not sticking out my neck (or rather, in retracting my wrongly-stuck-out neck) in seeming to endorse his decipherment.
As I have already said in my articles, I do not know whether his decipherment is correct or not. But one thing I do know now is that he does not seem to have any compunction in making bold statements on matters on which he knows nothing. Whether this is in endorsing Nilesh Oak’s ridiculous datings, or in making statements as in the following tweet:
https://x.com/yajnadevam/status/1900209437522133127
“Monkey and elephant have been reconstructed
in pielexicon. This is a neutral work. Talageri deriving it incorrectly only
speaks to his ignorance of the PIE hierarchy, which itself has no universal
form. It is not clear if he just picked examples or made his own etymology, it
wouldn’t matter, he could have just pointed to pielexicon. It wouldn’t matter
be OK to say that his linguistics is subpar, but where is the alleged
dishonesty?
Thank you, Yajnadevam ji, for expressing your faith in my honesty, although I do not require certificates from you. But have you read my article on the Elephant?
https://talageri.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-elephant-and-proto-indo-european.html
I am willing to bet anything that you have not, and I feel sure that your willingness to express critical comments on something which you have not read at all does not say much for your honesty.
I honestly do not think that you have the intellectual capacity to say things like “Talageri deriving it incorrectly only speaks to his ignorance” and “his linguistics is subpar”, because I have a definite feeling you do not even know what I have written on the subject of the PIE word for “elephant”.
If you have, why don’t you write a detailed article fully disproving what I have written in that article about the PIE word for the elephant? One person named “Sameer” already claimed he did it, and only ended up with egg on his face after babbling about unspecified and imaginary “mixed” Indian-African etymological origins for the common word for “elephant/ivory” found in four distinct Indo-European branches (Vedic, Greek, Latin and Hittite).
But of course, it is easy to make pompous pronouncements on things you do not know anything about, without going into details and specifics. Hence I hereby challenge you to go into details and specifics if you have any sense of honesty. Or else, learn to keep quiet about things you know nothing about.
Appendix added a few hours later:
Apparently, my strong reaction to Yajnadevam’s inadvertent or seeming support for the Shatterer’s criticism of the etymology of the PIE word for “elephant” has predictably given the jeering crowd of cowardly hecklers who make up the internet gang of liars the wrong impression that it releases “Sameer” from the onus of having to try to prove his dishonest lies about the “mixed” Indian-African etymological origins for the common word for “elephant/ivory” found in four distinct Indo-European branches (Vedic, Greek, Latin and Hittite). A drowning man will clutch at any straw, but straws do not save anyone from drowning. The fact still remains that the Shatterer stands completely shattered and defeated on this matter, and if he and his friends want to pretend to be satisfied with seeing Yajnadevam and myself “quarrel”, it speaks volumes for their degree of awareness of their own complete rout on the subject and their desperation to escape accountability for their dishonesty and lies. I am not holding my breath on the possibility of Sameer ever attempting to present his full “etymological” case for his false claims.
[Please also read the two comments below by "Cadaver" and my replies to them]
Yajnadevam has replied:
ReplyDeleteSomeone is feeding my tweets defending Talageri and this has the effect of taking rhetorical statements as if I made these assertions as matters of fact. This is classic mitrabedha and works because Talageri is not on Twitter (and for some reason I cant reply on his blog)
For the record, I don't think Talageri is a bad linguist, nor do I find his work subpar. These were purely rhetorical statements to show the flaw in dxrsam_0's reasoning of Talageris dishonesty. In fact, I have tweeted that Ibha as elephant is not just an elephant but a domesticated one, which can only come from India.
Please read the tweet again carefully. Unless I have lost the capacity to understand English, he is not saying "even if you feel Talageri is a bad linguist and his linguistics is subpar, where is the alleged dishonesty?" He is in effect saying "Yes, he is a bad linguist and his linguistics is subpar, but where is the alleged dishonesty?" And he practically states that I "derive it incorrectly".
DeleteNo sir he was making a rhetorical point in that tweet not actually accusing you of being subpar, etc. He actually wants to clear the matter up over email if you would like to do so
DeleteAs I said, it does not look like that. But it does not matter, he has clarified now that he did not mean it that way. And I assure you that I have nothing whatsoever against him, except that he put in wrong words at the wrong moment in this case. I would be happy to meet him (if he ever comes to Mumbai, since I do not travel outside) or communicate with him in a perfectly friendly atmosphere at any time.
DeleteThat said, everything happens to the good. Because of this more people are becoming aware of Sameer's false claims about "mixed Indian-African words", and his utter inability to corroborate his illogical claims. And at the same time, as he and his fans continue to escalate this with further twitter hooliganism, the more they are exposing themselves as indeed representing the "jeering crowd of cowardly hecklers who make up the internet gang of liars" that I called them. I don't have to say a single word more in this respect, they are proving me right with every new tweet.
Yajnadevam regarding Talageri:
ReplyDelete"Mr. Talageri seems to think I'm critical of his work. I am in fact, highly impressed by his work, which is one of the rare pieces that is an irrefutable reference in the field. I'm in the same position as he, I have no expertise to judge his work. " --Feb 14
"Despite their strongest efforts, Talageri's relative chronology is now pretty solid and dare I say, accepted. This is because the AIT side did not have their own response (other than ad hom attack on T and his references).
Similarly, until OIT side has a solid narrative, AIT wins" --Jan 2022
"You have to understand they are in an echo chamber. There was no Indic scholarship till literally 10 yrs ago. Talageri was a trailblazer by comparison." Jun 2023
I have nothing against Yajnadevam. In fact, even in this article I expressed my inability to judge the correctness or otherwise of his decipherment, which really is not my field.
DeleteBut his above tweet, which (even if that was not intended by him, his wordings definitely indicated it) definitely sounded as if he agreed with Sameer-and-fans' criticism of my etymology of the IE words for "elephant", at a point of time when that coward was again raising the same false points and I had raised the same exposure of their falseness.
But this was just a side-show: the main issue is Sameer's fake claims about "mixed" Indian-African source words for the four IE words, without anything to say about the source languages, the actual source-words, the ways in which they got "mixed: and the etymological rules and sound laws by which they took those particular forms and entered only these four IE languages..
In fact, let me add again, because he has interpreted the language as IE, I naturally want him to be proved right, even if I am not in a position to judge the correctness of it. And I genuinely do admire the meticulousness of his research and work.
DeleteBut I feel certain he has not read my article on the Elephant. I have no demand that everyone should read my articles, but then he should not have put up a tweet worded in that way in the thick of a hostile exchange about my etymology. I don't care what the opposite side says about my "honesty": it is so absurd that it only shows up their stupidity. I am scrupulously honest, since dishonesty will only weaken my case in future, and I accept every genuine criticism and correct my case for that same reason. What I want is appreciation of the data and the facts. In my article in the Sita Ram Goel volume in 2005, I mentioned how illiterate I was in the matter of Sanskrit when I was in college (in 1978) and misinterpreted Savarkar's "hindur-iti" as "hindu-riti" and took it to mean "Hindu customs". But now I have over 30 years of study and experience, and when I am right I do not back down.
What you must know about Yajnadevam is that he is entirely uneducated on linguistics in every conceivable way, yet boldly makes scathing criticisms of the field (often adhominems targeted towards everyone involved in it). He disagrees with the concept of Proto Indo European, as "every axiomatic relation can be reversed", and suggests that Sanskrit could very well have given Proto Indo European through a (totally not ultra rare and convoluted) series of depalatalisations, RE-buccalisations and somehow generating new information out of thin air (reversing e/o merger and somehow producing the entire system of Umlaut through standard sound changes that are based entirely on phonetics and not on grammar, as one would expect from a proposed sound-law).
ReplyDeletehttps://x.com/yajnadevam/status/1743753427845304531
This is him toying with the fact that PIE merged /e/ and /o/ to just /a/.
https://x.com/yajnadevam/status/1743750801598632058
Same again. He's doing it to prove that Mazda -> Medha is an "impossible sound change".
https://x.com/yajnadevam/status/1817037837155610820 - Just one of the many many scarcely or entirely non-accepted cognate pairs he proposes to "destroy PIE"
https://x.com/yajnadevam/status/1841937648832672186 , here he has concocted an inviolable rule, and used your mothertongue to "falsify" it XD
https://x.com/yajnadevam/status/1638970411235913728
Linguistics has no predictive power therefore it has no descriptive power?
By this logic, quantum physics cannot predict certain future states at all whatsoever, while it can explain past states. Does this mean we have falsified quantum mechanics? Call up Microsoft! Majorana is cooked.
We can't use physics to predict which plane is going to crash in the next year or so, but we can certainly apply it to analyse why a plane that already crashed : did. But I guess, physics is an axiomatic system with no predictive power, therefore we can reverse all relations. We can therefore derive the argument that the plane did not infact crash, but the crash infact planed.
Mr, Talageri ... I meant no offence and apologize for my wording. Those are artifacts of Twitter format. Sameer and I have long discussions and we make rhetorical statements that should not be taken literally. I have indeed read your elephant article and your original articles when they came out decades ago. No disagreements. Like you, I am not in a position to judge either way. Peace.
ReplyDeleteYajnadevam ji, it is over now, and I also apologize for my tinderbox reaction. but, as I just wrote in reply to another comment from "TheButter Thief":
ReplyDelete"everything happens to the good. Because of this more people are becoming aware of Sameer's false claims about "mixed Indian-African words", and his utter inability to corroborate his illogical claims. And at the same time, as he and his fans continue to escalate this with further twitter hooliganism, the more they are exposing themselves as indeed representing the "jeering crowd of cowardly hecklers who make up the internet gang of liars" that I called them. I don't have to say a single word more in this respect, they are proving me right with every new tweet."