Yajnadevam on the Elephant

 

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

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?

9:06 PM · Mar 13, 2025”

 

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]