Political or Religious Implications
There may also be political or religious reasons to associate languages in ways that most linguists would dispute.
For example, it has been suggested that the Turanian or Ural-Altaic language group, which relates Sami and other languages to the Mongolian language, was used to justify racism towards the Sami in particular. There are also strong, albeit areal not genetic, similarities between the Uralic and Altaic languages which provided an innocent basis for this theory.
Some believers in Abrahamic religions try to derive their native languages from Classical Hebrew, as Herbert W. Armstrong, a proponent of British Israelism, who said that the word 'British' comes from Hebrew brit meaning 'covenant' and ish meaning 'man', supposedly proving that the British people are the 'covenant people' of God.
The Lithuanian–American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas argued during the mid-1900s that Basque is clearly related to the extinct Pictish and Etruscan languages, even though at least the comparison had earlier been rejected within a decade of being proposed in 1892 by Sir John Rhys. Her motivation was to show Basque was a remnant of an "Old European culture".
Read more about this topic: Pseudoscientific Language Comparison
Famous quotes containing the words political or, political, religious and/or implications:
“Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places for believing practices.... Politics has once again become religious.”
—Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)
“Fear is cruel and mean. The political reigns of terror have been reigns of madness and malignity,—a total perversion of opinion; society is upside down, and its best men are thought too bad to live.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)