Just another word: I followed this thread more or less from the beginning (of course with long pauses in between), but only several months ago I got curious enough about the blatant goropism to actually start a small jstor-research whether there are any articles about goropism in general and the shown Turkish one specifically.
It wasn't and isn't very surprising that that's not the case, there are no rebuttals by linguists of such "theories" since there never was any academic discourse concerning them. They and especially their "methods" are just too ridiculous to be even discussed in peer-reviewed journals (that's the not-surprising part).
What was, at least for me, a bit surprising is the (relatively) vast coverage of the so-called "Turkish History Thesis" in many articles which were (especially) published over the course of the last 10 years. I read some of those whenever I felt like in leisure time.
Tanyeri-Erdemir (2006), which I quoted in the last post, tried to show, beside the stuff about THT I (partially) quoted, how the field of archaeology in Turkey developed in the 1930s being more or less on par with its European equivalents by reflection on the methods they learned on excavation sites of foreign archaeologists and systematic programmes for students to study on European universities before returning to the Turkish excavation sites.
The same can't be said as far as linguistics are concerned - there were only amateurs, whose "methods" were accordant. Aytürk (2004), also quoted in the last post, is a, in my opionion, good short outline concerning the historical circumstances which made such amateurish charlatanism socially acceptable (at least to some degree, and of course locally constricted). One of the, again at least for me, more surprising facts is that the "method" and the results haven't changed at all - they are still exactly the same they were in the 30s (and before).
Aytürk (2004) also doesn't criticise the "method" itself, solely because there just isn't anything to criticise from a point of view of someone who has the slightest idea of (modern, historical and/or comparative) linguistics; or to quote Aytürk (2004, 1
, who quotes Friedrich Giese, a participant of the Third Turkish Language Congress, on which the Sun Language Theory was presented:
"What is the principle behind these studies? Are you depending on unambiguous proof, or are you proceeding by intuition? Although these are very interesting matters, one still needs to depend on a methodology. What is that methodology?"
There of course is no methodology - at all. The same thing can and was done for more or less all languages by (what a surprise) speakers of the respective speech community whose language was thought of as the
Ursprache (an interesting
article about several other exponents of the one and only true most ancient language and their approach to it in general). I tried to do the same thing ancalimon does with "sound-patterns" (or whatever I imagined the word sounds like, it's not like any of those "experts" took the time to study the phonology of the language in question) of German and some random other languages (preferably - as it's also usually the case - languages I don't even speak and have no idea whatsoever about). Sadly I wasn't able to do so, not because I couldn't (it's actually really easy, especially in times of the internet) but because I just felt uncomfortable (might even say: dirty) raping (even if they are just merely) words. Therefore just a
link.
I for one think it's alright if ancalimon or anyone else likes to "compare sounds" and "discover stuff" as a hobby even though it has no scientific, academic, linguistic or, for that matter, intellectual value - the same can be said about playing table tennis - as long as he's feeling content doing so. In this spirit: carry on and may the Kampradturk guide you.