I've read some of it, but he really needs to stop straw-manning the current model for linguistics. (The family branches.) He should use the basic model for history, (scope, ad hoc, explanation of best possible evidence, cover the most evidence, and so forth), and show why his model is superior to the other one, rather than just talk about how outdated the current models are and so forth and so on.
I am also skeptical of Edo Nyland's hypothesis regarding the origin of languages.
He claims "Benedictine monks working from the Pannonhalma scriptorium in Hungary created Hungarian, which special invention technique was taken north to create Estonian, Finnish and Lappish."
The Benedectine order was not established until 528 C.E., whereas at least 9,000 years ago (when the Baltic and North Seas formed a link known as the Litorina Sea), early Finnish- speakers were forming settlements on coastal regions and throughout the three distinct ecological regions in the area.
These regions were identified as 1) the Arctic, 2) the Woodland regions (including Kainuu, Ostrobothnia, Savo, Satakunta, Tavastia, Karelia), and 3) the Coastal Lowlands (including Satakunta, Uusimaa and Ahvenanmaa). These settlers were speaking Finnish (and had evolved a shamanistic religion) at least 7 millenia before "Benedictine monks" supposedly applied a "special invention technique" from the "Pannonhalma scriptorium" for development of the Finnish and "Lappish" languages. Moreover, these settlers were and are ethnically, linguistically and anthropologically distinct from the "Sami" (the correct term for the "Lappish" people).
As for the Estonians, they likewise have archaelogical evidence for their existence and culture that dates back 8,000 years, and Roman historian Tacitus wrote about the "Aestii" and "Aestiorum gentes" in 100 A.D. The Benedectine's "invention technique" surely had to have been extraordinarily "special" to allow them to develop a language, even a "mere" four (4) centuries in advance of the existence of their own monastic order.
Meanwhile, well before the establishment of the Benedectine order in 528 C.E., the people comprising what were to become the ancestors of the Hungarians joined the Bulgar-Turkic Onogur tribes in the middle of the fifth century B.C.E., occupying the north shore region the Black Sea.
Those Onogurs who did not migrate but formed a tribal alliance under Khazar overlords became the "Megyer" tribe, the origin of the word "Magyarország" (see "Magyar"), the Hungarian word for a Hungarian and the land of Hungary.
There are other problems with his analysis (the so-called purity of the "Basque" language, while other linguists are now discovering its relation to the Uralic languages previously mentioned).
Nevertheless, Mr. Nyland's conjecture that central and northern European languages (especially those of the Uralic group) are contrivances of Benedectine monks fails under the scrutiny of accepted historical and anthropological studies of the people and languages he purports to analyze.
Re: Linguistics
I'm skeptical of him because he's writing about what are considered specialist subjects w/o a specialist degree in them. For example, here's one excerpt from a book of his, "It has been estimated by Dr. Marija Gimbutas, professor of archaeology at the University of California, that as many as 9 million people, overwhelmingly women, were burned or hanged during the witch-craze.", from "“The Witch Burnings - Holocaust Without Equal”.
The problem being that the "Burning Times" killed only around 50,000 to 150,000 people at most, 150,000 being the high end estimate established in 1975 once we started going through primary sources and figuring out the actual numbers. Areas which were "unknown" in how many people died were put on the high end, but with time, we find new information and this "high end" number is lowered. Right now it's between 50-75,000 at tops, as detailed by Jenny Gibbons. (She's actually a specialist in that time period.) Nor was it "overwhelmingly women", it was about 75% women, with some areas being mostly male.
Overall point being is that this is a guy with an agenda, and lest we forget the words of Schumpeter, "The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie." Rather than being an impartial historian, he seemingly has a huge matriarchal axe to grind, and the facts be damned if they don't fit the theory correctly.
Re: Linguistics
I found some other direct criticisms of him, (other than a few jokes about his theories). This one is from an expert in the Basque language, Larry Trask of the University of Sussex, and author of the '97 book, "The History of Basque". His opinion is:
He has merely sat down with Aulestia's Basque-English dictionary and extracted bits from it to please himself. Many of the Basque items he uses are neologisms constructed only in the 19th or 20th centuries, sometimes only in the 1980's or 1990's, and very many of them are words borrowed into Basque in modern times from Spanish or French.
Another reviewer:
I myself have never heard of a Saharan language spoken in Europe, and it's extremely unlikely that any language was spoken in Europe universally, given the land mass in question. Europe is, after all, full of geographic barriers that would have impeded the spread of any one language in ancient times.
And another damaging one:
This is the main problem, exactly. His system has him translating words
into sentences (of roughly as many words as there are consonants in the
"translated" word), and for each VCV "word" in these sentences he has a
choice of seven or eight different meanings (since the VCV sequences just
have to be _part_ of a Basque word, which can be of any length), and he's
allowed to fill in the occasional preposition or pronoun here or
there...so it's not all that surprising that he can come up with a
half-sensible-sounding meaning for each word, given the power of his
system. And notice that there's no control on the "meaning" of the word;
it can be anything which roughly suggests the meaning of the modern word
(compare this with the methodology of modern historical linguistics; here,
if you're trying to show that two words are related, they have to have
identical or near-identical meanings. Pairs of relations which don't
satisfy this criterion aren't taken seriously (if, for instance, the
relationship between the languages is in question; this is the problem
with the work trying to show that Proto-World exists)).
There are some other more minor technical problems; for instance, some of
the Basque words he's using are (on the view of linguistic history which
he's rejecting) recent borrowings from other Indo-European languages
(e.g., _abokado_ 'lawyer'); he needs to provide an account of the textual
and linguistic evidence that these are borrowings (like the fact that
these words show up in non-Basque texts before they show up in Basque
texts). And he has no account, as far as I can tell, of the fact that
there are systematic sound correspondences across languages; e.g., that
Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek "p", corresponds to Germanic (e.g., Gothic)
"f", not just in the words for "father" which he talks about, but in
hundreds of other words (though I suppose he could say that the monks were
just being sneaky). And some of the etymologies require that the monks
have powers of prophecy; "Australia", for instance, is given the meaning
"Courageous and capable convicts went everywhere", a reference to events
which didn't happen until long after the continent was named. For that
matter, the monks have to have known about _modern_ Basque--Basque has
changed over time (there are Basque texts going back several centuries).
In a sense, the debate between a mainstream historical linguist and this
guy would be a little bit like the debate between someone who believes in
evolution and someone who believes that God created the earth 200 years
ago, complete with fossils and all the other evidence people use to argue
for evolution. It's very difficult to refute this kind of person; any
evidence for evolution, for him, is just evidence that God is very clever.
The same problem arises here; there is excellent evidence that languages
evolve over time, and no evidence at all for his system. But you can
_still_ believe in his system, if you can persuade yourself not to care
about evidence.
Linguistics
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