The absurd fallacy of HERSTORY. There is no such thing in any language other than English, and in fact no such thing in English!

The absurd fallacy of HERSTORY. There is no such thing in any language other than English, and in fact no such thing in English!

If there is anything which raises my hackles, it has got to be the absurd notion adapted by English language feminists alone that the word HISTORY is somehow gender related, when in fact it most certainly is not! English feminists who insist on changing the word history to herstory are displaying the most egregious linguistic ignorance. As anyone with even a smattering of higher education knows beyond a doubt, the English word history is in fact directly derived from the ancient Greek i9stori/a=, which means: inquiry, knowledge, information, science, narration and above all, a story. Now the sheer absurdity of the position of English feminists is blown wide open by the equivalent words for history in practically every other language, for instance, Dutch = geschiedenis, French = histoire, German = Geschichte, Italian = storia, Polish = przeszłość and Portuguese = história, to cite just a few examples. Any French feminist would laugh out loud at the notion that herstory is somehow the same thing as history, since in French the word for “her” is “son” (masculine gender) and “sa” (feminine gender). Of course, some allophone English feminists will scream aloud that “son” is gender-biased, without realizing in the least that gender in French, and for that matter in any and all inflected languages, including Greek, Latin, German, Russian etc. has nothing whatsoever to do with masculinity or, what is even worse, in their silly “intellectual” construct, sexism! The Dutch and German words, geschiedenis and Geschichte respectively, blow the English feminists’ ridiculous claim right out of the water, let alone the Polish przeszłość. I could cite hundreds of other languages, and the results would always be the same, to wit, the English word history has absolutely nothing to do with masculinity or sexism. So all I have to say to unilingual English feminists, “Get a life!” and at least swallow the truth with grace and dignity.

In the citations below, all italics are mine:

Consider Wikipedia:

 

Herstory is history written from a feminist perspective, emphasizing the role of women, or told from a woman’s point of view. The principal aim of herstory is to bring women out of obscurity from the historical record. It is a neologism coined as a pun with the word “history”, as part of a feminist critique of conventional historiography, which in their opinion is traditionally written as “his story”, i.e., from the masculine point of view.[1] (The word “history”—from the Ancient Greek ἱστορία, or historia, meaning “knowledge obtained by inquiry”—is etymologically unrelated to the possessive pronoun his.

And Rational Wiki:

 

“Herstory” is a neologistic term for “women’s history,” a variant of the Marxist “people’s history”; while a people’s history professes to reinterpret history from the perspective of workers and/or common men, a herstory professes to reinterpret it from the perspective of women. Most feminists don’t use it.

The term is an illustration of its coiners’ belief that regular history is heavily slanted toward men’s point of view, a “systemic bias” reflected in the term history, which they seem to have simply assumed was a portmanteau of “his story”.

Unfortunately, it happens that the English word history is a loan word, derived directly from the Latin historia, which is itself a loan word from ancient Greek.[1] On the other hand, the English word his is derived from a proto-Germanic root,[2] and is not in the least etymologically connected to the first three letters of history. They just happen to sound the same, and only in English. The origin of this term is a testament to the intellectual laziness of extremists in any field, who are quick to grab hold of anything that seems to support their point of view but reluctant to examine it critically.

and Reddit:

Also, I appreciate the title quote is somewhat playful. But I find it extremely irritating – ‘history’ is directly taken from the Greek word historia, roughly translating to ‘inquiry’ or ‘investigation’. ‘His’ and ‘her’ as actual words do not exist in Ancient Greek; words in the language meaning the same thing do exist. But the only reason ‘herstory’ is a thing is because it’s an awful pun based on the conventions of the English language which the word ‘history’ does not follow; it betrays a lack of knowledge of context, a tendency to jump on anything resembling ‘gendered’ words, and it’s a bad pun.

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Is it even possible to determine what the word for “fig(s)” is in Minoan Linear A? You may be surprised!

Is it even possible to determine what the word for “fig(s)” is in Minoan Linear A? You may be surprised!

Among several other tablets in both Minoan Linear A and Mycenaean Linear B, Linear A tablet HT 88 contains the supersyllabogram NI on the second line:



The question is, what is the actual word for “fig(s)” in Minoan Linear A? Apparently, no-one knows. The odd thing about this supersyllabogram NI is that it was taken over lock-stock-and-barrel by the Mycenaeans. We will never know why, but it is clear that they thought it convenient simply to hang onto it. It may very well be that that the Mycenaeans continued to use the Minoan word for “fig” alongside their early Greek suza. If that is the case, it is all the more relevant for us to attempt to reconstruct the Minoan word for “fig”. Whatever the circumstances, we are still left with the perplexing question, what is the word for “fig” in Minoan Linear A anyway?

In spite of apparently insurmountable obstacles, it may not be so difficult to reconstruct as we might imagine. If we stop to consider even briefly what the word for “fig” is that I have methodically selected in 13 languages, ancient and modern, belonging to 6 different classes, we discover that all but one of them are either monosyllabic or disyllabic. In one instance only is it trisyllabic, pesnika, in Serbian. This does not come as any surprise to me as a linguist, though it may to the so-called  “common person” . Here are the words for “fig” in 16 languages belonging to 6 different languages classes: 
  
KEY to language classes:

AU = Austronesian/ IN = Indo-European/ LI = language isolate/ NC = Niger-Congo/ SE = Semitic/ UR = Uralic. A language isolate is one which does not belong to any international language class whatsoever, but which stands entirely on its own. 

AU: Indonesian ara Malay rajah Maori piki
IN: French figue German Feige Greek (Mycenaean) suza (Attic) suchon Italian fico Latin ficus Norwegian fiken Portuguese figo Serbian pesnika Spanish higo
LI: Basque piku
NC: Swahili mtimi (sub-class = Bantu)
SE: Maltese tin (the only Semitic language in Latin script)
UR: Finnish kuva

Under the circumstances, I am given to wonder whether or not the Minoan Linear A word for “fig” is monosyllabic, disyllabic or possibly even trisyllabic. It is clear that it cannot be monosyllabic, because the supersyllabogram for “fig” in both Minoan Linear A and Mycenaean Linear B is NI. And supersyllabograms are always the first syllable only of di- tri- or multi-syllabic words in both of these languages. Given this scenario, is it possible or even feasible to reconstruct the Minoan Linear A for “fig”? Surprisingly enough, the answer is yes. Why so? It just so happens that most Minoan Linear A words which are diminutives are feminine with the ultimate being either pa3 or ra2. Under the circumstances, it only takes one small step to restore the two mostly likely candidates for the Minoan Linear A for “fig”. And these are:



It is of course possible to argue that the Minoan word for “fig” is trisyllabic, but this is highly unlikely, since the only trisyllabic word for “fig” in all 13 of the languages cited above is the Serbian, pesnika. Hence, I am reasonably convinced that the Minoan Linear A word for “fig(s)” is either nipa3 (nipai) or nira2 (nirai).

Finally, as it is clear that since the word for “fig(s)” does not even remotely correspond to any of the 13 words in 6 language classes, ancient and modern, above, not even Basque, it may very well turn out that, like Basque, the Minoan language is also a language isolate. I should not be the least but surprised if it were.  

This discussion will be part and parcel in my upcoming article in Vol. 12 (2016) of Archaeology and Science (Belgrade) ISSN 1452-7448, “Pylos tablet Py TA 641-1952 (Ventris), the Rosetta Stone to Minoan Linear A tablet HT 31 (Haghia Triada) vessels and pottery” and a Glossary of 110 words”, the third article in a row I shall have published in this prestigious international annual by the beginning of 2018 at the very latest.

Je suis Charlie – in French, English & Greek + 11 modern languages & 3 ancient Greek dialects!

Je suis Charlie - in French, English & Greek + 11 modern languages & 3 ancient Greek dialects!



I beg you, please be sure to RETWEET this, folks! As a polyglot Canadian, fluent in English and French, conversant with both modern languages and ancient, especially ancient Greek, with some 20 dialects under my belt, including Mycenaean Linear B & Arcado-Cypriot Linear C, I hope to reach not only everyone alive now, but as many of our ancestors as possible. I do this out of love for all the millions upon millions of people who have been slaughtered by warmongers, manaics, religious fanatics & terrorists, past, present and... God forbid... future!

Je vous prie de tout mon coeur de faire des RETWEETs de ce message des plus urgents! Tout en étant canadien parfaitement bilingue, je suis également polyglotte, connaisseur de plusieurs langues modernes et anciennes, dont une vingtaine de dialèctes grecs tels que le mycénien en linéaire B et le chypro-arcadien en linéaire C. Dans ce but, j’espère communiquer ce message de solidarité bienveillante à tous ceux qui sont encore vivants autant qu’à tous nos ancêtres, dont d’innombrables millions qui ont perdu la vie, tous massacrés par des bellicistes, des maniaques, des fanatiques religieuses et des terroristes d’antan, de nos jours et... à Dieu ne plaise ... incontournablement à l’avenir.

Richard Vallance Janke,
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Happy New Year in Greek, Linear B, Linear C, English, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian & German

Happy New Year in Greek, Linear B, Linear C, English, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian & German! Click to ENLARGE:



Richard and Rita