Crackpot ideas

I think that everybody is entitled to a few crackpot ideas, especially if they’re harmless.

The blogosphere is absolutely brimming with crackpot ideas, many not nearly so benign. My good friend, Dean Esmay, for example, believes that HIV has not been proven to be the cause of most cases of AIDS. He can marshal impressive arguments and evidence that support his belief but it’s sufficiently outside the mainstream of thought that I think it can reasonably be characterized as crackpot. I don’t honestly know whether Dean is right or wrong and I don’t have the background and training or the time, energy, or inclination to acquire it to make a sensible judgment on the subject.

There are crackpot ideas on the state of Iran’s nuclear weapons development program (in both directions), the character of Islam (also in both directions), the genius of Karl Rove, and a host other matters large and small floating around out there.

I have quite a few crackpot ideas of my own, one of which I’ve already aired here, but I have lots more, mostly pretty harmless.

One crackpot idea I have is that the Roman Catholic Holy Saturday liturgy is derived from the initiation rituals of the Mithraic mysteries. There’s actually a little evidence that at least hints at that. The ritual is known to have originated in the border areas of the late Roman Empire where the legions were strongest. Those are the very places where the Mithraic mysteries were most prevalent. The fire and water symbolism and the dramatic “Lumen Christi” enunciation are all distinctive enough to make me suspect that it has pagan antecedents.

Another crackpot idea of mine is that I believe that the classification of French as a Romance language (i.e. derived from Latin) is mistaken. Yes, I’m well aware of the accepted narrative of the history of the language. I just believe it’s largely concocted. There’s no doubt that France has a lot of words borrowed from Latin but it’s very different in vocabulary and syntax from the languages that are obviously Romance languages like Italian and Spanish.

I believe that French should more properly be classified as a Celtic language, or, more precisely, as deriving from Latin, Celtic, and Germanic sources and not neatly classifiable as belonging to any of those families. My main argument is the imperfection of the orthography. There are a significant number of French words and grammatical constructs from which extremely tortured Latin origins can be constructed but which have obvious Celtic parallels.
I can marshal enough evidence on this that I’ve managed to get serious French linguistics scholars sputtering in about 10 minutes. Some take me more seriously, however. One linguist, after hearing my argument, noted “The 19^th century scholars who did the classifying knew Latin better than they did Celtic languages”.

That’s certainly part of the explanation but I think there are others. It’s pretty well-documented that there was a deliberate project to Latinize English and I believe something similar went on with respect to French. The other reasons are status and politics. Latin is high-status; the Celtic languages, all peasant languages in the 19^th century significantly lower in status. And in the 19^th century there was an active movement to suppress Breton and other regional languages in France. Emphasizing Celtic antecedents to the French language would have interfered with that project.

As I say, it’s a crackpot idea.