1359: False Linguistic History Aug 31, 2018

Linguistics—like any discipline—is a subject to bias and agendas. It has been discussed before how many early philologists tried to relate Hebrew, Greek, and Latin for religious reasons, but scholars also tried to relate New World languages to other European languages. By comparing selectively chosen words and few aspects of grammar, some early linguists made claims that some of the early inhabitants of the Americas were, for instance, Norwegians. While is some historical basis for this idea, this is not true to that extent, and is simply Eurocentric in nature. Most linguists at the time dismissed many of these types of idea, however.