User:Chuck Entz/Unreliable sources

The internet is a marvelous resource, but it gives us access to everything equally. In with all the valuable resources are many that are biased, inept, or just plain wrong. The sources listed here are notable for being unreliable sources for use in etymologies- their reliability for other uses is beyond the scope of this list.

Out of date
Just as scientific resources about biology from the days when people still believed in spontaneous generation, or medicine from before germ theory are only worth studying from a historical perspective, etymological resources are suspect that come from before certain linguistic theories and before the discovery/decipherment of certain languages.
 * F.E.J Valpy Latin Etymological Dictionary
 * His theory that Latin was wholly derived from Greek was already being superseded by Indo-European comparative linguistics as it was published.

Failed amateur efforts
Generally written by people who are successful enough at one thing that people are willing to publish their efforts in other areas where they're quite inept. These works often contain an impressive amount of detail, but the methodology and/or judgment behind everything is so fatally flawed that it all amounts to utter nonsense.
 * John Bellenden Ker An essay on the Archæology of Popular English Phrases and Nursery Rhymes Volume 1 & Volume 2
 * Although his botanical works are worth referencing, his attempts to explain various English idioms and parts of nursery rhymes by reconstructing phrases in "Low Saxon" by comparison of Dutch and English are truly awful.
 * Joseph Yahuda- Hebrew is Greek
 * If you try hard enough, you can come up with (sort of) plausible explanations for the similarities between words that random chance dictates will occur in any pair of languages. A cool theory that would rewrite all of history is more than enough motivation here- but the results are still nonsense.

Use with caution
These sources have a great deal of useful data compiled by competent linguists, but the theoretical information derived from it is based on flawed or disputed methodologies.


 * Austronesian Comparative Dictionary.
 * Blust is convinced that statistical analysis of the similarities and differences between languages will allow reconstruction of the histories of those languages relative to each other. Unfortunately, language change is very complicated, and various events and historical trends can massively skew the numbers to the point that the statistics are completely unreliable.
 * Something else to watch out for: Blust regularizes spelling in some languages to make it easier to compare them. Always check his orthography against the language's orthography in other sources.
 * The Tower of Babel

Biased

 * These people really, really want you to believe that their ethnic group/gender/religion/historical theory is better than everyone else's, so they throw together anything they can find to tell a good story and ignore anything that contradicts that story.
 * African Prehistory
 * Compiled by a poet who chose to believe that similarity between something associated with Igbo and anything else anywhere in the world was proof that the other things were derived from Igbo. She was also apparently unaware of or chose to ignore the fact that we can read Ogham writing and that it's early Old Irish, not Igbo.
 * Journal of Eurasian Studies
 * Not peer reviewed. Although there may be some legitimate scholarship in this journal, there are enough outrageously bad examples such as this discussion of alleged "Turkish substrate" words in English based on things like syntactic function to show that there are no academic standards at all for at least some of the articles.
 * and others The Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm for the Origins of Indo-European Languages
 * Dedicated to the /Paradigm, a theory wholly outside the mainstream of modern linguistics, that says the Indo-European languages originated in Europe during the Paleolithic. Alinei is an expert on dialectology, but that doesn't make him an expert on historical linguistics. Alinei's theories about the Etruscans and the Turks are attractive to the Pan-Turkists, so they tend to cite him as well.
 * Christian Biblical-literalist historians.
 * When someone with no training in historical linguistics tries to prove that two names separated by a thousand miles and a thousand years are the same thing, they're usually wrong.
 * Feminist revisionist literature
 * The now well-known bias against women over the centuries doesn't justify making up alternative facts.