Johannes Goropius Becanus, False Etymology and the Garden of Eden

Pre-Enlightenment-era Dutch linguists such as Johannes Goropius Becanus probably don’t make the list of things you think about on a regular basis. Typically, they wouldn’t make my list, either, but right now I’m on a little bit of a linguistic history kick and I have a few grievances that need airing.^{Click these—>}1These little digression bubbles will contain snarky, juvenile humor, additional information, mini tangents, and occasionally totally unnecessary profanity. They’re not always super user friendly and sometimes open strangely, for that I apologize. I didn’t create the plugin, and I’m talking to the guys who did. It’s a work in progress. Tap a 2nd time to close.

The 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries were loaded with times some bearded dude went out and did something not everyone took very seriously. Galileo, Gessner, Columbus,2Nobody really knows what Columbus looked like. None of his portraits are actually contemporary with his lifetime and are based on pure speculation. So no, we don’t know if he had a beard, but considering how many months he spent at sea with no ladies around to impress with his baby-smooth cheeks, my guess is that he just went with it for a while because shaving with a straight-razor on a rocking boat sounds like less fun than cuddling with a hand grenade. just to name a few. It was an era of suicide-science named as such – by me, just now – for its tendency of earning explorers a watery grave, and the the scientists and thinkers the hangman’s noose – or at least the threat of it. So going off the deep end wasn’t really all that uncommon and had people not done a little bit of crazy thinking we might not have the nice things we have now. 

Still, when it came to linguistics, this particular bearded dude was a special brand of bonkers, and it is here that our tale begins…

Enter Johannes Goropius Becanus

Born Jan Gerartsen van Gorp in 1519 in, of all places, the hamlet of Gorp in the Brabant region of what is now the Netherlands, Johannes would grow up to become a true “renaissance man” – both literally and figuratively. 3For those ill acquainted with the idea of a “renaissance man,” it is a term used to define an individual – usually male – who is just kind of handy at everything. One of those guys who fought in the war, can fix your car, your plumbing, do your taxes, sail a boat, explain the history of Stradivarius violins – probably play one too, tapdance, and speak Latin, Greek and Swahili for no readily obvious reason.

Over the course of his life, Goropius Becanus would become an accomplished polyglot, a highly respected physician, and a not-so-highly respected linguist.

Meet Jan.

Johannes Goropius Becanus is an obnoxiously long name. I’m going to call him Becky.

All right, cool, no need to get your ruff in knot. 4Those floofy white neck things that 16th and early 17th century poshy people liked to wear are called “ruffs”. Ministers of the Church of Denmark still wear them today. More interestingly, you know the cone of shame that dogs and cats wear when they’re injured so they don’t scratch or lick something they shouldn’t? The official term is “Elizabethan collar” and it’s based on the ruff. And it’s funny…you know…because dogs go “ruff”……. I’ll let myself out, but aren’t you enjoying all of the things you didn’t know you didn’t know? I am.

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Our friend Becky did very well for himself very quickly in life and having studied medicine in Leuven, he did the thing parents are always proud of and became a reasonably skilled doctor. Good fortune followed and Goropius Becanus managed to land himself the favor of a bunch of very important, very powerful people.

People like this:

Goropius Becanus went on to serve as the personal doctor to the sisters of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V – a.k.a. Mr. Badass Armor5Charlie was actually a highly accomplished polyglot himself. He spoke French, Dutch, German, Italian – probably Greek and Latin because he was fancy and royal and that’s what they did – as well as pretty decent Spanish. This last one he studied as an adult as it was necessary for accepting the throne of Castille as per the Cortes Generales, which is still a thing, though it now refers primarily to the Spanish legislative body. He is also often credited with the famous line: “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.” A true warrior poet. – who each in turn went on to become queens of everything:

This is Maria, who was probably prettier IRL. She is also holding a stick for no apparent reason.

And this is her sister Eleanor, who had a better painter, and brought business cards.

JGB would seriously get around for a guy of his time. Goropius Becanus spent a ridiculous amount of time touring Europe from Spain to Italy, and Germany to Britain and everything in between, but he was constantly homesick and had a truly endearing love for Antwerp. So he went home.

Yet another rich, powerful dude – Philip II, Mr. Badass Armor Jr. – paid the good doctor a visit and practically begged him to be his own court physician. Philip offered Becanus that outrageous salary that only the son of the Holy Roman Emperor can offer, but el Goro 6 I really have no idea what to call this guy because his name is distressing, so I’m just going to keep switching it up.refused, preferring to be a small-town doctor (called a “medicus” because Latin) and to finally get the hell away from all of that courtly intrigue bullshit and spoiled princes who couldn’t even commission full suits of armor. 7And can you imagine how lame a job it would be to spend your days attaching leeches to a prince’s jacksy in order to bleed out the bad spirits? Yes, they did that, and interestingly enough it’s not totally baseless even by modern medical standards, but I’m not going to digress further than I already have except to say that the practice originated in India. Unlike writing, which we’ll get to.

This is Phil. The thing between his legs is an optical illusion. I think.

In 1554, having settled into his comfortable new life as a private practitioner, JGB was finally able to devote himself to the thing he really loved – languages and linguistics!

Goropius Becanus was a pretty dedicated polyglot, and while the extent of the languages he spoke is mostly unknown, he was at the very least well versed in Greek, Latin and Hebrew, and of course his native Brabantic Dutch dialect – which is kind of the central point in the plot and we’ll get to that right now.

This is where our fearless hero’s descent into madness begins – with his native tongue and a little bit of good old-fashioned nationalism.

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From Antwerp to Eden – Goropius and his thoughts

Goropius Becanus believed that his language – Anwerpian Brabantic – was the language spoken in the Garden of Eden, and that all other languages stemmed from it, and he developed an extensive collection of works explaining his logic. Indeed, he even went so far as to suggest that the Garden of Eden itself was right there in the Benelux. Because why not?8You don’t want to know how long it took my dumb self to realize that “Benelux” is a portmanteau of “BElgium, NEtherlands and LUXembourg. It sounds like the name of a Tel Aviv luxury hotel casino to me.

Brohannes believed adamantly that the oldest language would also be the easiest to speak and learn, be possessed of the most basic grammatical structure, and contain intuitive pronunciation. Since his native language made use of a lot of short words, whereas the other Classical languages he spoke, by comparison, did not, he surmised that since Brabantic was easy for him, it must therefore be easy for everyone, which clearly made it the oldest language. Since the Garden of Eden was supposed to be the birthplace of humanity where God gave Adam the gift of language in order to name the beasts of the world, logic dictates that Brabantic is the linguistic genesis in Genesis.

This would explain why everyone in the Bible is white…9At the time, pretty much everyone was hardcore religious and people were constantly doing lots of super shitty things to each other in the name of God. It was believed that the world was a few thousand years old and few people could read or write or knew anything about history beyond folklore. None of this Proto-Indo-European crap was on anyone’s mind, and it was just implied that everyone was the great great grandspawn of a pair of biblical hippies incapable of following simple instructions. They just accepted this as truth and went back to dying of the plague. This makes perfect sense – if you’re 9.

But our guy wasn’t 9, he was 36, and he wasn’t done yet.



In order to tie Brabantic to Adam and Eve, Goropius rolled up his sleeves, put on his flat thinking cap, and pulled a hilarious etymology of his own reasoning out of his bunghole. He connected biblical names such as “Noah” to Brabantic words like “nood” – or “need” in English. He linked the Latin term quercus (oak) to the Brabantic werd-cou (“keeps the cold out”). 10I don’t follow his logic here at all. Is it because they built houses out of wood? Because you could burn it in your fireplace?

And among his most absurd assertions, Gorpy stated that both Adam and Eve’s names were of Brabantic origin – coming respectively from Hath-Dam, or “dam against hate” and Eu-Vat, “barrel from which people come,” or from Eet-Vat, “oath-barrel.” 11Can we all just take a second to think about the fact that this guy somehow managed to convince himself beyond a shadow of a doubt that Eve’s name was in some way related to barrels, or the hilariously misogynistic notion that women are barrels from which people erupt. I now have an awkward image of baby volcanoes stuck in my head. And now so do you!

He even went on to publish a treatise 12A treatise is essentially a huge essay written in a particularly professional or academic style. You might be able to consider it sort of an analog for a modern white paper. called Hieroglyphica in which he somehow managed to work out that Egyptian hieroglyphs are also of Brabantic origin.

Goropism and pseudoscientific language comparison

Goropius Becanus really should have stuck with medicine and taken the prince’s offer because unfortunately for G-Dog, his works were received pretty poorly by most learned people, and are considered by some to have basically sullied the good name of Dutch linguists. Well done, Janny Boy.

The famous 17th century German philosopher, mathematician and wearer-of-huge-wigs Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, having read van Gorp’s works, is given credit for coining the word goropism – a word that now refers to the practice of fabricating false etymologies, or as I have come to enjoy immensely: “etymythology.”

Believing the works to be utter garbage, after reading the text, Leibniz is said to have cried out:

“alter Schwede, was ist das für ein Schwachsinn! [sic]“.

It’s quite unfortunate that the creation of false etymologies often comes with the goal of promoting a particular worldview or as an element of nationalism: “My people are better because my language is older and your language comes from mine, therefore you are inferior. Also, I hate science, facts, and puppies.”

Most people love their native language, and that’s only to be expected, you should. It’s what you grow up with. It’s the language in which you dream the most. The language your mom probably speaks. The one in which you automatically start cursing incoherently when you stub your toe on the door frame or step on a LEGO.

Language ties us to our families, our cultures, our history, our faiths. It’s how we express ourselves. Even for those of us who have learned multiple languages throughout our lives, the native is usually the one running the show. However, most of us don’t believe that our language is the mother of all languages.

Why is this still a thing?

Unfortunately, the practice of pseudoscientific language comparison and false etymologies isn’t just relegated to the pre-modern era. There are countless contemporary examples of etymythology and pseudoscientific language comparisons rising from the swamps all over the world today.

So often, our worldviews, the cultures we grow up knowing, and our deeply rooted beliefs place something of a concrete frame around our perceptions of history and scientific understanding. This was the case for Goropius Becanus when his religion placed him within a frame, limiting his line of thinking to people absolutely coming from Adam and Eve.

Operating in this sort of confine requires the thinker to rationalize their ideas – or etymologies, in this case – within predetermined boundaries; limiting the outcomes to those acceptable by the frame itself. We are both very fortunate and unfortunate as a species insofar as we have such an urge to know and to understand everything – or at the very least have an explanation whether we get it or not.

It’s difficult for people to have no explanation for something, so we would rather have a fail safe in place to ensure that things make sense to us. Attributing something you don’t understand to something else – whether that power is science or faith in a higher power – is comforting, and it allows us to get on with our lives without rocking back and forth in a fetal position wondering why we can’t figure everything out; it’s a filter of sorts.  

But this need to explain everything somehow leads us to take the frames we’re in and try to squeeze more stuff inside. We try our hardest to cram square pegs into round holes in desperate attempts to rationalize our observations and our thoughts and to make it all fit with our worldviews. 

The process of developing goropist etymologies reminds me of a child working on a jigsaw puzzle. Upon first glance, the piece looks as though it could fit, but when applied clearly doesn’t belong. The child then begins frustratingly pushing, folding and bending the piece into that space, celebrating when, now in a mangled state, it “fits.” They then proceed to celebrate how good at puzzles they are.

An adult, on the other hand, would likely see that problem, leave the space empty, continue working elsewhere, and then come back to that space when the proper piece is discovered buried under the couch cushion three months later.

But in this case the jigsaw puzzle is reality, and a mangled thought process – such as “because it kinda looks like it might fit” – is why we can’t have nice things.

Attributes of pseudoscientific language comparison

There are numerous indicators of false etymologies and goropism. Goropius Becanus himself isn’t necessarily guilty of every single one of these. While hardly innocent either, he was indeed a product of his time and as such lacked much of the modern world’s resources and employed certain methods of scientific inquiry that we would likely scoff at today.

The complete list is super long, but here’s an only-sort-of-long list of the most common arguments employed by those engaged in false language comparisons, etymythology, goropism, and just pseudoscience in general:

1. Establishing word comparisons based on phonological similarities alone

Most of the time that you see people wrongly contrasting words between languages, they’re really just basing their similarities on a vague resemblance in sound or spelling. This can be seen clearly in von Gorpenstein’s comparisons between Brabantic inferences of the names of Adam and Eve in association with “hath-dam” and “eu-vat”. At first glance they kind of sound sort of similar, I guess? He certainly thought so. There are countless unattributed fringe blogs dedicated to strange word “matches” based 100% on phonetics alone.

2. Disregarding the scientific method

The scientific method is that thing you learn in middle school that goes make obvservations > formulate hypotheses > etc etc etc > conclusions.

One thing that really doesn’t work with the SM is personal bias and a desire to have our ideas vindicated that overrides our ability to think objectively and accept results. Most scientists are a little bit guilty of this at some point in their lives – and who wouldn’t be? We’re all desperate to have our research and hypotheses proven true and nobody likes being wrong – not to mention the pressure placed on academics to publish so they can remain relevant and by extension, you know, eat.13Tragically, researchers often aren’t paid as much as we may think, and in order to remain employed there is often incredible pressure on them to produce results and papers, etc. This can be really bad because it has led to scientists either fabricating or rushing results because they feel like they have no choice. It can result in a misinformed public, and on the worst occasions can damage the legitimacy of their disciplines. This is horrific because it further plays into the population’s distrust of science. Which is kinda the point I’m getting at here.

Thing is, you don’t get to jam your desires into this model just because you’re grumpy that it doesn’t fit nicely – you’re not a child with a frustrating jigsaw puzzle.

The very nature of the SM is that it is supposed to be entirely objective. The human factor sometimes messes with this, because egos and money are things that exist, but that’s the idea anyway, and for the most part it has served us relatively well.

There are criticisms of this method, and they may be valid, but goropists, more often than not, do not employ any model of scientific inquiry, accepted or otherwise.

3. Lacking knowledge of, or actively rejecting well-established history

There is a ridiculous amount of stuff that we just don’t know about the history of languages or the people who spoke them. However, there is also a lot that we do know. For instance, we know that Tamil and Sanskrit belong to different families. Comparative linguistics allows us to determine that Sanskrit is an Indo-European language more closely related to Brabantic than it is to its Dravidian neighbors.

Proponents of pseudoscientific language comparisons like to make statements such as: “my language is 10,000 years old because my religious book says so”. This is essentially little more than wishful thinking.

To use one example – the Indo-European language family is the most well understood, well documented language family by a wide margin. While there’re still a lot of things that we don’t know and that linguists don’t agree on, there are countless experts who have spent at least 150 years studying and reverse-engineering this ancient, hypothetical, late-Neolithic proto-language. These experts have dedicated their lives to getting their facts as straight as possible, and I for one trust them more than anyone else. My mechanic is better at fixing cars than me, so I trust him. Linguists are better at this stuff than me, so I trust them. Seems obvious, no?14One of the central issues in Proto-Indo-European studies is its origin, or urheimat – a term used to indicate the original location of a proto-language’s speakers. There is still some debate regarding the urheimat of Proto-Indo-European, but the majority of linguists appear to agree that it has its origins on or near the Ponto-Caspian Steppe. One thing is certain though – there is virtually no credible evidence that it emerged from the Indian subcontinent as is claimed by many goropists seeking to label their language as the grandparent of the family.

Furthermore, it’s probably fair to assume that most of the world’s population has a limited knowledge of the history of their own nation or their language, and many of those proposing false etymologies and language comparisons tend to have a biased and inaccurate understanding of their own tongue’s origins or historical lexicology.

4. Believing that “experts” are all wrong or part of a global, biased conspiracy

This is a phenomenon common to most flavors of scientific denial ranging from anti-vaxxers to climate change deniers, Flat-Earthers, or those people who don’t believe in the Moon landings, and it might be the one I despise the most. One thing they all have in common is not simply a disbelief in the assertions of the majority of qualified scientists, but they actively believe that the scientists involved are being paid for biased research, or are part of a conspiracy meant to bend the truth to their own nefarious or – sometimes – “imperialist” purposes.

Unfortunately, on occasion the ages old issue of racism and its counterpart – racist accusations – come to bear. A frequent gripe among goropists is that their ideas are rejected by Western “establishment” scientists because they’re racist or have some sort of secret gobalist agenda.

This isn’t totally without precedent either. A hundred years ago this was absolutely true, all the time, but today science is a little bit more universal. When it comes to linguistics, there are countless experts from all nations contributing to the betterment of human knowledge, especially in areas such as Indo-European language studies . There may still be some incidents from time to time, but in general it’s a weak argument in the 21st century to assume that all scientists are part of a grand conspiracy.

As I stated in a little black digression box above, one of the serious issues with this is the breaking down of public trust in science and scientists. When you work to discredit scientists it undermines the legitimacy of their profession and can affect other disciplines’ credibility as well. This can start a snowball effect that makes society turn away from science and that’s really just not cool.

5. Refusing to submit material to peer review or recognized scientific publications

If your argument can’t hold up to scientific scrutiny, you’re supposed to throw it out or take steps to revise it until it does. That’s how the scientific method works. One of the requirements of a legitimate scientific theory is that it be falsifiable, which is something goropism is not.

If you think your material will be rejected by reputable publications, there is usually something wrong with it. That’s not to say that no outside-the-box thinker has ever come up with something that challenged the status quo, and publishing original ideas with sufficient research and evidence to support them is still a great thing to do, even if it won’t necessarily be taken seriously at first. Never know, you could change the world.

However, generally that’s not the case. If you have confidence in your science, get it done! Get it out there through the proper channels, be heard!

If not, don’t assert it as fact.

6. Rejecting the concept of borrowing or loanwords

Most of us know that languages absorb vocabulary and trends from neighboring languages or those that they have otherwise come into contact with. This has never been more clear than it is now thanks to language evolution and globalization. English in particular is grabbing up other languages’ vocab like a starving amoeba. It is also leaving its words in everyone else’s languages. 

Just because one language uses a word from another does not inherently imply a familial link. It just means one group of people thought the other group of people’s word filled a new need in their own language, or was just plain cool.

7. Using ideological, political, or religious reasoning to justify a connection

Perhaps the most common issue is that people tend to be very staunch in their personal or cultural beliefs. This again ties into the theme of nationalism or traditionalism and is by far the hardest point to communicate. In fact, the more you push people and present them with facts, the more likely they are to be further reinforced in their beliefs and push back even harder. Nobody likes being told that their belief system is wrong, and who can blame them?

One such instance of this can be seen in the Sun Language Theory – a 1930s linguistic origin story that proposed a proto-Turkic language as being the ancestor of all of the world’s languages. This idea was used to promote Turkish nationalism and was strongly backed by Turkey’s first president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

Unfortunately, while this notion was mostly stamped out by the 1950s, there are still people who believe in the Sun Language Theory to this day despite the fact that it has essentially no legitimate scientific or historical backing and has been rejected by virtually all modern linguists as little more than a bogus nationalist wet dream.

Perhaps the loudest and the most visible example of goropism in modern society are the etymological “disputes” regarding the Tamil and Sanskrit languages and their impact on other tongues around the world.15To set the record straight: the Tamil people have really been handed the short stick and had to deal with a lot of shit over their many, many years. They are an indisputably ancient people with an incredibly old language – believed to date back to 300ish BC in a relatively “well preserved” form. Not bad, but some are erroneously convinced it’s way older.

There are believers who think Tamil is the forebear of Sanskrit (it isn’t, they aren’t even related), and those who think it’s the oldest language and that it goes back over 10,000 years (it’s not and it doesn’t and I don’t have time to explain all of the reasons why). Many of these assertions have their roots in religious beliefs and the things written in ancient scripture.

It gets really difficult to argue when religion gets involved. Similar words have been said of Hebrew in particular, and on the nationalist spectrum: of Serbian, Turkish and others, such as Irish.16The American writer Daniel Cassidy wrote in his book How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads, that an exorbitant number of English slang words come from Irish. His claims have in large part also been discredited, but this guy was obsessed with Ireland and Irish and that’s what happens.

8. Citing discredited researchers or historic figures with outdated research

Several weeks ago, I had the pleasure of being part of an online “discussion” regarding the prominence of Indian languages – in this case Sanskrit – and their prominence as the mother tongue(s) of all languages. The individual claiming as much cited an Indophile nationalist blog as well as works by 18th and early 19th century linguists and Indophiles such as Friedrich Schlegel and Max Müller, who were both pretty smart dudes, but whose accounts are tragically outdated and have since had more holes poked in them than Sylvester Stallone at the end of literally any movie he’s ever been in.

I thought Fred and Max were fairly interesting guys and I thought I’d make a box, so I made two instead because boxes are fun, so here:

Friedrich Schlegel

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel, as he would have been formally called, was a prominent German Indophile during the turn of the 19th century - not the Nazi officer of the same name. But they did have one thing in common. They both loved Aryans!

Badum-tss!  

Much like his predecessor Johannes, Schlegel was a man of many other talents, being prominent as a poet, literary critic, philologist and rejector of stylish floofy wigs. He would later inspire many other writers and thinkers of the Romantic period and was generally a "pretty smart cookie".

In his 1808 signature book Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of India) Schlegel claimed that India was the birthplace of Western civilization and the motherland of all of its languages.

He came to these conclusions having compared Sanskrit with German, Persian, Greek and Latin and found some similarities in vocabulary and other stuff. Technically, he wasn't wrong here, they are related, he just didn't really understand what we understand today. So his work wasn't completely useless, but citing it in the 21st century as a grounds for defending the claim of Subcontinental language origins is sort of silly.

Max Müller

Another oft-cited Indophile is the Victorian era philologist Max Müller. As a not-so-stupid-but-a-product-of-his-time-dude with silly mutton chops, Müller dedicated his life to comparing languages and was one of the geniuses behind the now largely discredited Turanian language family.

 

He studied Sanskrit and then went about linking it to Indo-European languages, which is, again, not wrong.

In Müller's time it was generally believed that Sanskrit was the eldest of the Indo-European languages - and it is indeed quite old. As one of Britain's (he moved there because reasons) most prominent India experts, Müller attempted to study the Vedas and link historic Vedic culture to early Classical European societies. He did what he could with the resources he had at the time, and you have to give him credit for actually going to India, unlike many of his armchair anthropologist contemporaries, but it's still not really cool to cite information that has been rejected in modern times just because you like it.

Unfortunately for Müller, when Scientific American published his obituary in 1900, it announced rather mercilessly that he had actually taken the credit for a translation of the Rig Veda performed by another German expert whom he had paid. Sort of a dick move.

Even the legendary writer, satirist, serial blasphemer, and France’s political problem child, Voltaire was on board with the Sanskrit-is-king notion. He claimed in the 18th century that the Ganges and the Brahmins were the genesis of European science, culture, and society. He liked to claim that even the ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras went to India to study geometry. 17I wasn’t able to confirm that this was actually true, but it is well known that Indians and Mesopotamians had the whole A²+B² = C² thing figured out first and ideas traveled, probably on camels.

If you’ve ever read Voltaire, though, you’ll note that it’s hard sometimes to tell when he’s just messing with you. He was a bit of a clown sometimes.

There’s nothing wrong with referencing the research of historical figures, and science would never be where it is were it not for a thousand cemeteries’ worth of smart, passionate dead people coming up with cool ideas that turned out to not be entirely infallible. The issue here is that we need to understand that science is constantly moving forward – or at least it’s supposed to be. As we go we build on what we thought we knew, and we change accordingly when presented with new evidence that contradicts the old. We don’t get to cherry-pick the stuff that supports our models and call it legit. We don’t get to scientifically cite old dead dudes just because they said something we want to be true.

9. Claiming junk archaeology as true or falsely representing legit archaeology

Many goropists do come to the debating table with some sources to cite other than the musings of obscure Victorian era dandies. Some bring archaeology. When the very nature of an argument is rooted in history, archaeology is a great way to drum up some attempted legitimacy to defend a point – especially if the archaeologist agrees with that specific worldview.

It is generally accepted that cuneiform script is the oldest example of truly language-codified writing. While older script systems may exist, they have not yet been deemed to necessarily qualify as true writing.18True writing refers to scripts that are known to encode spoken language. To oversimplify this: when you read this text in English using the Latin script, you know you’re reading a spoken language. Every letter indicates a sound and the writing directly correlates. Other scripts like the one that we’ll get to in just a second are more akin to “markers” than they are to “writing” in the codified sense. It’s a little bit more complicated than that but this is a little black digression bubble, not the Encyclopedia Britannica. This could change, and I kind of hope it does, but for now that’s just how it is.

There are considerably older systems that could still fit the definition of “script” without being “writing.” These include China’s Neolithic Jiahu Script, and the subject of this segment – the Vinča symbols, as well as many others.

When it comes to examples of goropism attaching itself to archaeology, we need look no further than the Neolithic Balkans.

The Vinča symbols 19The č is pronounced something sort of like the CH in “check”. I’m sure someone with better knowledge of Slavic languages will say that’s a lame comparison and call me out but I don’t speak Serbian so for now I think that’s close enough. are a series of undeciphered markings on pottery and tablets discovered in what is today Turdaș, Romania, in 1875 by Zsófia Torma – a Hungarian archaeologist and all around lady-badass. These fragments and inscriptions from the Neolithic Vinča culture have since been carbon dated to between the 5th and 6th millennia BC, which is massively older than late 4th millennium BC cuneiform.20I love putting things into zoomed-out perspectives, especially really old things. I know it looks obvious, but the 6th millennium BC is as far from the 4th millennium as we are to Julius Caesar, and about the same as Caesar was to when the Pyramids at Giza were built. There were mammoths running around in some places still. Simple math, but not something we think about on a daily basis.

However, after more than a century, linguists and archaeologists still know very little about them and have not been able to successfully codify the symbols as true writing. Many theories have come about over the years but at the end of the day everyone is still stumped.

That’s the tl:dr version, anyway. I could write an entire post about the Vinča culture and their symbols and maybe I will some time, but the awesomeness of this discovery isn’t really the point.

The point is that a lot of people living in the region have gone and claimed this ancient culture as their own and used it as an expression of national supremacy.

This disturbing, nationalist AF article titled, of all things: “Vinča is first civilization in World is located in Serbia!” (actual title, not typos) is the only example I’m going to give right now because I think it sums up this problem quite simply.21I originally wrote a scathing footnote commentary in this space about the unnamed author of the Serb nationalist site, who goes well beyond garden-variety douchesnorkle and spews truly hateful word-vomit all over his site. Unfortunately, my profanity laden footnote didn’t open properly on mobile devices, so I removed it because I’d like to be the (slightly) bigger man. So here’s the abbreviated version: fuck Nazis.

The gist of that link, for those of you who shy away from masochism or didn’t bother to click because ain’t nobody got time for that, is that there are folks out there who insist that the symbols are in fact early Serbian and that they are evidence that 8,000 year old Serbs were pretty much the “original Europeans” and the builders of the oldest cities in the world. I feel like the Natufians in Jericho 4,000 years earlier might take issue with that, but what do I know…

It shouldn’t be a herculean feat to surmise that the Vinča culture did not speak Serbian, and Serbian did not evolve from whatever the Vinča culture spoke. They were not Serbs. Saying otherwise is like me claiming that thousand year old Iroquois artifacts discovered near my home town in New York are part of my white boy heritage just because I was born in the same geographical location and think the Iroquois are cool.

Conclusion

To briefly defend Goropius Becanus: he’s not responsible for the persistence of etymythology, nor was he even close to being the first guy to come up with wacky linguistic hypotheses. He is simply the namesake of a somewhat tongue-in-cheek word, courtesy of my man Leibniz, that does have relevance today. While Goropadoodledoo22I’m *really* struggling here guys…. was widely ridiculed for his ideas, he did what he could with the information he had available. He was fiercely influenced by his religion, the available knowledge of the world, love of his homeland, and probably some tasty cheese and chocolate.

He was wrong, as were Müller and Schlegel, and many others who came before and after him, but they all worked within the scope of their times, and while they were clearly influenced by personal bias, it’s not their faults that people choose ignorance today. The refuting of the scientific method, peer review, and the refusal to set aside personal bias for facts and testable, repeatable theories, as well as the vilification of experts is nothing new – but it is time for us to all try to get ourselves on the same page.

I’d like to think that Johannes Goropius Becanus would have agreed – he was, after all, a doctor and a man of science, even if it was bad science, but at the time, his society was so deeply rooted in religious bias that science and faith were more or less forced to “work together” to the best of their ability; they often still are.

Unfortunately for our guy here, he’ll most likely go down in history as either a stub of an unknown Wikipedia article, or a witless nincompoop; a minuscule footnote in linguistic obscurity relegated to the annals of history and the occasional snarky, potentially-too-long-winded article by random language bloggers. Poor guy.

I got your back bro.

Brian Powers

Apex-editor of Languages Around the Globe, collector of linguists, regaler of history, accidental emmigrant, serial dork and English language mercenary and solutions fabricator. Potentially a necromancer. All typos are my own.