A recent episode of "Men and Prophets," beautiful series of Radio 3 devoted to the history of religions and the relationship between religion and today's world, introduced me to a very singular character, whose knowledge has resulted in some internal and external reflections. Fri blogging the weighting of your summer readers distracted by umbrella, so you learn to complain that place too infrequently (enough to make you see:). And I just want to see who has the courage to leggerselo everything inside ....
Semerano The character is John, who died a year ago at the ripe old age of 92 years. A figure of intellectual awkward, long-lived in the shadows and only partially erupted in the light thanks to some "friends" of the likes of Umberto Galimberti, Emanuele Severino and Massimo Cacciari, who took off from exile in which he was confined because of his unorthodox positions. (For indisputable evidence of isolation, we think that Rai has been unable to find anything better to illustrate that the photograph of the tombstone, I reproduce here as an act vaguely necrophiliac pulp.)
better than I can do, I just described Umberto Galimberti in "La Repubblica" on 14.6.2001, on the occasion of the publication of the last essay Semerano hard at Mondadori
"The author of which I speak is John Semerano that ninety wrote: Infinity: a millennial misunderstanding. A student of Giorgio Pasquali and Giuseppe Forlani semiologist, Giacomo Devoto and Bruno Migliorini, Semerano John began his career in Florence as a professor of Latin and greek in high school, but his real passion is the etymology of words, whose research is disappointed too many times when referring to the etymological dictionaries who espouse the theory of the origin of our Indo-European languages, is opposite to the expressions: etymology 'unknown', 'inconnue', 'ignorée', 'unbekannt', 'unknown'. He was then suspected that, taking as a framework for the Akkadian language spoken in the third millennium BC in Anatolia, Syria, Mesopotamia by the merchants and rulers in their correspondence with the Egyptian pharaohs, those etymologies 'unknown' yield their secrets, and especially the etymologies of English words and German have always placed a heavy test the Indo-European framework. To pursue this hypothesis Semerano John left the chair in high school and moved as the first director of the Laurentian Library in Florence and then to the National Library where he remained for thirty years to build his masterpiece The origins of European culture, in four volumes published by Leo Olschki. [...] About the Etruscans, we know that [...] John Semerano starting from happening, he deciphered the writing, but his discovery, on the authority of Massimo Pallottino, had no follow-up and Etruscan writing was unnecessarily wrapped in her puzzle. In 1985, the celebration of the Etruscans held an international conference in Florence, where he was granted to John Semerano intervention of three minutes was not possible to prove anything. [...] The left Italy in the British newspaper The Guardian became curious about the person and, through the good offices of Neppi Modona, joined him in Florence and then interviewed him out with a full-page title "An italian Professor Finds Accadian linguistic roots under the tree. " The news shocked the world Anglo-Saxon culture and the Italian left unspecified, except that a few years after Indro Montanelli became curious about that and John Semerano invited to write some articles on the subject in his paper. This little recognition that annoyed Salvatore Settis 23 February 85 [ slip?, NDB ] discredited on Tuttolibri La Stampa John Semerano guilty to him to consider the Galileo claimed that a Copernican revolution about the origin of languages. But in those years Vittorio Mathieu [ slip giant Galimberti, this is actually Paul Matthiae, NDB ], head of the Italian expedition to Syria, which was found [...] twenty thousand Library of the Ebla tablets that Assyriologist Giovanni Pettinato began to translate and disseminate the discovery in his good books, that comforts the hypothesis of John Semerano. [...] In the same year [1994] noticed him and turned their attention to his research and Massimo Cacciari Emanuele Severino said earlier referred. The rest is history. In 1999, during the international congress held in Milan on "The first roots of Europe", L'Espresso had a long article on the report of John Semerano, and in April 2000 on Sergio Frau's Republic devoted two full pages of culture with a very good article: "As the land began to speak."
Fin Galimberti here. But the transmission of Radio 3 (which was the re-release of an interview in 2001) has allowed me to get in touch with the voice of this old young man who, despite his ninety next seemed little more than a middle-aged spirit and presence. Semerano had a way of stroking the concepts, typical of the man who lived far from the clamor and the envy of the academic self. His work definitions are, at times of intense poetry, like this:
"The words might be called spiritual gathering of media messages away, and make us partakers of time spent in the distant universe, civilizations and peoples of which up to several hundred years ago we knew nothing.
Words are the most tenacious of the stones. We need to auscultate their secret as the echo of a shell in the abyssal oceans. These are voices of people off, but as lights turned off are continuing to send their message of light.
For example, the word hand. From Latin manus . In etymological dictionaries the word is unbekannt elucidated. But the word has a transparency manus extraordinary, for maintenance in Akkadian means "compute." The hand or instrument so as to calculate. The Akkadian language is the mother of Assyria and Babylon. Semitic language that feels a lot of the most ancient Sumerian language. Going back again, Semitic languages \u200b\u200bare the Mediterranean, like the Canaanite, Aramaic, the origin of the Etruscan language among others. Languages \u200b\u200band European civilizations have their roots in this language, in this koine in the Akkadian is the most important.
Words such as Europe, Italy, Atlas do not result Indo. The concept of "Indo-European language" is a myth specially formulated by grammarians of German nineteenth-century myth that has had disastrous consequences on the political and historical. The racial laws were born in this cultural environment addiritura when he was forbidden to speak of the Semitic languages. It was preferred to move the origin Europe farther east, rather than accept a source-Semitic Mediterranean. "
It is the latter concepts include the" sin "of Semerano. Far from being a harmless discovery of an obscure discipline as paleolinguistica, having put the Akkadian and Semitic languages \u200b\u200bat the heart of the game, describing the building as a mythical Indo-European is not supported by any objective evidence, it would be a second revolution Copernican, when accepted.
Yeah, when accepted. The myth of the Indo-European civilization. Semerano not consider plausible dell'indoeuropeo says be a conjectural language reconstructed by linguists with a purely technical process, but completely out of touch. There is no need to say that such an argument has been rejected by linguists in the trunk classics. According to his critics, he disputed the theory dell'indoeuropeo thinking only of the early nineteenth century German linguists, regardless of the subsequent evolution of the studies that led to several corrections and refinements of the hypotheses late-Romantic. The claim that the existence of Semerano dell'indoeuropeo would be a "fairy tale" is contradicted by archaeological discoveries such as the decipherment of Hittite tablets, made just on the basis that it was an Indo-European language written in characters of writing cuneiform.
There are heavy, scientific linguists against the poor (but Unbreakable) Semerano. His methods appear to them to completely amateurish. For example, he has under the Latin res ("thing") from happening Resu , "head", completely ignoring the fact that the final-s of the Latin is the ending of the name. Perhaps if he got the moves by the prosecution rem, it may be moved up the incident REMU "belly"? Similarly, in all his work Semerano would simply served, without scruples methodological, dictionaries of various languages, which often ignores. His whole theory is based on heterogeneous combinations of terms, without being offered an alternative model to that developed by the traditional linguistic and without it are explained and defined the language laws that have guided the derivation of the various languages \u200b\u200bexamined by the ancient Mesopotamian languages.
not know about you, personally, I find this terrible problem (and "safely" in the sense of something designed for detailed and calmly) interesting. The Indo-Europeans, those notorious "sea peoples" who by their invasion of the Aegean Sea around 2000 BC would be the origin of Greek civilization, are a big problem, far that high school, anything but academic. Scholars of the nineteenth century, Greece was presented as a dilemma, since the scientific breakthrough of archeology, passed during archaeological excavations at the end of 700 (at least we should remember the tutelary deity of Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst of 1755, and Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums del1764) from the state of discipline purely philological and antiquarian, progressive condition of the real observational and experimental science. The white statues of Greece kouroi and athletes (who now know to be rather were stained in origin, and so also a bit ' tacky), the Apollo "with no veins or tendons," the Olympian serenity and harmony that emanates from all higher quell'impressionante building intellectual, artistic, but also philosophical, scientific, social, democratic (despite slavery), seemed to be originated with the suddenness of lightning to illuminate the darkness, or at least the greyness of the Mediterranean world of the first millennium BC Of course, the neoclassical view that was created at Jena and Heidelberg, as the kingdom of the world greek timeless (and essentially in- space) of Supreme Harmony was largely lacking. To complete the picture with the vision of the world greek tragic and existential (Delphi, Eleusis) Man that still leaves us speechless, Nietzsche had to wait at least and its tragic pages of Die Geburt der Tragoedie of 1871 (hereinafter, a few years later, the excavations of Schliemann's Mycenaean and Phrygians, confirming the detailed reality of Greece primitive of Homer). Despite the undoubted incompleteness, nevertheless, at the beginning of the 800 Greek civilization loomed like a giant white Parian marble horizon gibbering superstition Mesopotamia. How could such a complex, articulated wonder had come out of nowhere?
To try to find the clue of this mess, the Europe of the late eighteenth creates the concept of "matrix Indo-European. " According to this model, the Greek civilization, created after the invasion of Indo-European peoples, is a native European civilization arose in opposition to an East African and Asian property seen as decadent. The latest version of the theory we need to Marija Gimbutas ( LINK), the author, inter alia, a wonderful book entitled The the Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe . This version of the Indo-European theory, completely unchallenged until the late '80s, the Indo-Europeans identified with a nation of warriors on horseback that pastors should reflect the culture of the fourth millennium, the Copper Age or Chalcolithic, that kurgan of (from a Russian word of turkish-Tatar origin meaning 'burial mound')
these shepherds from the steppes of Ukraine warriors, then taken the form of so-called culture of the battle-ax , would invade Europe in several waves, wiping out native populations, or by making the European continent, and substituting its own language to any language background. A doomsday scenario that also implies the idea of \u200b\u200bthe absolute superiority (military but also cultural) of the immigrant population on indigenous peoples, given the high level of pre-existing European civilizations. Not in this case scenario, which we call the Great Invasion, dates back to the nineteenth century, and the context in which the ideology was also born "Aryan." The books of the founding fathers dell'indoeuropeistica are full of references to the Aryan race destined to conquer the world. This kind of criticism (along with a reassessment of the basic Semitic or even North African of Greek culture) have made a fortune, for example, Martin Bernal and his famous book Black Athena . Bernal says that the "Aryan model" would triumph not because of its greater scientific plausibility, but for a variety of external causes: firstly the rise of Romanticism, then the rise of racism related to European colonialism and, in the racism, the rise of anti-Semitism, and finally a misunderstanding on the part of the historical sciences, the concept of "objectivity."
I take the following considerations from Origins of the languages \u200b\u200bof Europe: the problem of continuity , M. Alinei (Bologna, Il Mulino 1996). Over the past thirty years, while the experts of Indo-European language (the "favolieri" of the unrecognized Semerano) continued to work based on the classical model of Gimbutas, the archaeological science has made enormous strides, first with the discovery of more and more methods of dating precise, which have imposed a radical change of all the dates of European prehistory, making them much more old traditional ones, then with the development of methods for analysis and interpretation of increasingly sophisticated, leading to a gradual revision of traditional views on European prehistory, by eliminating or minimizing the role of invasions, and instead emphasizing the aspects of continuity and the role of internal development, economic and social. And in the context of this radical revision of European prehistory has increasingly begun to doubt the sustainability of the traditional theory of "the great invasion."
The book has focused on the "problem" in Indo-European has been explicitly Archaeology and Language: the Puzzle Indoeuropean Colin Renfrew (1987). Renfrew warrior replaces the invasion of Europe with an invasion of the Chalcolithic peaceful beginning of the Neolithic, by the early farmers, and goes on to match the process of diffusion of agriculture (the only real cultural gap documented by archeology new) with the process of diffusion of Indo-European languages.
In the '90s, however, another theory has been proposed as an alternative to that of Renfrew. The idea of \u200b\u200ban invasion Neolithic large, in fact, was immediately criticized by archaeologists, including specialists in the study of the transition from Mesolithic to Neolithic. These could easily be shown neolithization that Europe did not occur as a result of a major invasion that would have invested the entire continent, but due to a complex process of diffusion of products and techniques dell'agropastorizia, which has been accompanied by modest contributions that immigrant are interested only in the Balkans, Germany, and to a lesser extent the central-western Mediterranean area, and not at all the rest of Europe. On this basis, the most recent theoretical proposal states that the origins of the Indo-Europeans would not have come as warriors or Ukraine, either as farmers from the Middle East, but would be the natural heirs of the people who are always in Europe, that is, since Homo sapiens sapiens has spread across the continents of the Old World, in the Paleolithic, coming from Africa. The Indo-Europeans would then always been in Europe and Asia, as it admits that Africans have always been in Africa, the Chinese in China and the Australian Aborigines in Australia, and so on.
seems to me that the latter theory (which is very good Alinei co-author) is really fascinating. Our languages \u200b\u200b"Indo-European" date back no less than the primitive language of 'Homo sapiens . In our brain, already headed for his instincts by the amygdala, a remnant of the age of the caves, the linguistic forms moving along the meandering paths that follow ancient carved by a river that flows from the African highlands far one hundred thousand years ago. Never heard anything more beautiful, really, since the days when Don Giulio Torri taught us the catechism of the Salesian Oratory (okay, let me demystify a little bit:)
This whole situation does not clash too much even then with the evolution of Proto-Greek civilization in the Aegean. Modern archeology is now confirmation of the development a bit 'anywhere in the Europe of the Bronze Age (about 1500 years before him), highly stratified social structures and the emergence of powerful elites, accompanied by the culture of the tombs for burial. These would, in short, the great-uncles of the Homeric king of Argos and Mycenae, Agamemnon and fortissimum Mirmidonum rex. Only, just, merely shift the problem.
In fact, you may be pleased to have begun to understand a bit 'better the origin of European languages \u200b\u200band the connection with the previous cultural traditions, but the problem is still all there, intact. How did - really! - To come out something like the classical Greek culture, starting from the subsurface to the whole rest of Mediterranean Europe? Why did not develop similar civilization on the coast of Iberia or North Africa, or in the northern Adriatic? Because the plateau Iran is not one that came out as Phidias carved or one that measured the circumference of the Earth as Eratosthenes? Why the Semitic peoples were immersed in their rambling mumble (unfortunately come to this day) of their unspeakable Jaweh or Allah, only gods, vengeful and terribly upset in their loneliness, while the Greek philosophers gave birth to concepts and reasoning of stunning modern and invented mathematics and geometry? (Oh, now do not give me the pro-Nazi Aryan, eh ?...)
And towards the end of this (ahem ... ahem ...) post summer, I close it on myself and go back to the top and good John Semerano, who has sought throughout his life to fighting the "fairy tale" Indo-European invasion against his most tenacious supporters, or linguists. I go back to GS, because if it is true that Indo-European hypothesis has now been put into crisis by more than one party, he is now in good company (who knows that he will be chatting and Marija Gimbutas sitting side by side on a cloud of some paradise, a choice among several proposed by the diverse religions of the many Olympians who have studied). But as I tried to point out, the "knot" of the Greek question remains. Also because I suspect there is some "rage" ideological, in wanting to show all the costs that the Greeks were linked in some fashion to the proto-Semitic culture (and to some extent, even the Bible). As demonstrated by the last book Semerano he spoke at the opening of post, good Umberto Galimberti.
This volume is (see above) Infinity: an age-old misunderstanding. The ancient civilizations of the Near East and the origins of greek thought (Mondadori, 2001). Starting from the well known hypothesis of a derivation of all languages \u200b\u200bfrom a common matrix Akkadian-Sumerian, GS goes up to a radical overhaul of the entire story of the archaic and classical Greece, no more miraculous island of rationality, but an integral part of one community that stretches from Anatolia, Mesopotamia, to Egypt.
entire construction of this book is based on a new interpretation of the term apeiron , central to the philosophy of Anaximander. Of this there is just a pre-Socratic fragments, handed down by Simplicius in his Commentary on Aristotle's Physics , few words were enough to establish a full, powerful thought pattern:
principle of things is infinite. .. birth and death of things happen as needed, since they pay the penalty and reinstated the wrong that they commit to each other in the order of the time ...
Anaximander defines the element from which all things have their origin the term Apeiron, which is usually considered consists of a-privative ("without") and Peras ("assessment", "end") and therefore translated as "indeterminate" or "(un) done." According Semerano instead (you do the short) the term would be attached to the Semitic ' APAR corresponding to the biblical ' Afar and the incident eperu , all terms that mean "earth". The fragment of Anaximander no longer refers, therefore, a philosophical concept of infinity, but to a conception of "belonging to the land" that is found throughout sapienzale an earlier tradition of Asian origin and is also in the biblical text dust you are and dust you shall return. Here, in my opinion, check the ideological fury.
admit they have not succeeded (yet) find the book of Semerano to read it with due care, and I'm writing my impressions based solely on what the author said in his interview. I admit that even I do not mind the whole idea of \u200b\u200bbringing Anaximander (and perhaps other pre-Socratic) in a less metaphysical and more "materialistic", along with Thales and Democritus. I admit also that could be resolved with a smile that the main objection was made that argument, citing the alternation of the diphthong in the language that ionic found so often in Homer (for example, a Homeric "pontos apèiritos" would be translated, following Semerano, with a questionable "earthy sea" instead of "endless sea").
But what they do not admit is that I take off to infinity. I you want to drive back on Earth and in the ground, his head covered with ashes and his lip quivering, in worship of an ancient god invented by fear. I want you to cut the wings of thought that Greece has instilled in the depths of the brain Europe to return them to the darkness of the barren hills Canaanite superstitious. No, not touch the infinite. Let me wander, boring apologists of Christianity, for endless ocean of knowledge.
And happy holidays:)
