Hey! Coming from outside Indo-European or Etruscan linguistics, what's the tea with Giuliano Bonfante?
Giuliano Bonfante lived to be 101 years old and I'm not aware that he was ever on the right side of a debate even once in all that time.
I think the last three times I came across him were:
When he claimed the Etruscans must have had close contacts with Germany before the Romans came along because German Erz 'ore' is derived from the name of the city of Arrētium in Etruria (it is not).
When fellow dipshit Szemerényi praised him in one of his own dogshit books (possibly Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics) for rejecting laryngeal theory.
Laryngeal theory is the reconstruction of three PIE consonants, *h₁, *h₂, and *h₃ (so written because their most likely phonetic realisation is considerably more contentious than the fact of their existence—they're called laryngeals mainly because they colour vowels similarly to laryngeals in some Semitic languages, including Akkadian), that, at the time it was formulated (1897), were not known to have survived as consonants in any IE language, but that resolve a host of issues with vowel behaviour. Between consonants the laryngeals were preserved as vowels, typically a (almost all languages) or i (Indo-Iranian), but Greek and Greek alone has separate outcomes for each of them: Gk. γενέτωρ, Lat. genitor < *genator, Skt. जनिता janitā < PIE *g̑enh₁tōr 'begetter'; Gk. πατήρ, Lat. pater, Skt. पिता pitā < PIE ph₂tēr 'father'; Gk. δοτός, Lat. datus < PIE dh₃tos 'given' (and Skt. अदित adita 'he was given' < *h₁e-dh₃-to). The decipherment of Hittite in the early 20th century led to the realisation that Hittite preserves at least consonantal *h₂ as ḫ, and by, say, the 1950s you would have had to be a real dumbass to still reject laryngeal theory.
When he claimed the Philistines were "obviously" Illyrian on the basis that Παλαιστῖνοι kind of looks like Palaeste, a city in Epirus, and he couldn't be bothered to look at the Semitic data. In the same article he suggests Mitinti, the name of three separate Philistine kings, shows "the pre-Hellenic -νθο- suffix", which he thinks is Illyrian (Mitinti is a perfectly normal Semitic word meaning 'gift'), and—actually, just read it. The whole thing is shocking. Some of it is because it's from 1946, but it's abysmal even for 1946.
This is how Bonfante always seems to work: he throws out a bunch of wild, obviously unsupportable claims, badly misrepresents the state of the field and accuses everyone else in it of missing obvious points, promises to treat if not the actual thesis statement of his paper then at least an extremely load-bearing point in it in some future work, and then just ignores any responses.
His contribution to the festschrift I mentioned earlier (p. 460)—a review of a chapter of a book that came out fourteen years earlier, mind—is pretty typical. Note that his position that the Indo-European homeland is on the Baltic coast isn't even in the top three mainstream positions (Pontic-Caspian steppe, Anatolia, Armenia).
It's the behaviour of an established scholar who has gone senile eccentric in his retirement but is basically humoured by his colleagues (very common!), except Bonfante was like that his entire life. Part of the reason he gets away with it, I think, is because he often cites hard-to-find, often non-English publications for his more ridiculous claims (Szemerényi was fond of doing the same thing) and he often refers to his own work in Italian, so editors and peer reviewers who don't already know him don't bother to track anything down and wrongly assume he must be at least base-line credible. By the end, though, I'm convinced that he mostly got published so more serious people would have something to publish refutations about in slow years.
tangentwithtanner
gummygunk
prguitarman
blakekathryn
romaincrisis
yousharknotpass
baratheonpilled
theartofmadeline
