Word: goddarde
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...book, Gardner notes that pseudo-scientific theories are sometimes the work of brilliant men who can construct quite intricate puzzles for others to undo. Ives Goddard of the Smithsonian Institution makes the same point about Fell's work: "Fell spends years putting together his information...He's constructed an elaborate puzzle for us to solve...Recently I spent a couple of hours with a reporter and we looked up several of these words [from Fell's lists comparing ancient European languages and modern Indian tongues]...they can all be refuted, but in the end it's a waste of effort...
...Ives Goddard, formerly of Harvard and presently of the Smithsonian Institution, where he is linguistic editor of the Handbook of North American Indians, doesn't think highly of Barry Fell's word lists. Goddard, who is an authority on Algonquin languages, says Fell's work in that area is "full of errors of analysis and interpretation. He has trouble getting Indian words and their glosses right, he mixes languages together [a cardinal sin in comparative linguistics]...There is not even a vague inkling of enough resemblances to require an historical explanation...
...Fell's assertion that Ogam is an ancient Celtic script that reached both Ireland and America after its origin on the Iberian peninsula, both Goddard and Calvert Watkins, professor of Linguistics and the Classics, maintain that there is a well-established literature on Ogam that identifies it as a script developed in Ireland by someone who knew Latin, sometime around...
Fell's use of Ogam is convenient; as Goddard notes, "It is an epigrapher's delight." Ogam, which consists of clusters of vertical parallel lines positioned above or below a horizontal median, is easily made ambiguous by weathering. In addition, most of Fell's supposed Ogam inscriptions are written without vowels. Goddard says this makes it easy for Fell to read anything he wants...
Fell deals extensively with Algonquin place names in New England, which he says were derived from ancient Celtic. Curiously, he attempts to prove their Celtic origin by pointing out similarities between the Algonquin and recent Gaelic. Goddard described this as similar to "using a modern French dictionary to read Latin...