Quality of Sources: Godfrey Higgins, pt 3

Higgins, pt 3: Anacalypsis: Preface, Preliminary Observations

Higgins lived during a pre-neogrammarian age, and hence at the time, comparative linguistics had not reached the point where it could be called a science. 

For a very long time, and during the writing of the greater part of my work, I abstained from the practice of many etymologists, of exchanging one letter for another, that is, the letter of one organ for another of the same organ; such, for instance, as Pada for Vada, or Beda for Veda, in order that I might not give an opportunity to captious objectors to say of me, as they have said of others, that by this means I could make out what I pleased. From a thorough conviction that this has operated as a very great obstacle to the discovery of truth, I have used it rather more freely in the latter part of the work, but by no means so much as the cause of truth required of me. The practice of confining the use of a language while in its infancy to the strict rules to which it became tied when in its maturity, is perfectly absurd, and can only tend to the secreting of truth. The practice of indiscriminately changing ad libitum a letter of one organ for another of the same organ, under the sanction of a grammatical rule, - for instance, that B and V are permutable, cannot be justified. It cannot, however, be denied that they are often so changed; but every case must stand upon its own merits. [1, preface]

At the time of his writing, historical linguistics did indeed operate a bit along these lines - although some basic idea of regular sound change had occurred to the scholars of the time. It was this kind of completely ad hoc approach to historical linguistics that lead the neo-grammarians to come up with less ad hoc reasoning.

The idea that languages go from infancy to maturity is not generally taken seriously by anyone these days. Certainly, languages change over time, and assuming that the same rules apply now as a thousand years ago in some language would be misguided.

In a somewhat better speculation on how language may have come about, he expounds:

4. After he [early mankind] had arrived at the art of speaking with a tolerable degree of ease and fluency, without being conscious that he was reasoning about it, he would probably begin to turn his thoughts to a mode of recording or perpetuating some few of the observations which he would make on surrounding objects, for the want of which he would find himself put to inconvenience. This I think was the origin of Arithmetic. He would probably very early make an attempt to count a few of the things around him, which interested him the most, perhaps his children; and his ten fingers would be his first reckoners; and thus by them he would be led to the decimal instead of the more useful octagonal calculation which he might have adopted; that is, stopping at 8 instead of 10. ... There is nothing natural in the decimal arithmetic; it is all artificial, and must have arisen from the number of the fingers; which, indeed, supply an easy solution to the whole enigma. Man would begin by taking a few little stones, at first in number five, the number of fingers on one hand. This would produce the first idea of numbers. After a little time he would increase them to ten. ... To these heaps or parcels of stones, and operations by means of them, he would give names; and I suppose that he called each of the stones a calculus, and the operation a calculation. [1, p. 1]

Indeed, it is generally agreed by all linguists today that the preponderance of the decimal system is closely related to our ten fingers - however, it is also noted that there is a preponderance of vigesimal systems (base-20), with sub-bases of 5 or 10. It is unclear whether Higgins genuinely meant that the early humans called these stones (or pebbles or fingers or whatever) and the act of counting calculation and calculus, or whether he is just giving a name to these things so as to be able to talk of them later on.

5. The ancient Etruscans have been allowed by most writers on the anitquities of nations, to have been among the oldest civilized people of whom we have any information. In my Essay on the Celtic Druids, I have shewn that their language, or that of the Latins, which was in fact their language in a later time, was the same as the Sanscrit of India. This I have proved not merely by the uncertain mode of shewing that their words are similar, but by the construction of the language. The absolute identity of the modes of comparison of the adjective, and of the verb impersonal, which in my proof I have made use of, cannot have been the effect of accident.  [1, p. 2]

As it turns out, precious little is known of the Etruscan language. One entire book is extant - liber linteus zagrabiensis. Scholars have not been able to read it - despite knowing the alphabet. If it were (closely) related to Latin, it would undoubtedly be possible to read by recourse to Proto-Indo-European or somesuch. Robert Ellis' The Armenian Origin of the Etruscans listed about 200 words - other sources give about the same amount even 150 years later. Some of these words have been obtained through Greek and Latin sources. It is generally agreed that it is not an Indo-European language [2].

Its grammar is rather different from Indo-European languages of the time as well [3]. It shares the rather notable feature of suffixaufnahme with a bunch of other languages, including Old Georgian, Hurrian, Urartian and Lycian - of which only Lycian is Indo-European. 

Suffixaufnahme, for those who are interested, is a generalized congruence phenomenon. Normally, a noun (and maybe its adjectives and other determiners) are marked for a case - e.g. Latin meo antiquo malleo - my(dative, masculine) ancient(dative, masculine) hammer(dative, masculine). In languages with suffixaufnahme, such case markings can be stacked, obtaining things like - and this is fake Latin - artificiso antiquo malleo. "the builder(masc,genitive)(masc, dative) ancient(masc,dative) hammer(masc,dative)".

Considering how successful Indo-Europeanists have been with both Hittite and Tocharian, basically showing what regular sound changes and other changes needed to take place to derive those languages, the failure to do so with Etruscan - for which evidence has been available for a much longer time - indicates something about the problem.

Considering how ignorant Higgins has proven to be already about linguistics, I will not ascribe any credibility whatsoever to his claim to have shown Etruscan to be identical to Sanskrit; he seems unaware it is not even related to Latin.

7. A very careful inquiry was made by Dr. Parsons some years ago into the arithmetical systems of the different nations of America, which in these matters might be said to be yet in a state of infancy, and a result was found which confirms my theory in a very remarkable manner. It appears, from his information, that they must either have brought the system with them when they arrived in America from the Old World, or have been led to adopt it by the same natural impulse and process which I have pointed out. [1, p. 2]

Today, we know there are numeral systems of varying complexity in the Americas, with some especially simple ones in Brazil, for instance the Pirãha language. Other bases than 10 do occur - Higgins does point out 5, but he fails to point out the vigesimal systems. [4]

8. The ten fingers with one nation must have operated the same as with the other. They all, acccording to their several languages, give names to each unit, from one to ten, which is their determinate number, and proceed to add an unit to the ten, thus ten one, ten two, then three, &c., till they amount to two tens, to which sum they give a peculiar name, and so on to three tens, four tens and till it comes to ten times ten, or to any number of tens. This is also practised among the Malays, and indeed all over the East: but to this among the Americans there is one curious exception, and that is, the practice of the Caribbeans.

Exceptions also occur in Papua New Guinea, where various strange systems obtain in languages, even ones where it does not make great sense to talk of bases. Bases of size 4,5,6,8,10, 12, 20 (subbases 5 or 10), 24 (subbase 6), 32, 60 (subbase 10) and 80 (subbases 20, 10 and 5) are attested. Some both in the Americas and the Old World, some exclusively in the Old World, etc.

They make their determinate period at five, and add one to the name of each of these fives, till they complete ten, and they then add two fives, which bring them to twenty, beyond which they do not go. They have no words to express ten or twenty, but a periphrasis is made use of. From this account of Dr. Parsons', it seems pretty clear that these Americans cannot have brought their figure and system of notation with them from the Old World, but must have invented them; because if they had brought it, they would have all brought the decimal system, and some of them would not have stopped at the quinquennial, as it appears the Caribbees did. If they had come away after the invention of letters, they would have brought letters with them: if after the invention of figures, but before letters, they would all have had the decimal notation.

Although he is probably somewhat right about counting not having developed very far at the time the Americas first were settled, the logic here still is terrible. Certainly there could have been tribes with more advanced counting systems in parts of Eurasia at the time the first tribes had passed into America without the numbers being taken along. Ultimately, he presents a theory of convergent evolution for the numeral systems. Now, it seems today this evolution is more one of assimilation into the predominant systems of the big languages of the world - small languages in Latin America adopt it from Spanish and Portuguese, Aborigines from English, Africans from English, French and Arabic, and so on. Comrie even apparently noted that unusual numeral bases are going extinct faster than the languages that have them!

From that point on, the numbered paragraphs go on for a few pages elaborating on things about the development of astrological things, such as the zodiac and lunar mansions and so on. In paragraph 16 he claims that "the science of the Babylonians and Egyptians was but the débris of former systems, lost at that time by them, as it is known to have been in later times lost by the Hindoos" [1, p. 4]. I think this seems to be a strawman argument - he assumes they were more advanced than they were, their achievements were entirely achievable with the tools we know them to have used, and so on. At the very least in order to make the claim that they had lost some knowledge, he should provide some actual argument that shows they knew of things or had calculated things they should not be capable of with their tools.

22. A traveller of the ancients, of the name of Jambulus, who visited Palibothra, and who resided seven years in one of the oriental islands, supposed to be Sumatra, states, that thei nhabitants of it had an alphabet consisting of twenty-eight letters, divided into seven classes, each of four letters. There were seven original characters which, after undergoing four different variations each, constituted these seven classes. I think it is very difficult not to believe that the origin of the Chinese Lunar Zodiac and of these twenty-eight letters was the same, namely, the supposed length of the Lunar revolution. The island of Sumatra was, for many reasons, probably peopled from China.

Took me a while to find anything on Jambulus, since his name apparently normally is written Iambulos. His works are considered absurd and mere fiction [5].

I guess the reason for the probable Chinese origin of the Sumatran population has to do with both the Chinese and the Sumatrans being Asian? Now, the source he quotes to support this entire thing - Asiatick Researches vol X, says:

The two alphabets of the Sumatrans consist only, one of twenty-three, and the other of nineteen letters: but it is probably that there were two sorts of them formerly, as in India, and which were originally the same. One was used by the more civilized and learned classes, and at court, the other was current among the lower classes, whose poor and barren dialect had fewer sounds to express. 

Speculation instead of fact. What makes this even less easy to figure out is that on Sumatra, over 50 languages are spoken, none of which goes by the name Sumatran. At this point, it is basically unfalsifiable - sure, some group might very well entirely by accident have had 28 letters. Until I know which one, it is impossible to check the reason - maybe they just so happened to distinguish 28 sounds.

One interesting thing regarding "fewer sounds" and so on, is how until fairly recently - and even to this day in some pseudo-scientific circles - Sanskritists and Hindu nationalists were so certain about the perfection of the Sanskrit language, that they denied the existence of speech sounds that were not distinguished in Sanskrit. Thus, if a language derived from Sanskrit had increased the amount of sounds it distinguished, this was denied - the new sounds were really just versions of the same sound, since it was inconceivable that sounds unavailable in Sanskrit even existed. Therefore, many of the orthographies of the languages of India mark fewer distinctions than the spoken languages do, in this charade to make Sanskrit seem superior.

Generally, though, languages' alphabets do not tend to have a specific number of letters due to doctrine or dogma, but due to either tradition (which changes over time, of course), or due to functional concerns: these are the sound-units we need to distinguish, let us make up letters to distinguish them.

29. About the time this was going on [dividing of time into smaller units, development of astrology], it would be found that the Moon made thirteen lunations in a year, of twenty-eight days each, instead of twelve only of thirty: from this they would get their Lunar year much nearer the truth than their Solar one. They would have thirteen months of four weeks each. They would also soon discover that the planetary bodies were seven; and after they had become versed in the science of astrology, they allotted one to each of the days of the week; a practice which we know prevailed over the whole of the Old World.

Except we know it did not. Weeks of every conceivable length are attested, and the spread of seven-day weeks is ultimately rather recent - starting out at about 2000 years ago.

After arguing that the wide spread of "X" as a symbol for ten - and ad hoc explanations as to why it is absent as such in some places (not even honestly mentioning multiple places where X was not used to denote ten, which is the majority of places). This goes on to

32. General Vallancey observes, That from the X all nations began a new reckoning, because it is the number of fingers on both hands, which were the original instruments of numbering: hence יד (id) iod in Hebrew means both the hand and the number ten. [1, p. 7]

Except this is not the case! יד adds up to 14, although י itself does signify ten, and has for its name iod. However, the name of the number is עֶשֶׂר , 'eser.

He further claims to have proven that the alphabet of the Hebrews, Samaritans, Phœnicians, Greeks and so on all had sixteen letters. This sounds like so much bull, but the actual argument is in The Celtic Druids and I will not read that book just yet.

84. There have been authors who have wasted their time in inquiries into the modei n which the inventor of the alphabet proceeded to divide the letters into dentals, labials and palatines. There surely never was any such proceeding. The invention was the effect of unforeseen circumstance - what we call accident; and when I consider the proofs, so numerous and clear, of the existence of the oldest people of whom we have any records, the Indian Buddhists in Ireland, and that in that country their oldest alphabet has the names of trees, I cannot be shaken in my opinion that the trees first gave names to letters, and that the theory I have pointed out is the most probable. [1, p. 15]

The bolded part is not bolded in the book. I think the bolded part needs no actual further debunking, it quite sufficiently debunks itself. There are no such records. We have no earlier attestation of the Ogham alphabet than a few hundred years CE. There is some internal evidence that requires the Ogham alphabet to be maybe a couple hundred years older than the earliest attestation.

Generally, Higgins seldom provides sources for his claims. His writing is dense, boring and so full of misconceived notions that pointing out any starting point where he first went wrong is near impossible. It seems the lack of quality research of his time, a wild imagination, and even further lack of any kind of requisite education on how to understand linguistic evidence conspired to create some very wild claims. I have only reached paragraph #100 at this point, and I know there's a few between #84 and #100 I should explain why they are wrong; I have omitted quite a few earlier ones as well, since they repeat previous assertions or hinge upon ones I have noted already. The times he gives sources, the reference is often not to a particular page in a book, but to the book in its entirety. 

This must be among the most frustrating stuff I have ever read.

[1] Higgins, Anacalypsis, vol 1 1.

[2] http://multitree.org/codes/ett.html

[3] http://paleoglot.blogspot.fi/2007/01/lingua-files.html#etruscan

[4] http://wals.info/chapter/131

[5] http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=ACL3129.0002.001, more precisely http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moa/ACL3129.0002.001/560?rgn=full+text;view=image. What is known of his works to this day can be found in English translation here.

Quality of Sources: Godfrey Higgins, pt 2

Godfrey Higgins: The Irish Druids

Having not read the entire work yet - not even an entire volume - I do not know entirely what is in store for me. I have seen the occasional bits that do give me an idea about the mental agility of this man, however. It seems as though Higgins categorically rejected the use or value of anything which he could not wrap his mind around, and it seems his mind was not willing to imagine much beyond the scopes of what he was used to. 

I do grant, his theory is innovative and weird, and thus not the kind of thing he was used to, but he seems to have accepted weird things on that level - it is when the details of how something works are out of his capability of understanding things that he fails to accept that there may be something to it.

A good example of this is his inability to grasp how Hebrew worked:

It is impossible to say what would be the first step which would be adopted by man in the formation of language, but a probable near approximation to the truth I think may be contemplated, merely by the application of a little common sense. His first words would consist of simple sounds, which, by our present system, might be represented by such words as ba bal; or by our vowels, a or ah. They would be nouns or the signs of things. They would have only one number, one case, one gender. After some time, probably by very slow degrees, the words which we describe by the other parts of speech would arise. The different cases would be formed by adding words in the most simple manner; as bit, house; le bit, to house; be-bit, by house. I can have no doubt whatever that the written language which comes the nearest to this simplicity is the Hebrew of the Synagogue. Its cases are made, like the English, by words, and its use of the rude form instead of a genitive case, called being in regimine, is a peculiarity which marks almost primeval simplicity. The words which denote the past and future times may be used one for the other, and which is to be adopted, in any case, can only be known from context. They have been attempted to be subjected to rule by what is called the vau conversa, but I think in vain. Many other marks of rudeness might be pointed out. [1, p. 739]

The latter half of this section stinks with linguistic naiveté. He never explains why the use of prepositions can be taken as a mark of primitiveness, and his using a Hebrew phrase and badly translating it, making it sound like bad English in the process is pretty much a fallacy of its own.

To be more clear: Hebrew בית (bayit), by itself, means "a house". "The house" would be rendered הבית, ha-bayit. Is this somehow less primitive than Latin entirely lacking articles? Further, when prepositions are applied, usually written as prefixes, we obtain לבית ,בבית - lebayit, bebayit (note: my transliteration here is coarse; do not use it as a guide to pronunciation; it is just here for making a point, not for teaching Hebrew. It is also influenced more by Biblical Hebrew than by Modern Hebrew, but I have influences from both, which makes my transliteration somewhat uncertain and haphazard. In Biblical Hebrew class we did follow some kind of European continental standard pronunciation, but that doesn't preserve consonant distinctions made in Biblical, and for some reason, I have adopted an Ashkenazi pronunciation on my own. What can I say, I like the sound of final -s over final -t.) These translate roughly as "to a house/to the house" or "by a house/by the house". However, in text with niqqud, a further thing is marked, a thing that usually is clear from context. The first consonant is geminated (this is marked by having a dot in it, the dagesh forte, giving us בּ and similar letter-forms), obtaining lebbayit, bebbayit for "to the house" or "by the house", so in a text with niqqud, we can be entirely sure of which nouns with prefixes are definite and which are indefinite.

Now, it might seem weird to a speaker of English that such an all-important difference as the vs. a would be left unmarked in writing, even if there is a manner of clarifying that is even mandatory in speech. Try, however, to have a word-editor delete all instances of " the "," a " and " an " from a text, and see how many of them you can guess right. (Note: you'll need to keep spaces that I included in quotation-marks or words like 'theory' and 'apex' will suffer misfortune of having parts cut out. And any native speaker knows exactly where to insert "the" or "a" in that sentence without me having to tell them!)

Many languages around the world lack articles, c.f. Russian, Finnish, Latin, Korean, Urdu, Berber, Panjabi, Evenki, Ket, Yup'ik, Dhargari, Ukrainan, Estonian, Serbian and Croatian, Hindi, Canela-Krahô, Fijian, Iban, ... [2, 3]. In a sample of 534 languages (there's about 6000 in total), 198 lacked both indefinite and definite articles. In languages that mandatorily do mark definiteness, it isn't unusual that this marking only is applied to subjects and objects, or even just to objects. In another sample of 600 languages, 198 had no articles. It is likely the latter sample was expanded a bit to include some known outliers? 

Out of a sample of 261 languages, Iggersen found a full hundred with no case marking. 

Further, Higgins posits that the Hebrew way of constructing possessive phrases is somehow primitive. For those who do not know this, Hebrew nouns have two forms that are a bit like cases, but with a somewhat different function. A noun by itself is in status absolutus, whether it be object, subject or any other such constituent of a sentence. When possessed, it is instead in status constructus, which for some nouns is a somewhat reduced form, that is, it often has shortened vowels or otherwise reduced vowels. For some nouns it is identical and for some it gets a separate suffix, e.g. feminines have torah - torat תרה - תרות, behemah - behemat בהמה בהמות, and masculine plurals get alternations like susim - suse סוסימ - סוסי. 

In the plural, the plural marker for feminines is identical for the construct and absolute states, although the vowels can be reduced a bit in the construct state. Now, my Biblical Hebrew is not good enough to spot grammatical mistakes, but good enough to work my way through a text if I need it, so do not take these things as certainly correct - take them as something in the right ballpark. Now, saying "the man's house", you take the singular constructus of house - beit (c.f. the absolute state: bayit, which already has been mentioned) and stick it before the noun man, ish - habeit haish. The fact that the house is the inflected noun in this may seem weird to speakers of English, after all, it is man's, not man house's or some equally weird construction in English. The Hebrew basically is a bit like if "the house of the man" would be reanalyzed by future generations and then rendered as thehouseof theman.  

And sure, this seems weird. Until we look at what wals.info has to say about it. English does what is known as dependent marking. This means the marked noun is the one that is the attribute of the other. Hebrew does what is known as head-marking, marking the noun that is the head of the noun phrase. These are not the only approaches available - some languages mark both, and some mark neither. In the former, you'd have something like houseof theman's. In the latter, you'd have house man or man house to express 'the man's house'. In a sample of 236 languages, 98 follow the English model, marking the noun with some kind of genitive-like case. Ancient Hebrew, however, is in a category that is not significantly smaller: 78 languages in the sample mark the head noun. A further 22 mark both, and 32 mark neither. Enigmatically enough, the sample has 6 outliers that do not adhere to any of these options, the article related to the feature at wals.info explains how those work. [7]

Well, apparently this boggles Higgins so much that he must posit that a language that is not like English is primitive. 

Biblical Hebrew actually lacked a past-present distinction in its verbs, and his confusion has to do with assuming that the distinction present in the verb was the same as the distinction made by English. It had, instead, a thing linguistics of today knows as aspect. Aspect, most famously, is a central feature in most Slavic languages in conjunction with tense. It also occurs in Georgian, in various Finno-Ugric languages, in ancient Greek, Sino-Tibetan, various Asian, African and American languages. Western European languages kind of merge some tenses with aspects in a somewhat complex manner; this too is common through languages worldwide. A wals.info sample of 1132 languages, obtains that more than 10% - 123 languages - have neither aspect or tense marking on their verbs. [4] Anyways, there are reasons why aspect and tense easily get conflated in languages over time, as there tends to be a correlation - we will often speak of actions as being completed when they also are past, hence parsing 'completed' as 'past' is a reasonable thing. However, we can speak of a completed action in the future - "once I have sold the house, I'll buy a small apartment somewhere" is an example of such, where we think of what comes after a completed future action. [5, pp. 82-83] In Biblical Hebrew, completion vs. progress at the time of which the speaker is thinking was more central than time at which the action occured compared to the present. As the wals.info sample points out, many languages do not even have either in its verb forms.

The Sino-Tibetan languages are sometimes quoted as languages rich in aspects but poor in tenses. The problem here is that Higgins let his own ignorance of language and his inability to conceive of a language not lining up with how English categorizes the world be the standard by which he measured how advanced languages were - marking different categories on verbs was too much for him to grasp. I do realize he didn't have access to Bernard Comrie's "Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Problems", as it would not be written for over a century after his death, but ... being wrong is still being wrong, even and maybe especially if a better understanding of the topic one was wrong about appears after one's demise. 

I could waste a lot of electricity writing up an explanation as to why the argument Higgins presents is misguided and the method he uses to find "the original language" is downright unfit to reach any conclusion about historical linguistics whatsoever. I think I have provided enough information now about languages in the world to show that at the very least his conclusion regarding "the original language" is based on faulty data, and a sufficiently good demonstration that his understanding of the languages he was working with was flawed, imperfect and downright dumb by modern standards.

Not only did he have too little data, what data he had he misunderstood. He also drew far wider conclusions from it than was warranted. Someone who labels themselves "a linguist" using such a source in their research is beyond belief, and this is a good indication that D.M. Murdock does not really have any kind of mastery of a field in which she claims to be a scholar.

[1] Godfrey Higgins, The Irish Druids. Available at archive.org

[2] Matthew S. Dryer, World Atlas of Language Structures, feature 37A,  http://wals.info/feature/37A

[3] Matthew S. Dryer, World Atlas of Language Structures, feature 38A, http://wals.info/feature/38A

[4] Matthew S. Dryer, World Atlas of Language Structures, feature 69A, http://wals.info/chapter/69A

[5] Bernard Comrie, Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Problems, 1981

[6] Oliver A. Iggersen, World Atlas of Language Structures, feature 49A, http://wals.info/feature/49A

[7] Johanna Nichols and Balthasar Bickel, World Atlas of Language Structures, feature 24A http://wals.info/feature/24A

Copypasta notice:

I did an actual act of copypasting from another source into this article: I did indeed plagiarize an entire letter from wikipedia, a plagiarism that would shame me greatly if I did not admit to it. Since I am not very acquainted with the Hebrew keyboard layout, the entire letter "בּ" did pass from wikipedia through my clipboard, instead of me looking up a keyboard layout map and finding how to obtain the desired letter.

Quality of Sources: Godfrey Higgins, pt 1

Edit: as usual, I published this before proof-reading. Good job, again ..! So, this is the text, a few edits later:

Quality of Sources: Godfrey Higgins

Acharya S uses a lot of sources. Some of these are quality research, but a large number are written by less knowledgeable people. 

Let us consider Godfrey Higgins. Acharya S relies very strongly on his works, referring to them more than a hundred times in The Christ Conspiracy (I counted 119, I may have missed some), and a significant number of times in Suns of God. Considering that the total number of references given in The Christ Conspiracy is 1124, Higgins is the source given in about 11% of the full number of sourced statements. That does tell us something about her views of Higgins: she does think he is a credible source, worth taking seriously. (Further, some of Murdock's other references refer to Higgins, thus increasing his importance to her work even more.)

Godfrey Higgins' main written work is titled Anacalypsis; An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil of the Saitic Isis; or an Inquiry into the Origin of languages, Nations and Religions. It was published in two volumes, each available at archive.org nowadays: Vol I, Vol II. It is an illogical, outdated work based on faulty evidence, flawed reasoning, naive misunderstandings and wishful thinking. 

It seems clear Higgins considered Anacalypsis his main work, but he wrote an earlier work which it seems he considered a preparatory work, and he refers to it a fair bit in Anacalypsis as well. This work goes by the name The Celtic Druids. Trying to trace some of his thinking, I have been led to read bits and pieces of both, and even considered taking a pause from Acharya's books to properly debunk this source first. Considering what an importance she attributes to this work, it is worthwhile evaluating its quality.

In the first pages of The Celtic Druids - duly note, not Anacalypsis, we find a staggering example of just how much of an ignorant man he was. 

I am convinced that the unlearned reader will be satisfied that the Hebrew is essentially the same as the Greek and Latin - having, like them, its five vowels. The learned Hebraist,  whose mind has been poisoned by the craft of the synagogue, I do not expect readily to give up his prejudice in favour of unlearned simplicity. But if the old men will not give up their nonsense, it will be exploded, because the young ones will not admit it. Perhaps it will be like Mr. Frend's algebra. Some years ago, he pointed out to the learned of Cambridge, that their negative quantities in algebra were not only nonsensical and useless, but that they were actually prejudicial to science. Of course the learned old gentlemen would not consent to be untaught, to unlearn, but I understand that at the Mechanics' Institutes, algebra is now taught without negative quantities. [1, pp. iii,iv]

Of course, he was a man of his time, and did not have access to knowledge as easily as we do today. This ignorance is but what can be expected of him, so I hold no grudge against him. However, whether his findings are worth taking seriously still has to be investigated reasonably, and it has to be pointed out that he is wrong, misled and misleading, and not up to the task of figuring these things out. Further, it is clear that less was known in general in his time, and so it was less easy for him to obtain accurate information, and the information he did obtain is likely to be riddled with problems. 

If negative numbers are prejudicial to science, I wonder what this fool would have thought of modern science, which even takes square roots of negative quantities, and posits that such numbers have marvellous meaningful use in quantum physics, electrical engineering, multi-variable calculus and so on! 

However, another mistake has crept in into the same short text. It is true that in a relatively late stage of Hebrew, it had five vowels. If we ignore the length distinction Proto-Hebrew in fact had four vowels, i, a, o, u. Proto-Semitic, in fact had three monophthongs and two lengths, /i i: a a: u u:/. Typologically, that is not unusual. Nor did Greek have five vowels, it had five short and seven long ones! (The reason many languages do have more long vowels than short ones has to do with the time it takes for the listener to recognize the difference between two similar vowel sounds: it is likely some short sound will be realized with a quality that can vary between the qualities of two distinct long vowels. It takes more acoustic cues to be able to determine whether the sound heard is /o/ or /u/, than whether it's /i/ or /a/, hence, fewer distinct sounds in the short vowels is a reasonable and common occurence.)

It is difficult to discuss the sounds of a language with anyone who does not have a clear understanding of the concepts of phonemes, allophones and related concepts. I may write a separate post on these concepts, but for now, I will try and trample that minefield with you, hoping to get the point across without having to provide an introduction to the theory of phonemes, problems with the theory itself, what kind of mistakes people tend to do as far as reasoning about phonemes of other languages go, etc. 

A further indication that this guy is completely ignorant about everything that is relevant in comparative linguistics, can be found just a bit earlier on the same page:

The reader will find in the ensuing work that the Hebrew language, which is of the first importance, is treated as a language of great simplicity,*- that its vowels are considered precisely the same as those of the English, and of all the other languages in the Western part of the world. [1, pp. iii]

I am astounded by this. Which languages of the western part of the world have the same vowels as English? Which have the same vowels as those of ancient Hebrew? Which vowels of English does he even mean - some dialects have merged or split vowels in all kinds of strange manner in English. It seems as though he is thinking exclusively of the five orthographic vowels of English, viz. a e i o u - which are but five symbols used in written English to convey more than a dozen different vowels. These do not correlate very well with the vowels of Biblical Hebrew - /a, e, i, o, u, ɛ, ɔ, ă, ɔ̆, (ɛ̆), ə/ - but of course, maybe I am poisoned by the craft of the synagogue. Who knows. Just like any language, there is dialectal variation in English pronunciation, and as a representative I pick Received Pronunciation here. Its vowels are as follows, /iː, ɪ, uː, ʊ, e, ɜː, ə, ɔː, æ, ʌ, ɑː, ɒ/. These systems are not remarkably similar whatsoever. (Of course, Biblical Hebrew had dialects as well, and we know there to have been at least three different main later developments of how the vowels merged into smaller sets of vowels later on. However, if we permit matching it up that way we can match up the number of vowels to any number between 5 and 10, a significant leeway, and a match-up signifies nothing whatsoever, as the majority of human languages have between 5 and 10 vowels.[3]) 

Nor do the languages of the western part of the world have, by and large, the same vowels as does English - German has a system with 16-17 different vowels, in part distinguished by a tense-lax contrast, in part by a length contrast, in part by lip-rounding and so on. French, likewise, distinguishes some front vowels by rounding, and also adds some nasal vowels to the mix for a total of more than a dozen distinct vowels.

The conceptual confusion this writer shows is immense, and any modern linguist would recognize the flawed understanding underlying it. I am afraid I will get into typology and lose the reader entirely here, but I can confidently say that there is a significant number of languages that do have five vowels, just like Latin. The reason for this seems to be as follows: over time, speakers are likely to converge on vowel qualities that maximize the aural distinction between different vowels. A three-vowel system is the most remarkably distinct one : [i ɑ u] are the three "extremes" of how we can shape the mouth when producing vowels, [i] having a long and narrow passageway for resonance, [u] having a short and narrow passageway, and [ɑ] having a wide passageway. 

Now, having only three vowels comes at a cost: the number of distinct syllables becomes low, especially if there's few permitted consonant clusters (which is a common thing in most languages, even English is at the cluster-heavier part of the spectrum of human language, although there are notably cluster-richer languages as well, such as Georgian or the Salishan languages). Hence, a five vowel system apparently strikes a good balance between acoustically distinct and permitting good succinctness in how to shape words. Four is also popular, but it seems five also provides a nice kind of symmetry (two back vowels, two front vowels, and one central open vowel, the back and front vowels divided into two mid and two closed vowels).

Changes from three to four or five vowels, or from seven to three or whatever are not intentional things, generally: they are things that happen over time, and without planning. Explaining how this happens is beyond the scope of this post, but linguists do have a fair idea about it. 

Anyways, he rants about the sad state Hebrew is in with unwritten vowels, and claims that this is due to the loss of vowel symbols - a thing that we know for sure was not the case: alphabets, that is, writing systems where vowels are written as separate independent letters have been invented but once, and this invention happened roughly when the Greeks adapted Phoenician writing to Greek [a correction to this claim has been added towards the end of the post; the main point still stands]. Since then, all "proper" alphabets have been inspired by the Greek alphabet, or a derivative thereof (e.g. Latin, Cyrillic, the Georgian alphabets ...) For some reason, alphabetic writing does not seem very popular among populations only now putting their languages to writing - syllabic writing systems seem to be favored by many such groups, and we can find examples of such a trend already beginning with the Cree syllabary, popular among some native American tribes in the US. 

He rants about the Hebrews not having restored the vowel letters after their national disaster, and attributes this to followers of modern cabala not being happy with anything that is simple. Such stupid reasoning baffles any reader even half knowledgeable about these matters. If even a sliver of his reasoning were consistent, he would notice that Sanskrit likewise encodes its vowels not as letters, but as diacritics. Yet, this language that has no proper vowel letters, he calls "the beautiful and almost perfect Sanscrit" [2, p. x].

He ends the foreword of The Celtic Druids with a very reasonable sentiment, promising us great intellectual humility:

To certain persons who permit their bigotry to mislead their judgment, this book will be gall and wormwood, because I have not thought proper to pander to their base passions. ...[1, v].

Yeah, the source of disagreement with his conclusions can only be bigotry - I already see where this book will take me. He also warns that criticizing him without informing him thereof is the act of the midnight assassin. Now, I do not intend to harm him - and he being dead, any harm come to him would be rather odd indeed - I only intend to show that we now know more than he did, and we have better ways of being sure of what we know, and that which we know shows him wrong. There's no shame in being wrong if one is willing to test one's beliefs, and for us modern people, we should not shame those of the past, if their being wrong was a result of the lesser availability of quality research and knowledge in those times. By now, the only thing we really should care about is whether he is reliable. No shame (or just a little) on him for being wrong, a lot of shame on any modern reader who thinks he is reliable and uses him as a source. Anyone who does so only perpetuates ignorance in the world.

I have not read much in The Celtic Druids this far, but have read a fair bit of Anacalypsis. There is sufficient foolishness there to write a hundred posts on it, but I will refrain from going through it entirely and only give a handful examples of severe ignorance in his book. This post thus introduces a small diversion - a series of posts will occur in parallel with the posts that directly focus on Acharya's work. This is especially reasonable, as sometimes it takes time finding and obtaining copies of sources that are relevant for debunking Acharya, whereas it would seem the sources needed to debunk Higgins are easier to obtain.

A correction regarding the development of alphabets proper in the world

Seems Old Uighur and Korean are independently invented alphabets, so my statement that alphabets proper only have been invented once is in error (I don't recall where I read that, going to try and find my source for it), although the main contention still stands - Higgins berates the Jews for not returning to a thing they hadn't even had, and which by then only had been invented once at the time (and which then was adopted for Latin and some other languages in close contact with the Greeks). Since this is the case regarding alphabets, alphasyllabaries of the Semitic and Brahmic kinds thrice have inspired the invention of alphabets, once with the invention of the Greek alphabet in antiquity, then in the 8th century in Chinese Turkestan, and in the 15th century in Korea. Old Uighur derives from Sogdian, which derives from Syriac, which derives from Aramaic, and Korean Hangul derives from Phagspa, which derives from Brahmic through Tibetan. No sources for this yet.

[1] Godfrey Higgins, The Celtic Druids, 1827-1829, originally in three parts.
[2] Godfrey Higgins, Anacalypsis, vol I, 1836
[3] wals.info, http://wals.info/feature/2A