I like Kuhn, too.

You can find plenty of loonies talking bollocks about quantum mechanics, and they don't make that (unlike them) wrong either.

Sure, Kuhn's fine on his own, but he's one of those people who are irresistible to loonies of all persuasions. Quantum mechanics is an excellent parallel (Dancing Wu-Li Masters, anyone?).

Yes, isn't that a brilliant paper? (Well I can say that, I didn't write it!)

It's not Kuhn's fault, but people certainly do grab him and run amok.

Kuhn is susceptible to the "they said Galileo was a loony too" co-option. It's epistemologically vacuous, but if your grasp on philology, physics, whatever, is out on the fringe, you're probably not going to be a regular contributor to the _Journal of Symbolic Logic_ anyway, so the irony will continue to elude you.

The most hated of my recent bosses went to a seminar on the Paradigm Shift to Excellence once. Kuhn cannot be forgiven.

I didn't read the whole thing, but I trust that the Finno-Ugric link to Dravidian has not been questioned.

Hungarian linguistics has been dogged by this kind of politically influenced pseudo-science as well. The belief that Hungarian is the mother of all languages and that Western civilization derives from ancient Magyar-Sumerians will get you a free beer in most pubs. It is incredibly widespread, even among relatively educated folks.

Her's a taste: http://www.hunmagyar.org/hungary/history/controve.htm#III.%20THE%20SUMERIAN%20QUESTION

On a positive note, there seem to be an unusually large number of Finns and Hungarians in Turko-Mongol studies and possibly other areas of study involving strange languages (including linguistics.) Good things from doubtful origins. My guess is that once a Finn has learned any other language except Estonian, the third language will be relatively easy. Someone bilingual in Swedish and Finnish has really travelled an enormous distance compared to someone bilingual in English and French.