Xenoglossy Research in Reincarnation Cases of Past Life Regression

[Eteponge]

Hi all, I'm new to this forum. (I mainly post on NDE Forums and others). I have a question regarding Xenoglossy Research in Reincarnation Cases of Past Life Regression. This has to do specifically with scientific research in this area, and that is the reason why I'm posting this here rather than in the Questions about Reincarnation section, as I'm seeking a rebuttal to a critic's arguments against it. I was searching through Wikipedia and I found mention of the following...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenoglossia

Xenoglossy has been used to support notions such as reincarnation on the assumption that retention of knowledge of the language from a previous life is the only way to account for it. The leading proponent of this idea is Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist who has tried to present scientific evidence to support this assertion.

Linguist Sarah Thomason concluded from her analysis of the cases described by Stevenson that in all but one case the language knowledge displayed was minimal and could easily have been learned by casual exposure. In the one case in which she considered the subject's language knowledge to be non-trivial, that of a Marathi woman in Bombay who could speak Bengali, Thomason argues that the language could easily have been acquired by natural means: Bengali and Marathi are closely related languages, the woman had a life-long interest in Bengali language and culture and many Bengali acquaintances, and people in Bombay are exposed to Bengali in such contexts as the cinema since many films are made in Bengali.

Now, I am an individual who is far more skeptical of the skeptics than I am of the experiencers and researchers of these phenomenon, so I must ask, can anyone here please provide me with an ample rebuttal to this person's claims?

The wikipedia article also states that it was originally posted in:

"Past tongues remembered?" The Skeptical Inquirer, 11.367–75, Summer 1987, and, "Do you remember your previous life's language in your present incarnation?" American Speech, 59.340–50, 1984.

That it was posted in "The Skeptical Inquirer" raises red flags to me that these skeptical claims are definately not the last word on the matter, due to CSI-COP being notoriously well criticised as being both pseudo-skeptical (pathological skepticism) driven and ridiculously one-sided in nature.

There is more to this...

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000410.html - Blog Post by Sarah Thomason: Stupid Dead People Communication Tricks

It is very obvious from reading the above article that this individual is very biased, cynical, and very much against Xenoglossy in Reincarnation Cases of Past Life Regression, yet despite that, she does appear to make some plausible sounding arguments against it.

However, I'm not gullible enough to be blindly fooled by the arguments of cynical skeptics, I'm sure there must be a "catch" here, a good set of arguments from the other side that these one-siders wouldn't mention, and even solid cases that don't fit this hypothesis that should help knock it out of the water. Skeptical of the skeptics is what I am, so I'm asking you all, what is a good rebuttal to this piece?

Eteponge

 

[deborah]

Welcome to the forum Eteponge,

Please give us some time to look into the articles you have posted and to find some good references for you. Excellent post BTW.

One of our members pointed out earlier this month the following:

Wikipedia is not a very good website to find information,... People all over the world can change this information, Wiki is a good starting point but a bad ending point as you will never know if that information has been changed, you can check to see if the info is correct and then list both sources. - by vanhalen50one50

 

[Eteponge]

Welcome to the forum Eteponge,

Please give us some time to look into the articles you have posted and to find some good references for you. Excellent post BTW.

Thank you!

As for Wikipedia being unreliable as a source of definitive information, I know that all too well. Many of the Paranormal Articles on there have been written and re-written in a Skeptically Biased Viewpoint (rather than being a perfect balance of both sides as it should be).

It wasn't the Wikipedia Article itself that bothered me so much as the Blog Post on the website of the purported linguist researcher in question that confirmed everything the Wikipedia Article said regarding her claims.

However, that's merely the biased one-sided Skeptical Viewpoint on the matter, which is far from the last word. I'm sure there is another side to this story, because with all I have read in books and articles regarding Xenoglossy in favor of Reincarnation, it's sounded a heck of a lot more convincing than the Skeptics are leading on. :thumbsup:

 

[Ailish]

Hi Eteponge,

Welcome to the forum.

There are many cases on record of adults and children speaking and writing languages which they have never learned. They involve modern and ancient languages from all over the world.

Dr Ian Stevenson was one of the most respected scientists in the United States and it was his careful research and documentation that paved the way. He wrote from a very academic point of view – which is difficult for some people to get past. : angel

In his book “Xenoglossy” he documented a study he made of a 37 year old American woman. Under hypnosis she experienced a complete change of voice and personality into that of a male. She spoke fluently in the Swedish language—a language she did not speak or understand when in the normal state of consciousness.

Dr Stevenson's direct involvement with this case lasted more than eight years. The study involved linguists and other experts and scientists who meticulously investigated every alternative explanation.

Others have followed in Dr. Stevenson's footsteps and offered up impressive cases for research. Here are a few examples:

Dr Morris Netherton reports one case of a blond, blue-eyed eleven year old boy who under hypnosis was taped for eleven minutes as he spoke in an ancient Chinese dialect. When the tape was taken to a professor at the Department of Oriental Studies at the University of California it turned out to be a recitation from a forbidden religion of Ancient China. (Fisher 1986:202).

Author Lyall Watson describes a case of a ten year old child, an Igarot Indian living in the remote Cagayon Valley in the Philippines. The child had never had any contact with any language or culture other than his own. Yet under trance conditions the child communicated freely in Zulu, a language he could not have even heard. Watson only recognized it because he had spent his early life in Africa (cited by Lazarus 1993: 84).

Peter Ramster; an Australian psychotherapist, has documented several thoroughly investigated cases. In his book The Search for Lives Past (Ramster 1990 : 227) he cites the case of Cynthia Henderson whose only contact with the French language had been a few months of very basic instruction in Year 7 of high school. Yet under hypnosis she was able to carry on a long and detailed conversation in French with a native speaker who commented that she spoke without any English accent and in the manner of the eighteenth century.

Dr Joel Whitton cites the case of Harold Jaworski who under hypnosis wrote down twenty-two words and phrases which he 'heard' himself speaking in a past Viking life. Working independently, linguists identified and translated ten of these words as Old Norse and several of the others as Russian, Serbian or Slavic. All were words associated with the sea ( Whitton and Fisher 1987: 210).

In some cases subjects under trance have communicated in languages no longer in use or known only to a handful of experts.

In 1931 a young English girl from Blackpool, known as Rosemary in the files of the Society for Psychical Research, began to speak in an ancient Egyptian dialect under the influence of the personality of Telika-Ventiu who had lived in approximately 1400 BC. In front of Egyptologist Howard Hume she wrote down 66 accurate phrases in the lost language of hieroglyphs and spoke in a tongue unheard outside academic circles for thousands of years (Lazarus 1993: 85).

~ Victor Zammit

As far as people not remembering fully their past life language, and only being able to recall a few words or sentences....I think that in itself is pretty amazing when it is validated. I also don't think that only being able to recall a few words -- disproves anything at all.

Consider a good friend of mine who grew up in Poland until she was ten. Once she moved to Canada, both she and her sister only spoke English. When she went back for a visit at the age of 20 -- she fumbled and stumbled her way through conversations and could hardly remember a thing. If she can't remember her mother tongue after only ten years -- how can someone expect perfect sentences from a language perhaps spoken over 500 years ago?

Judging by the title of Sarah Thomason’s blog article – she came into this study with an already closed mind. Dr. Stevenson’s cases are academically well-presented and scientifically researched. Imo – at this point the onus shifts onto the skeptic to provide an alternative credible explanation to xenoglossy. So far no-one really has been able to.


Ailish

 

[Eteponge]

Hi Eteponge,

Welcome to the forum.

There are many cases on record of adults and children speaking and writing languages which they have never learned. They involve modern and ancient languages from all over the world.

Dr Ian Stevenson was one of the most respected scientists in the United States and it was his careful research and documentation that paved the way. He wrote from a very academic point of view – which is difficult for some people to get past. : angel

In his book “Xenoglossy” he documented a study he made of a 37 year old American woman. Under hypnosis she experienced a complete change of voice and personality into that of a male. She spoke fluently in the Swedish language—a language she did not speak or understand when in the normal state of consciousness.

Dr Stevenson's direct involvement with this case lasted more than eight years. The study involved linguists and other experts and scientists who meticulously investigated every alternative explanation.

Others have followed in Dr. Stevenson's footsteps and offered up impressive cases for research.

Ailish, thank you so much for responding with this information, I greatly appreciate it. I just KNEW there was something fishy about that Skeptical Source, and as usual, my suspicions were correct. Someone ought to rewrite that Wikipedia Article in question as it was obviously written one-sidedly by a Skeptic with a debunking agenda. Wikipedia Articles should be balanced, this one clearly wasn't. Skeptics are notorious for offering plausible sounding explainations that sound reasonable on the surface but utterly collapse when honestly investigated further and held up to all of the known facts of the matter, because they never tell the whole story and just tell their side on these issues.

As far as people not remembering fully their past life language, and only being able to recall a few words or sentences....I think that in itself is pretty amazing when it is validated. I also don't think that only being able to recall a few words -- disproves anything at all.

Agreed. And the debunking linguist in question seemed to be suggesting that just because it's remotely plausible that they could have possibly picked up some of the foreign language beforehand, then they empircally MUST have. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. (Either by lying about it or subconsciously.) Why? Because in their mind, these things do not and cannot exist, despite any evidence to the contrary. They've already made up their mind about it.

I on the other hand, don't have enough blind faith to be a Universal Conspiracy Theorist regarding all of these claims coming from sincere honest reputable individuals and researchers, it's obvious to me there is indeed something there.

Consider a good friend of mine who grew up in Poland until she was ten. Once she moved to Canada, both she and her sister only spoke English. When she went back for a visit at the age of 20 -- she fumbled and stumbled her way through conversations and could hardly remember a thing. If she can't remember her mother tongue after only ten years -- how can someone expect perfect sentences from a language perhaps spoken over 500 years ago?

Indeed. Their whole skeptical argument surrounding that is a total strawman. It's like saying that a past life is not possible unless they can remember every single little detail from their entire past life. Using that logic, I guess our current lives don't exist either, since I can't for the life of me remember much of what happened to me last week, much less a decade ago. :laugh:

It generally comes to me in memory bursts, just like past life recall often does.

Judging by the title of Sarah Thomason’s blog article – she came into this study with an already closed mind. Dr. Stevenson’s cases are academically well-presented and scientifically researched. Imo – at this point the onus shifts onto the skeptic to provide an alternative credible explanation to xenoglossy. So far no-one really has been able to.


Ailish

I fully agree. Skeptics will say the burden of proof is on us to prove it, then we provide very strong circumstantial evidence in favor of the phenomenon through many well documented cases and research, and then they shift the goal posts and claim that the evidence is insufficient and they come up with numerous unprovable alternative explainations that are often ridiculously weak and do not add up with the whole facts of the matter, therefore it shifts over to them to prove that their alternative explainations are correct, and they cannot do that.

I guess they feel that being cynical, rude, and mocking towards something somehow mind-bogglingly erases evidence of it from existence, but as my friend Winston Wu says, "Unfortunately for them, reality doesn't work that way."

 

[Vitor Moura]

Articles

Eteponge, can you get these articles of American Speech and Skeptical inquirer? The article of American Speech is here http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-1283(198424)59:4<340YRYPL>2.0.CO;2-W but I don't have full access. Here in Brazil we access scientific journals by CAPES but this journal is not in the data base. Do you have access to JSTOR?

Best wishes,
Vitor

 

[Eteponge]

Eteponge, can you get these articles of American Speech and Skeptical inquirer? The article of American Speech is here http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-1283(198424)59:4<340:DYRYPL>2.0.CO;2-W but I don't have full access. Here in Brazil we access scientific journals by CAPES http://www.periodicos.capes.gov.br/portugues/index.jsp but this journal is not in the data base. Do you have access to JSTOR?

Best wishes,
Vitor

No. It merely referanced the sources on Wikipedia. It doesn't matter though, as the author of the pieces made a blog post that summed up essentially what was in those pieces, and they have already been throughly debunked by Ailish and her sources.

 

[theycallmejoe]

Nothing really to add other than, well written and well done, Ailish :thumbsup:

Hi Eteponge,

Welcome to the forum.

There are many cases on record of adults and children speaking and writing languages which they have never learned. They involve modern and ancient languages from all over the world.

Dr Ian Stevenson was one of the most respected scientists in the United States and it was his careful research and documentation that paved the way. He wrote from a very academic point of view – which is difficult for some people to get past. : angel

In his book “Xenoglossy” he documented a study he made of a 37 year old American woman. Under hypnosis she experienced a complete change of voice and personality into that of a male. She spoke fluently in the Swedish language—a language she did not speak or understand when in the normal state of consciousness.

Dr Stevenson's direct involvement with this case lasted more than eight years. The study involved linguists and other experts and scientists who meticulously investigated every alternative explanation.

Others have followed in Dr. Stevenson's footsteps and offered up impressive cases for research. Here are a few examples:




As far as people not remembering fully their past life language, and only being able to recall a few words or sentences....I think that in itself is pretty amazing when it is validated. I also don't think that only being able to recall a few words -- disproves anything at all.

Consider a good friend of mine who grew up in Poland until she was ten. Once she moved to Canada, both she and her sister only spoke English. When she went back for a visit at the age of 20 -- she fumbled and stumbled her way through conversations and could hardly remember a thing. If she can't remember her mother tongue after only ten years -- how can someone expect perfect sentences from a language perhaps spoken over 500 years ago?

Judging by the title of Sarah Thomason’s blog article – she came into this study with an already closed mind. Dr. Stevenson’s cases are academically well-presented and scientifically researched. Imo – at this point the onus shifts onto the skeptic to provide an alternative credible explanation to xenoglossy. So far no-one really has been able to.


Ailish

 

[Vitor Moura]

The case of Jensen

An angel send me the article of Sarah Grey Thomason. I think she make good points about some flaws in this case of Stevenson.

Here is the more important:

His 1974 book Xenoglossy is the only published work I've found that contains enough "xenoglossic" data for a linguist to study: over half of the book is a transcript of a session with his subject, TE, a thirty-seven-year-old housewife who was born and raised in Philadelphia. Stevenson is a much more careful and critical observer than PG, but he is equally unsophisticated about language, and TE's "Swedish" is as unconvincing as PG's subjects' "Bulgarian," "Gaelic," and "Apache."

Problems arise when one tries to interpret the TE data, primarily because it has been transcribed in standard Swedish orthography—in spite of the fact that there are comments in Stevenson's account to the effect that TE's Swedish is sometimes phonetically and grammatically flawed. Only tape recordings would show whether the crucial grammatical suffixes in the transcript were actually pronounced by TE or added by the wishful thinking of the transcribers. In spite of such uncertainties, however, it is possible to make a good case for TE's "Swedish" as non-Swedish (though more conclusive evidence could have been gathered from word lists).
TE's parents immigrated to the United States as young adults, and Polish, Yiddish, and Russian were spoken in TE's home in addition to English. TE studied French in high school, but her sole (remembered) exposure to Swedish was a Swedish television program that she remembered rather well. Stevenson devotes considerable attention to the question of possible fraud on TE's part, but in fact the extremely poor quality of her "Swedish" seems to me to rule out the possibility of secret studying.

Under hypnosis, TE manifests a laconic personality called Jensen, a nineteenth-century Swedish man. Like PG's subjects, TE seems to be building on languages she's heard or studied and on her one brief exposure to spoken Swedish. During two sessions, Stevenson had Swedish-speaking psychic-research colleagues speak Swedish to Jensen, and these conversations form the basis of Stevenson's claim that Jensen spoke genuinely responsive Swedish. But the transcript, even in standard Swedish spelling, casts considerable doubt on that claim. When Jensen fails to respond to a question posed in Swedish, the interviewers often repeat it in English; aside from the obvious aid to intelligibility, the result is that, by the second session, TE had heard quite a bit of Swedish with immediate translation. As Samarin points out in his review of the book, only sixty items in Jensen's one-hundred-word vocabulary were used first by Jensen (1976, p. 272); the other words were introduced by the interviewers. And many of Jensen's sixty "Swedish" words can be identified with words in languages TE had been exposed to. Many are very similar to English words; examples of others areja T (cf. Russian ja T) and by 'town' (cf. French ville 'city').

As with PG's subjects, Jensen's anomalous utterances were identified by good-willed observers as belonging to a closely related speech form—in this case, Norwegian or, for odd pronunciations, various Swedish dialects. Many of Jensen's responses are incomprehensible or totally inappro¬priate. For instance, when asked what he would pay for some item at mar¬ket, he answers what is interpreted as the Swedish equivalent of my wife. Stevenson ignores nonresponsive utterances like this and treats as a responsive utterance Jensen's claim that his wife's name is Latvia—a name that seems a good match for Sir Guy de [mopsss]. Jensen simply does not speak "Swedish" the way a real person speaks a language: he produces very few grammatically connected utterances, he makes errors that no native speaker would rnake, and he is said to display bits and snatches of Norwegian and several different Swedish dialects. Real speakers of real languages don't remember grammar and vocabulary so spottily.

The hypnotic subjects whose speech I studied produced fluent gibberish that seems to share several linguistic features with TE's "Swedish" and with the utterances of people who speak in tongues in a religious setting. The utterances are semantically empty and lacking in grammatical patterning, so they cannot be taken to represent human language. But they do have phonological patterns, and these are derived from the speaker's native language and from any other language(s) s/he has heard. With hypnotic subjects, any notion of what the foreign language might sound like seems likely to be reflected in the extensive use of a few characteristic sounds and sequences, as in PG's "Bulgarian" speaker's [st] and Sir Guy's nasalized vowels, final stress, and [R]. I suspect that an analogous (though less sophisticated) notion surfaces in Chloe's pidgin English—it is her idea of how an Apache would talk[...]

The conclusion I have drawn from studying three of PG's hypnotic subjects appears to be justified also for Stevenson's TE and for glossolalic utterances as well: the available evidence does not support the claim that anyone has ever spoken a real human language without being previously exposed to it in a systematic way in his or her current life..

Of course, I think new cases appeared since then that don't corroborate Sarah's conclusion.

 

[Eteponge]

Anyone have any answers to Vitor Moura's new found article?

 

[deborah]

It's hard to comment on a third parties large blocks of quotes like this.

"The hypnotic subjects whose speech I studied produced fluent gibberish..."

I do not think her study verifies anything - one way or the other. I know of an individual that has never been to the Far East - yet spoke fluent Ancient Sumerian and later an old Indian dialect. The speech was confirmed by a linguist - and the information about ancient Indian texts she spoke of - was confirmed by Monks in India a year later.

So I think it depends on the individual being studied and the circumstances. The woman I am speaking of - only speaks English. The work was documented by Bonnie Greenwell Ph.D. ---- 15 years ago.

 

[Eteponge]

I do not think her study verifies anything - one way or the other. I know of an individual that has never been to the Far East - yet spoke fluent Ancient Sumerian and later an old Indian dialect. The speech was confirmed by a linguist - and the information about ancient Indian texts she spoke of - was confirmed by Monks in India a year later.

So I think it depends on the individual being studied and the circumstances. The woman I am speaking of - only speaks English. The work was documented by Bonnie Greenwell Ph.D. ---- 15 years ago.

It seems to me that the anti-reincarnationist linguist critic in question merely focuses on the perceived weakness in a minority of certain cases of Xenoglossic Reincarnation, and ignores all of the rest of the Xenoglossic cases that are far stronger and far more convincing and wouldn't fall under her explanitive conclusions. And to note that OTHER LINGUISTS have been involved in OTHER CASES that are far stronger in nature than those tackled by the Skeptic and they agreed with the Xenoglossic conclusion rather than the Skeptic one.

 

[Vitor Moura]

I know of an individual that has never been to the Far East - yet spoke fluent Ancient Sumerian and later an old Indian dialect. The speech was confirmed by a linguist - and the information about ancient Indian texts she spoke of - was confirmed by Monks in India a year later.

So I think it depends on the individual being studied and the circumstances. The woman I am speaking of - only speaks English. The work was documented by Bonnie Greenwell Ph.D. ---- 15 years ago.

Hi, Deborah

what is the name of this studie? It was published in a scientific magazine or a book?

Best wishes,
Vitor

 

[John]

Wikipedia

I wanted to put a good word in for Wikipedia. Like any internet website it can be changed, but there are many checks and balances in place to make sure that the quality of articles is the best possible.

I notice that the Xenoglossy article on Wikipedia has been updated and certainly I found some useful info there. Hope you do too...

-----------------------------------
Quote: Wikipedia is not a very good website to find information,... People all over the world can change this information, Wiki is a good starting point but a bad ending point as you will never know if that information has been changed, you can check to see if the info is correct and then list both sources. - by vanhalen50one50

 

[ssake]

I'd like to add my two cents in here and say that I found it difficult to get a linguist to take such cases seriously enough to get a professional opinion. I had a tape of a hypnotic session that was supposed to be an American woman speaking in 100-year-old Punjabi dialect, grieving about her son going off to war. I approached two linguists and they wouldn't give me the time of day. Finally I gave a copy to people from India who knew that dialect (modern version), and they said it wasn't language. So I assume it probably wasn't.


The cases are rare and difficult to prove, but anectodal accounts of very young children speaking a few words from a language they had no reasonable way of picking up crop up from time to time. There are a few such cases described in the "personal accounts" section of my website, http://www.ial.goldthread.com/personalaccounts.html.


Here's an account sent in to me for that web page:


Most of my life I've had a "memory." To know part of why this memory is so different, I'll tell you that I was born in 1953. When WW II started, my father was 10, and my mother was 5 years old. Another kinda unusual thing is that I have a second language. I discovered that language, watching a favorite British sitcom in the late 1960s. In that show, two interns greeted a third intern by saying to him "bore da." I KNEW he'd said "good morning"! That third intern was Welsh. I found a book at a nearby British bookstore, that had Welsh - English. I THOUGHT the intern had said bora da. According to this book, it IS bore = morning, da = good, and in Welsh, adjective follow nouns. Since then, my Welsh has become as prominent in my mind as English. The way that Spanish or French can be to certain folk in North America. Here is that "memory."


I am standing on a cliff of a high mountain, watching a few airplanes flying north. Behind me is my father. I ask him about them, and he tells me, in Welsh, that they are German, going to Liverpool and Manchester to bomb! This a memory of a girl born in 1953?


In the past decade, I've "remembered" that my name was Serena Evans, I was born in 1914 in Carmaerthan, Cymru, and died in a car crash when my English car went over a cliff in the Snowdon Mountains. I'd been living in Caernarvon, Cymru. And then, each parent has a memory for which they've had no ability to experience, in this life. They felt okay about telling me, when learned I believe in reincarnation, mostly 'cos the above "memory."


Diolch chwi (thank you)


Addendum to first letter:


After hearing Spanish daily for a decade, it is still a very imcomprehensible language to me. Yet I have never been taught, instructed, or coached in Welsh. ... I am bilingual -- in Saesneg ac Cymraeg. English and Welsh.


I think there's clearly enough evidence to take the question seriously--the problem is more that, being rare, and being ridiculed, it is difficult to prove to a skeptic's satisfaction.


Best,


Steve S.

 

[deborah]

Hi Vitor Moura,


Sorry I never replied to you - Bonnie Greenwell has not written any new books that I am aware of. The study and research done years ago was documented by Ms Greenwell and presented in many of her lectures. Her book that I often refer too is called Energies of Transformation: A Guide to the Kundalini Process

To my knowledge - Ms Greenwell no longer does lectures. But you could contact her and ask. One never knows.