The Phantom Time Hypothesis

[w_ockham]

I'm writing a paper on the "Phantom Time Hypothesis".  You can Google this, or refer to this paper by Niemitz http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/volatile/Niemitz-1997.pdf, or this by Illig http://www.bearfabrique.org/Catastrophism/illig_paper.htm, or this article about it on the BBC website http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/A84012040. Briefly, the

Comments

[wulfila]

In addition to that, take the name material we have. For example, Clovis and Louis the Pious actually bear the same name, but at noticeably different stages of historical language development. You have the first latinized as "Chlodovechus" (and can surmise that he would have called himself something akin to "Chlodwech", usually given als "Chlodwig" in modern German), while Louis would be latinized as "Ludovicus" and would probably have referred to himself as something like "(H)Ludvig", very close already to the modern German name "Ludwig".

If 300 years were suddenly missing, you would have to explain why every European language suddenly evolved in leaps and bounds instead of changing gradually (and a lot is happening precisely in that time period, not only in the Germanic languages).
I would be very impressed indeed if a group of conspirators did not only forge documents and timelines, but also managed to come up with convincing literary texts illustrating a believable sort of language change in the course of three imaginary centuries, and managed to convince everyone to use the wholly imaginary end point of that forced evolution as a new language from now on (and in several different languages, at that). IMHO, such a thing would be next to impossible even in a modern totalitarian system, and it could never have worked in the 7th century.

If public awareness of a year was only of the number of years of a king or emperor's rule, you could invent the calendar by inventing previous rulers.

That logic is a bit faulty. As I tried to explain above, different styles of counting were often combined in one and the same document, so the years of a king were definitely not the only way of marking dates.