What Captain Amazing said. My impression was that it was generally accepted that Tarshish = Biblical Hebrew for the city known to the Greeks as Tartessos (no clue what the residents called themselves/their city, except that it probably had the TRŠŠ root). (For the record, there’s also some that think it to have been the Tarsus in Asia Minor that the Saul who became Paul the Christian Apostle was from.)
Ethnically, I’m not sure. There is quite a bit of evidence that the Vascones fathered the Basque people, but AFAIK, there’s nothing definite. Location, proper names, and some mentions by ancient writers who may or may not have known what they were talking about are about all that’s left. It was a very busy area, once upon a time.
The language of the Aquitani almost certainly became the Basque language, but that doesn’t necessarily imply that the Aquitani people were the direct ancestors of the present-day Basque, either.
There has to have been some sort of relationship, but I don’t know how close to 1:1 it was.
Marija Gimbutas is an important thinker; to provide closure to her writing she needed to over-simplify somewhat. Let’s please do not over-simplify even further and pretend she thought all pre-IE cultures were the same.
Anyway, that Basque survived as a culture and language is probably due in no small part to mountains. For example, the Caucasus is the most mountainous region in Western Eurasia and may have more language families than all the rest of Western Eurasia!
There is convincing argument both top-down and bottom-up. Top-down: relevant speech mutation probably affected a single clan to start with. Even if independent languages arose, extinction is common so for all but one thread to die might be likely statistically. And even if pre-sapiens hominids had advanced speech, their cultures were overwhelmed by H. sapiens.
Bottom-up: Merritt Ruhlen has identified several words with cognates throughout the world, with approximately the frequency and phonetic change that might be expected. These words include akwa (water), dik (finger, point, one, ten – note that English has ‘dik’ cognates for three of these meanings), etc.
Why not? The thread isn’t about her.
There is some vocabulary crossover with French and Spanish; you can play “spot the Latinate word” when people are speaking Basque, and “spot the Basque word” when they’re speaking French or Spanish. But the grammar and the immense majority of the vocabulary are very, very different… you know, different enough to be able to spot the word which “does not belong.”
Given the problems of mutual intelligibility between the different Basque “dialects,” one could posit that they are different enough to be called different “languages of the Basque family,” except for the lack of separate armies and navies.
The Basques may not be who we think they are, latest genetic findings, also here.
BTW, I haven’t read through the whole thread, but did any Sumerian dopers turn up yet?
Clay tablets load webpages slow. Some of them are still on Windows .0000001 and sundial-up.
As I understand it it’s not so much a matter of being wiped out as adopting the language and culture of the newcomers.
That doesn’t suprise me a bit. Indo-European speakers certainly didn’t exterminate all the non-IE speakers, it’s just that after a time the descendents of the non-IE speakers adopted IE languages. If your village gets conquered by Celtic adventurers in a few generations the whole village might be speaking a Celtic language even though most of the ancestors of those Celtic speakers weren’t Celtic. And when the Romans conquer that Celtic village, the villagers end up speaking Latin even though most of their ancestors were Celtic speakers. And then when Germanic/Norse speakers move in, people start speaking a Germanic language.
I agree. Having lived in S. Spain in the 80’s and early 90’s, I was aware of the great debates about the regional and cultural “revivals”. Including but not limited to Catalan and Gallego. I also was near at hand when ETA set some (pretty minor) bombs off. (I am not trying to ignite a debate about the Basque Homeland, this is purely about the linguistics.)
At that time I did some basic research and spoke to many neighbors and academics about the issues. Can’t remember the cite, but I seem to recall that Basque was almost entirely finished as a spoken language in the 19th century, and “reconstucted” with vocabulary, grammar and pronounciation developed by a scholar ca. 1890? Therefore, many linguists now think of Modern Basque as being not quite authentic.
That said, the only reference I could find today was probably the same Wikipedia article quoted earlier. mentioning a “revival” after WW I.
So assuming that the Basques were assimilated into invading cultures and the language was for all practical puposes extinct, I don’t really understand why there is a revival at all.
An earlier post mentioned that the Basques are not genetically different from their non-Basque identifying neighbors. Isn’t the language then more like the wide variety of dialects found elsewhere like Italy, France and the Balkans?
I have no dog in this fight, but 150,000 is there on the page, in this section.
Cool! Learned a new word “autochthonous.” I actually knew what “chthonic” meant, but I never would have guessed “authochthonous” (‘originating from the place where found’) from that.
I’ll be using it at every opportunity in the next few days.
You’re thinking of Batua, “official Basque,” which was invented by Sabino Arana et co. as part of the whole “inventing Basque nationalism” thing; it is based mostly on the dialect of Guipuzcoa (and more on Donosti’s than Irun’s) and includes many latinate words which are about as necessary as extra legs on a dog. Traditionally there’s 7 dialects of Basque (one per tribe), in reality nobody has ever tried to count them, among other things because since dialects don’t just end up sharply at a nifty line on the floor, it’s not easy. As an example of the difficulty delineating dialects, to someone from Argentina, a person from Navarra and one from Valladolid sound the same; to someone from Burgos (midway between Navarra and Valladolid), they don’t.
Many people consider that Batua, rather than reinforcing the Basque language, destroys it. There are linguists working on studying the “real dialects,” writing inter-Basque dictionaries and so forth: hopefully, the movement to “save the real Basque from the imposition of the official Basque” will be on time to do it. From what I’ve seen (I’m from Navarra, but do not speak Basque, partly because neither of my parents didn’t and partly because I don’t want to learn Fake Basque) and conversations with Basque-speaking coworkers, friends and neighbors, many of them have a diglosia situation similar to what they used to have with Spanish/French: with the family, neighbors, friends… you speak your dialect; with the government, you speak Batua; with friends who are from a different place than you, you may switch or borrow words from Spanish/French/Batua.
I remember going from being told that speaking my own dialect of Spanish was wrong, to the backlash against that and people “reclaiming” their right to effing end diminutives in -ico (“it’s even in the dictionary, so don’t you dare tell me it ain’t correct!”) if they want to. Basque is going through a similar process; like I said, I do hope the backlash is on time.
John Mace writes:
> I have to say that’s a very weak, defensive response to an honest question in
> GQ.
>
> If it’s “the standard assumption”, you should be able to support it with more
> than a link to a 10 page wikipedia page w/o a quote to the actual part that
> applies to the question. BTW, I did a search for “150,000” on that page and
> didn’t get any results.
Look, try to understand the following: I don’t have infinite amounts of time for posting to the SDMB. I get incredibly angry when someone, apparently just for the fun of wasting my time, nitpicks my posts for something that’s largely irrelevant to my point in the posts. Why is it relevant to my first post whether language is 50,000, 75,000, 100,000, 125,000, 150,000, 175,000, or 200,000 years old? Why should I have to defend what was nothing but an irrelevant point? What you seem to be saying is that it’s not enough that I give one citation. You seem to be claiming that I am obliged to spend the next week going without sleep in a library finding every reference on the age of language in order to write the definitive article on the subject. On the other hand, you couldn’t even be bothered to carefully read the Wikipedia article that I gave a link to. As Mangetout pointed out, there is a reference to 150,000 years in the Wikipedia article. If you know more than me on this subject, give us a bunch of references.
It also works the other way round. Norwegian seafarers settled down on the Isle of Man and founded a viking realm, ruling all around the Irish sea, but it didn’t take long until they had assimilated into the Celtic society.
It’s more complex for France. There, the original Celtic speakers were invaded by Latin-speaking Romans, so that most of the country, apart from Brittany, changed from speaking a Celtic language to a dialect of Latin (which eventually became French). However, the country was also invaded by Germanic speakers, including the Normans from Scandinavia and the Franks from Germany. They gave their names to the province Normandy, and even the country France, but lost their Germanic language in favour of the French derived from Latin.
And in England, the original Celtic language was not replaced by the Latin of the Roman invaders, but was replaced by the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian invaders. Then the Normans – an originally Scandinavian group that had stopped speaking their Germanic language in favour of Norman French – invaded England, and made Anglo Norman French the official language for a couple of centuries. However, English survived (with a large dose of Anglo Norman French vocabulary) as the language of England.
Jeez. Go back to my post-- I was trying to understand if you were coming at that from a linguistic (bottoms-up) perspective or an archeological (tops-down) perspective. Your expertise is linguistics, so I thought maybe that’s where you were coming from.
If you come into this forum stating that something is “the standard assumption” in an area where you are known to be an expert, don’t be surprised if someone asks you to elaborate.
FWIW, I’m sure I know more than you about the archeological record. I’m sure you know more than me about the consensus among linguists.
Celtic languages were once widespread all over continental Europe and were totally wiped out, within hostoric times by the spread of Germanic and Romance languages and pushed to the margins of the British Isles. I believe that only Welsh is still really alive today. The Welsh also reintroduced a Celtic language, Breton, into western France and Welsh and Breton are said to be mutually comprehensible. So why does it seem difficult for Basque to be the isolated remains of languages that were replaced by Celtic tongues?
As for Jospeh Greenberg’s thesis, logic tells me it is likely true, but I doubt convincing evidence will ever be found. It is really amazing how quickly languages can chance. When I think that it seems likely that such languages as Russian and English had a common ancestor maybe 400 generations ago, I am amazed. It is a giant game of telephone.
[Moderating]
Wendell, chill out. It’s not like you’ve never nitpicked someone else’s post. There’s no need for this kind of defensiveness here.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Good discussion. A few nitpicks:
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Whatever may have been the case prior to the Roman conquest, the Brythonic Celtic tongue of southern England and Wales was extensively influenced by Latin during Roman times, with even common object nouns borrowed, and grammatic and syntactic influence as well. Modern Welsh, Breton, and Cornish exhibit this.
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IIRC, pre-Roman Armorican Celtic was moribund by the end of the Roman period, and Breton owes as much if not more to settlers from Britain fleeing the Anglo-Saxon incursions as it does to the indigenous Celtic (which in any case appears to have been Insular, not Continental).
I’ll yield to Dr Drake’s greater exoertise on either of these points, though – they’re from what I recall from studying Celtic linguistics some years back, and I cannot vouch for them.