But even the last claim made is essentially meaningless – all extant languages are as closely connected to “a Neolithic language” as Basque is.
What is your claim here, Bosda? English is also the offspring of a neolithic language. English speakers were anything but isolated, and yet we, uh, still speak. Are you saying that if people are not culturally isolated, they lose the capacity for speech? Think about what you wrote - all extent languages are descended from languages spoken way-the-heck-back-when. Proto-Indo-European was spoken by a primitive (though perhaps not neolithic) culture. Very few of its offspring languages were spoken by isolated populations, and yet it’s one of the largest language families in existence. Proto-Indo-European speakers didn’t lose the ability to speak their language - PIE is spoken today on every continent, except the dialects have diverged somewhat and we’ve developed wacky accents.
And English bears about the same resemblance to Proto-Indo-European as Basque does to whatever Proto-Basque language it descended from over the same period of time. I don’t know what “close connection” you mean. You have to define the claims you’re making; there is nothing in the present theory of linguistics that would suggest any “close connection” besides that of descent. Basque is obviously descended from something spoken in the Neolithic, as is every language in the world (save for sign languages and similar such things that developed whole-cloth) but that’s the only “close connection” that exists.
If your claim is that languages only diverge because of the proximity of other languages, well, that’s stupid. In historical times, Latin, which was culturally dominant over most of Europe (as well as parts of Asia) diverged, with the lack of a central government, into dialects, some of which disappeared while others blossomed. But very few of these communities were in total isolation from one another, which is why there are Romance dialects that are tough to categorize, seeming to fill in the gaps between dialects of greater political and cultural import. That doesn’t mean that Spanish and Portuguese didn’t emerge from one another, even though the territories are not particularly separated at all. The modern-day Chinese languages - Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, Wu, Hakka, and so on - diverged in the same way from Middle Chinese. In fact, the divergence of languages and thus the development of new ones was the norm through most of history. Languages change all on their own without help from the outside world, and they do it constantly. Even assuming that the Basques were completely isolated between the Neolithic and the present (they weren’t) there’s no reason to suggest that this would have led their language to remain “pure” and unchanged.
Your claims get continually weaker here, Bosda - they don’t stand up to examination. Until you can at least define “close connection”, you haven’t a leg to stand on. Meanwhile, those of us who have some understanding of linguistics realize that the only “close connection” Basque shares with a neolithic language is exactly equal to the “close connection” every language shares with its ancestors.
A lot of extraordinary claims get made about Basque, as I mentioned several posts ago. People are for some reason quite captivated by it, and have made any number of silly proclamations - it’s related to India’s Dravidic languages or the (also puzzling) scattering of unrelated languages of the Caucasus; it’s closely related to Native American languages; it’s actually some long-forgotten descendent of Latin. However, the fact that some schmoe with a webpage has put together a theory tying Basque in with everything from the Great Flood to the Illuminati doesn’t make it true.
So to clarify: are you claiming that Basque is, compared to other languages, more similar to its ancestors - that it has changed less over time? What is your evidence? Actual specimens of Aquitanian - the form of Basque spoken in Roman times - are so few as to make any comparison ridiculous. It’s a claim inherently without evidence, as far as I can tell. Please try to explain why I’m wrong.
Here, I disagree. Hebrew has quite a large number of words that have been specifically innvented, based on Hebrew roots, to address the need for a modern vocabulary. IMO this makes Hebrew closer to its ancient forebear than had it only co-opted and transliterated English (and other) words. For example, it would make perfect sense to an Ancient Hebrew that a “Thinking Machine” (or computer) should be called just that - Makhshev.
Modern Hebrew speakers have, in practice, little trouble with the Bible - the Bible is taught directly in its original form starting from 4[sup]th[/sup] or 5[sup]th[/sup] grade. As pointed out, a speaker of Ancient Hebrew would have quite a vocabulary to learn (along with the general Culture Shock of landing in the Technological 21[sup]st[/sup] century…), but would do just fine by having these concepts explained along the way. They make sense in terms of already known words and concepts.
Dani
PIE is thought to have existed circa 4500 BC. The oldest copper tool known to archaeology was found in Switzerland and dated 6000 BC. The oldest known bronze was found in Crete, 3000 BC. Perhaps, then, PIE existed within the intermediate stage known as Chalcolithic (which means copper and stone).
But PIE bears within itself direct evidence of a stone tool making culture. The PIE root *ka-men- became the word hammer in Germanic languages, but it gave Slavic the word for ‘stone’: kamen’.
Not so. There are several Aquitanian words that are identical or nearly similar with Basque words. This suggests that Aquitanian was the direct ancestor of Basque, or simply Basque itself at an earlier stage.
Aq Nescato; Bq neskato young girl' Aq *Cison*; Bq *gizon* man’
Aq Andere; Bq andere lady' Aq *Sembe*-; Bq *seme* son’ (from earlier *senbe)
Aq Ombe- and Vmme; Bq ume child' (from **unbe*) Aq *Osso*-, *Oxso*-; Bq *otso* wolf’
Aq Heraus; Bq herauts boar' Aq *Bihos*-; Bq *bihotz* heart’
Aq Beles-, Belex-; Bq beltz black' Aq *Sahar*; Bq *zahar* old’
Aq -corri; Bq gorri `red’
Aq -co; Bq -ko (relational suffix)
Aq -tar; Bq -tar (ethnonymic suffix)
“The word-structure of the Aquitanian names is identical to the word-structure of modern Basque; the phonology of Aquitanian is similar to that of Basque and even more similar to that independently reconstructed for Pre-Basque; a few of the Aquitanian names are attested as surnames in medieval Basque; the use of kinship terms as personal names is abundantly attested in medieval Basques. The identity of Aquitanian and Basque may therefore be regarded as established beyond reasonable doubt.”
Now, what the heck was the Iberian language, and whether it’s related to Basque at all— that’s a fascinating question, but since next to nothing is known of Iberian, we can’t know the answer.
Oh, no argument there - the similarities are obvious. But how many Aquitanian words are known? Without a rather large corpus, it’s impossible to truly evaluate how different Basque is from Aquitanian. That’s all I’m saying. There’s enough to make it clear that Aquitanian is Basque’s direct ancestor, but is there enough to determine whether spoken Aquitanian was close enough to modern Basque to allow for mutual intelligibility? I doubt there is.
I see there are some misconceptions about Hebrew.
The language never “died” – it was a language of scholars, and there is even some evidence that communities of Jews who remained in the land of Israel, in the Galilee, never stopped speaking Hebrew.
From time to time in Jewish history, there were communities (often times mystics) where people would decide to speak only Hebrew, or only Hebew on the Sabbath.
Written Hebrew has been very alive and active continously. There has been a constant flow of liturgy, legal literature, poetry, etc., throughout the past two thousand years. Every reasonably educated adult male Jew could read this literature.
It does not seem to have been a “mother tongue” for many on a continuous basis, but more of a “father tongue” – fathers taught their sons, but usually (and with major exceptions), not their daughters.
When Hebrew was “reborn” in the late 18th, early 19th century, a large proportion of male Jews could read and write in Hebrew already; they just didn’t speak it much.
As a Chinese person, I’m tempted to say “Chinese”, but it’s gone through a lot of major changes as China was overrun by a number of peoples who brought their own vocabularies and pronunciations to the table. (Supposedly, Japanese has preserved some of the old sounds, since they largely borrowed from the Tang dynasty, but I have yet to research this claim.)
Written Chinese has managed to survive with less changes–the two big ones I can remember off the top of my head being the “first” emperor’s efforts to unite script and the current communist government’s simplified text–but a lot of words have changed in meaning as they were adopted for other purposes.
Personally, I can read modern Chinese with no problem, but literary Chinese prose gives me massive headaches both because of the foreign vocabulary and grammar structure. (I don’t have as much of a problem understanding it if it’s read out loud, but I’ve mostly given up on trying to study the classics in their own words.)
To add to the Basque pile-on, the modern language has several dialects, including Navarro-Labourdin, which is considerably different from the “standard”, and Souletin which is nearly unintelligible to other dialects. Clearly, Basque is just as susceptable to dialect drift as any other language. As well, with considerable number of loan-words from Latin and other Romance languages in modern Basque, it is very doubtful that a speaker from two millennia ago would understand more than a handful of words of the contemporary tongue.