10 ms·

Hand of Irulegi: ancient artefact could help trace origins of Basque language

116 points by benbreen 4y ago

akolbe 4y ago
There is an important omission in that Guardian article. They cite a Latin professor said to have helped decipher the artifact and then another scholar of Indo-European linguistics: "Velaza’s colleague Joaquín Gorrochategui, a professor of Indo-European linguistics at the University of the Basque country, said the hand’s secrets would change the way scholars looked at the Vascones.'This piece upends how we’d thought about the Vascones and writing until now ... We were almost convinced that the ancient Vascones were illiterate and didn’t use writing except when it came to minting coins." What they fail to tell their readers is that Basque is not an Indo-European language at all. It's a language isolate – while Latin, Welsh, German, Danish, Greek, Armenian, Persian, Hindi, Urdu etc. are all related to each other, Basque is the only remnant of the languages that were spoken in Western Europe before the Indo-Europeans took over.
- DC-3 4y ago
  His studies probably relate to contact between archaic Vasconic languages and Indo-European. It is considered fairly likely that languages related to that of the Vascones were spoken more broadly in Western Europe in antiquity, and that they likely had influence to some degree on the Germanic, Romance, and Celtic languages that superceded them.
- NickC25 4y ago
  IIRC Basque (or a predecessor of it) had been spoken for hundreds of years in (what is now the Basque country) before the Roman's conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. I think it's the oldest surviving language isolate in the world. Contrary to popular belief, Korean is actually no longer considered a language isolate.
  - akolbe 4y ago
    If you think about it, all languages and all language isolates (there are many others besides Basque, like Ainu) are really the same age. At any rate, this applies if you assume that people developed language only once. Each language then represents an unbroken chain of transmission to the language of the earliest humans to develop speech, or one branch leading back to the original trunk. Isolates are merely branches that have no surviving twigs of recent provenance – recent enough, that is, to discern genetic relationships with the tools available today. Language isolates of different ages could only really occur if there were several populations of humans developing speech independently of each other, and at different times.
    - retrac 4y ago
      > if there were several populations of humans developing speech independently of each other, and at different times We already know of instances of societal-cultural upheaval or even trauma, so severe, that the language undergoes unrecognizable transformation in the form of pidgins. A group of young people from scattered tribes after some disaster, who speak no common language, and who are barely lingual and "re-invent language" for the next generation, seems quite possible over the last several tens of thousands of years, perhaps in multiple times and places. The similarity of grammar, in unrelated creoles, descended from such pidgin languages, is one of those great tantalizing mysteries in linguistics, and in my view, one that suggests we might just be wired to make a language if we didn't already have one, as do things like the apparent spontaneous emergence of sign languages in deaf communities. The spanner in the workers for that theory is that, of course, those hypothesized people who didn't speak related languages still grew up in lingual communities and were exposed to the idea of language from birth (even the deaf ones, really). Perhaps such events are just a remixing of what already was culturally common, and common to all humans. Indeed, perhaps no community where the link of language transmission has been completely broken, could even survive.
      - the_af 4y ago
        > is one of those great tantalizing mysteries in linguistics, and in my view, one that suggests we might just be wired to make a language if we didn't already have one Isn't this Chomsky's thesis about humans having an ingrained "grammar" (or proto-grammar, or grammar machinery) from birth?
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  My understanding is that most genetic studies seem to indicate the Basques likely migrated where they were around the same time as Indo-European/Yamnaya culture -- the copper age. Even looking at iron and bronze age remains, they are not appreciably different in genetic makeup than the surrounding populations. Similar story for the Etruscans, in fact. High rate of R1b and associated haplotypes. It seems likely to me that these populations were co-travelers with Indo-European speakers during the copper age. Following the same leads on metal and other resource deposits, and migrating along similar routes. I suspect if it was ever possible to find a "homeland" for these linguistic routes it would be along the Black Sea or Carpathians, next-door to the origins of the Yamnaya culture. Maybe the Basques/Euskadia/Vascones are the descendants of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, an ancient agrarian population that the Indo-Europeans passed through and blended with (and maybe conquered) on their way west.
  - Ebree 4y ago
    Basques have original language but not male line. It's R1b is IE steppe genes. The most probable source of Basque culture is from local native Iberian refugium. As well as Albanian/Illyrian in Balcan refugium. Basques are teared between claiming oldest native euroculture & negating IE conquest that drastically changed genetics & culture of Europe. What's understandable since their story seems unique & conflicted (adding rH- story) like Hungarian.
- Max-Ganz-II 4y ago
  I may be wrong, but I understand it is not the only pre-PIE language in Europe. I believe Finnish and Hungarian are two others, and there are a couple more, with much smaller numbers of speakers.
  - jdminhbg 4y ago
    Finnish and Hungarian are non-IE, but they are not pre-IE, they are Uralic languages that also entered Europe through migration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages#History
    - Max-Ganz-II 4y ago
      Ah, so! thankyou. It's all fascinating :-)
rendall 4y ago
> "... the five words written in 40 characters identified as Vasconic, suggest otherwise. The first – and only word – to be identified so far is sorioneku, a forerunner of the modern Basque word zorioneko, meaning good luck or good omen." How did they know some set of characters meant sorioneku? Is this not the first time they have even seen these characters?
- msrenee 4y ago
  So it definitely descends from the Phoenician alphabet which is also what the Greek and then Latin alphabets descended from. The Etruscan alphabet, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Hebrew are all related in there as well. It doesn't seem too far removed from other alphabets in that area. I'm honestly more surprised that they're saying they've only got the first word figured out.
  - kspacewalk2 4y ago
    You can visually see the progression of letters in a wonderful "Evolution of the Alphabet" chart from UsefulCharts.[0] Really brings home the relationships that may not be evident without seeing the intermediates. [0] https://usefulcharts.com/products/evolution-of-the-alphabet https://usefulcharts.com/products/evolution-of-the-alphabet
  - jng 4y ago
    It is variant of the northwestern Iberian alphabet, a derivative of the Phoenician alphabet as you mentioned, and Iberian writing has been decoded for a while now (not the language itself). Iberian used to be written in one of three ways, northwestern and southeastern variants of the Phoenician derivative, and Greek alphabet sometimes. I'm a native Basque speaker and the first word is obvious and makes all sense (still used these days to wish "happy birthday"), parts of the others have some resemblance to modern words, but it's far from obvious. Not surprising in 2000 years of the evolution of a minority, mostly-non-written language, with a ton of external influence. (The variation of the alphabet brings over letter T from greek, which does not exist in Iberian as seemingly they didn't use the sound, while Basque uses the T sound.)
  - 4y ago
Jun8 4y ago
A funny myth about Basque: “ An old myth says that since there weren't any Basques going to hell, the devil decided to learn Basque, so he could talk to them, lead them to the wrong path and send them to hell. But he was to be disappointed, as after several years, the devil still couldn’t understand what the Basques were saying! Myths are just myths, but a study conducted by the British Foreign Office did conclude that Basque is the hardest language to learn in the world. As an isolated language, it has no syntactic parallels in English, Spanish or French and its grammar is exceedingly complex. ” (https://omniglot.com/language/articles/whylearnbasque.htm https://omniglot.com/language/articles/whylearnbasque.htm) In Linguistics the notion that a language is more difficult/complex than another is not accepted. However, Basque grammar does have some less common characteristics such as the ergative case (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative–absolutive_alignment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative–absolutive_alignmen...). Here’s an interesting study on how Basque speaker brains process the language (https://phys.org/news/2006-05-basque-grammar-brain.amp https://phys.org/news/2006-05-basque-grammar-brain.amp), biggest takeaway is the confirmation of SOV processing order.
- mc32 4y ago
  One lingering question I have regarding linguistics is how did languages build complex grammars to then see their grammars simplify over time? Do we in modern times see languages with simple grammars develop complex grammars over time?
  - asherah 4y ago
    essentially no grammar change is a "simplification". every language has the same complexity in it's grammar, it mostly depends where that complexity lies you might just be confusing complexity with big words or large tables of grammatical affixes. over time, languages tend to either get more synthetic (closer to a 1=1 correspondence between words and morphemes) or agglutinative (many more morphemes per word), and it wraps around at the end - premium synthetic languages then start tacking words together, some start making other constructions, and suddenly you're on the agglutinative side!
    - 4y ago
wnoise 4y ago
> Until now, scholars had supposed the Vascones had no proper written language – save for words found on coins That seems to be a pretty ridiculous supposition. Why would they only use it for coins?
- oersted 4y ago
  The writing in this finding uses the iberian alphabet with some minor modifications. The iberian language has different indo-european roots, so it seems that indeed Vascones didn't have their own writing system, as was common for many languages of this era and later in history. It is also what evidence suggested (until now), pretty much no basque writings have been found until well into the middle ages, besides a few words in headstones and coins. Although we know the language was there because the Romans referred to it. Scholars probably assumed that some writing was taking place, but there is very little proof of it, so better to stick to what we know. It is intriguing that it looks like this object was a welcome message hung on a door, kind of like a welcome doormat. The object was found on top of a door, it has clear signs that it was nailed in an upright position with a wooden nail, and the first word is almost exactly the same modern basque word that is used to mean "welcome", "congratulations" or "happy". If this theory is correct, it suggests a significantly higher level of literacy than would be expected in a small town from this era. Why would you put up a welcome sign if guests wouldn't understand it?

116 points by benbreen 4y ago

There is an important omission in that Guardian article. They cite a Latin professor said to have helped decipher the artifact and then another scholar of Indo-European linguistics: "Velaza’s colleague Joaquín Gorrochategui, a professor of Indo-European linguistics at the University of the Basque country, said the hand’s secrets would change the way scholars looked at the Vascones.'This piece upends how we’d thought about the Vascones and writing until now ... We were almost convinced that the ancient Vascones were illiterate and didn’t use writing except when it came to minting coins." What they fail to tell their readers is that Basque is not an Indo-European language at all. It's a language isolate – while Latin, Welsh, German, Danish, Greek, Armenian, Persian, Hindi, Urdu etc. are all related to each other, Basque is the only remnant of the languages that were spoken in Western Europe before the Indo-Europeans took over.

DC-3 4y ago
His studies probably relate to contact between archaic Vasconic languages and Indo-European. It is considered fairly likely that languages related to that of the Vascones were spoken more broadly in Western Europe in antiquity, and that they likely had influence to some degree on the Germanic, Romance, and Celtic languages that superceded them.
NickC25 4y ago
IIRC Basque (or a predecessor of it) had been spoken for hundreds of years in (what is now the Basque country) before the Roman's conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. I think it's the oldest surviving language isolate in the world. Contrary to popular belief, Korean is actually no longer considered a language isolate.
- akolbe 4y ago
  If you think about it, all languages and all language isolates (there are many others besides Basque, like Ainu) are really the same age. At any rate, this applies if you assume that people developed language only once. Each language then represents an unbroken chain of transmission to the language of the earliest humans to develop speech, or one branch leading back to the original trunk. Isolates are merely branches that have no surviving twigs of recent provenance – recent enough, that is, to discern genetic relationships with the tools available today. Language isolates of different ages could only really occur if there were several populations of humans developing speech independently of each other, and at different times.
  - retrac 4y ago
    > if there were several populations of humans developing speech independently of each other, and at different times We already know of instances of societal-cultural upheaval or even trauma, so severe, that the language undergoes unrecognizable transformation in the form of pidgins. A group of young people from scattered tribes after some disaster, who speak no common language, and who are barely lingual and "re-invent language" for the next generation, seems quite possible over the last several tens of thousands of years, perhaps in multiple times and places. The similarity of grammar, in unrelated creoles, descended from such pidgin languages, is one of those great tantalizing mysteries in linguistics, and in my view, one that suggests we might just be wired to make a language if we didn't already have one, as do things like the apparent spontaneous emergence of sign languages in deaf communities. The spanner in the workers for that theory is that, of course, those hypothesized people who didn't speak related languages still grew up in lingual communities and were exposed to the idea of language from birth (even the deaf ones, really). Perhaps such events are just a remixing of what already was culturally common, and common to all humans. Indeed, perhaps no community where the link of language transmission has been completely broken, could even survive.
    - the_af 4y ago
      > is one of those great tantalizing mysteries in linguistics, and in my view, one that suggests we might just be wired to make a language if we didn't already have one Isn't this Chomsky's thesis about humans having an ingrained "grammar" (or proto-grammar, or grammar machinery) from birth?
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
My understanding is that most genetic studies seem to indicate the Basques likely migrated where they were around the same time as Indo-European/Yamnaya culture -- the copper age. Even looking at iron and bronze age remains, they are not appreciably different in genetic makeup than the surrounding populations. Similar story for the Etruscans, in fact. High rate of R1b and associated haplotypes. It seems likely to me that these populations were co-travelers with Indo-European speakers during the copper age. Following the same leads on metal and other resource deposits, and migrating along similar routes. I suspect if it was ever possible to find a "homeland" for these linguistic routes it would be along the Black Sea or Carpathians, next-door to the origins of the Yamnaya culture. Maybe the Basques/Euskadia/Vascones are the descendants of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, an ancient agrarian population that the Indo-Europeans passed through and blended with (and maybe conquered) on their way west.
- Ebree 4y ago
  Basques have original language but not male line. It's R1b is IE steppe genes. The most probable source of Basque culture is from local native Iberian refugium. As well as Albanian/Illyrian in Balcan refugium. Basques are teared between claiming oldest native euroculture & negating IE conquest that drastically changed genetics & culture of Europe. What's understandable since their story seems unique & conflicted (adding rH- story) like Hungarian.
Max-Ganz-II 4y ago
I may be wrong, but I understand it is not the only pre-PIE language in Europe. I believe Finnish and Hungarian are two others, and there are a couple more, with much smaller numbers of speakers.
- jdminhbg 4y ago
  Finnish and Hungarian are non-IE, but they are not pre-IE, they are Uralic languages that also entered Europe through migration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages#History
  - Max-Ganz-II 4y ago
    Ah, so! thankyou. It's all fascinating :-)

rendall 4y ago

> "... the five words written in 40 characters identified as Vasconic, suggest otherwise. The first – and only word – to be identified so far is sorioneku, a forerunner of the modern Basque word zorioneko, meaning good luck or good omen." How did they know some set of characters meant sorioneku? Is this not the first time they have even seen these characters?

msrenee 4y ago
So it definitely descends from the Phoenician alphabet which is also what the Greek and then Latin alphabets descended from. The Etruscan alphabet, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Hebrew are all related in there as well. It doesn't seem too far removed from other alphabets in that area. I'm honestly more surprised that they're saying they've only got the first word figured out.
- kspacewalk2 4y ago
  You can visually see the progression of letters in a wonderful "Evolution of the Alphabet" chart from UsefulCharts.[0] Really brings home the relationships that may not be evident without seeing the intermediates. [0] https://usefulcharts.com/products/evolution-of-the-alphabet https://usefulcharts.com/products/evolution-of-the-alphabet
- jng 4y ago
  It is variant of the northwestern Iberian alphabet, a derivative of the Phoenician alphabet as you mentioned, and Iberian writing has been decoded for a while now (not the language itself). Iberian used to be written in one of three ways, northwestern and southeastern variants of the Phoenician derivative, and Greek alphabet sometimes. I'm a native Basque speaker and the first word is obvious and makes all sense (still used these days to wish "happy birthday"), parts of the others have some resemblance to modern words, but it's far from obvious. Not surprising in 2000 years of the evolution of a minority, mostly-non-written language, with a ton of external influence. (The variation of the alphabet brings over letter T from greek, which does not exist in Iberian as seemingly they didn't use the sound, while Basque uses the T sound.)
- 4y ago

Jun8 4y ago

A funny myth about Basque: “ An old myth says that since there weren't any Basques going to hell, the devil decided to learn Basque, so he could talk to them, lead them to the wrong path and send them to hell. But he was to be disappointed, as after several years, the devil still couldn’t understand what the Basques were saying! Myths are just myths, but a study conducted by the British Foreign Office did conclude that Basque is the hardest language to learn in the world. As an isolated language, it has no syntactic parallels in English, Spanish or French and its grammar is exceedingly complex. ” (https://omniglot.com/language/articles/whylearnbasque.htm https://omniglot.com/language/articles/whylearnbasque.htm) In Linguistics the notion that a language is more difficult/complex than another is not accepted. However, Basque grammar does have some less common characteristics such as the ergative case (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative–absolutive_alignment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative–absolutive_alignmen...). Here’s an interesting study on how Basque speaker brains process the language (https://phys.org/news/2006-05-basque-grammar-brain.amp https://phys.org/news/2006-05-basque-grammar-brain.amp), biggest takeaway is the confirmation of SOV processing order.

mc32 4y ago
One lingering question I have regarding linguistics is how did languages build complex grammars to then see their grammars simplify over time? Do we in modern times see languages with simple grammars develop complex grammars over time?
- asherah 4y ago
  essentially no grammar change is a "simplification". every language has the same complexity in it's grammar, it mostly depends where that complexity lies you might just be confusing complexity with big words or large tables of grammatical affixes. over time, languages tend to either get more synthetic (closer to a 1=1 correspondence between words and morphemes) or agglutinative (many more morphemes per word), and it wraps around at the end - premium synthetic languages then start tacking words together, some start making other constructions, and suddenly you're on the agglutinative side!
  - 4y ago

wnoise 4y ago

> Until now, scholars had supposed the Vascones had no proper written language – save for words found on coins That seems to be a pretty ridiculous supposition. Why would they only use it for coins?

oersted 4y ago
The writing in this finding uses the iberian alphabet with some minor modifications. The iberian language has different indo-european roots, so it seems that indeed Vascones didn't have their own writing system, as was common for many languages of this era and later in history. It is also what evidence suggested (until now), pretty much no basque writings have been found until well into the middle ages, besides a few words in headstones and coins. Although we know the language was there because the Romans referred to it. Scholars probably assumed that some writing was taking place, but there is very little proof of it, so better to stick to what we know. It is intriguing that it looks like this object was a welcome message hung on a door, kind of like a welcome doormat. The object was found on top of a door, it has clear signs that it was nailed in an upright position with a wooden nail, and the first word is almost exactly the same modern basque word that is used to mean "welcome", "congratulations" or "happy". If this theory is correct, it suggests a significantly higher level of literacy than would be expected in a small town from this era. Why would you put up a welcome sign if guests wouldn't understand it?