John, (01)
You make a good point. Buried in the various bits of your email is the
observation that the term "Iberian people" in referring to the
precursors of the Celts along the Atlantic coast isn't necessarily a
reference to a single culture unified by a common language stem. We
don't have enough knowledge to say that. (And as you point out, we know
from the native Americans and the peoples of New Guinea that multiple
peoples with different language families and cultures still often trade
and share or borrow some practices.) (02)
> > We should also note that several important syntactic structures
> > of modern French, for example, are quite different from those
> > of Latin. So it is not safe to say that (modern) Basque is
> > unrelated to the language the Romans documented, just because
> > it doesn't exhibit some of the syntactic structures they commented on.
>
> The differences between Latin and the Romance languages are trivial
> compared to the differences between Basque and any Indo-European
> language. (03)
That wasn't my point. No one asserted that Basque was Indo-European. (04)
The argument was that we can't judge the relationship between modern
Basque and some first century Celt-Iberian language on the basis of a
handful of unusual syntactic formations that were observed in the 1st
century language. The best we can say is that, if the Basque language
family ever had such formations, Basque has lost them in 2000 years. (05)
> Since there is so little evidence about the language of the Picts,
> it's hard to say anything for certain about them. I would even be
> willing to accept that they spoke some language that was derived
> from whatever the builders of Stonehenge spoke, which could well
> have been related to Basque. But after a thousand or more years
> of independent development, it would have diverged far from Basque. (06)
Surely. The question is whether their languages belonged to a common
family that predates the Indo-European dominance in Europe. And the
answer is that we simply don't know. Surely, there was at least one
such language family -- human languages go back at least 20,000 years.
But there may well have been several unrelated families along the
Atlantic coast. (07)
My original position was that Basque is descended from one of those
languages, because it is not Indo-European and it is not Semitic, or in
fact related to any other known language. And I should have made that
clearer. I made the mistake of using a now-probably-outdated term for
the pre-Celtic peoples of the Atlantic coast -- "Iberians". As you say,
we don't know whether that was one people or several peoples, one
language family or several. The term is a catchall for a collection of
peoples that were contemporaneous and largely unknown. (08)
> > But the Stonehenge builders do show consistency in practices and
> > some wares with other "Iberian" (i.e. pre-Celtic) sites in France
> > and Spain.
>
> That would be evidence of trade, but not of a common language.
> There were many common wares and cultural practices among the
> native Americans, despite the many different language families. (09)
Yes. What I had in mind was building practices and burial practices and
ornamentation, as well as trade. But other archeology shows that even
those "cultural tells" are sometimes adopted from neighbors over time. (010)
> > The Basque people themselves say that their land and their
> > language are older than every invader.
>
> That is certainly true. Lots of invaders, such as the Visigoths,
> called themselves "conquerors of the Basques", but their language
> died out while the Basques remained. (011)
The Visigoths brought nothing but military prowess. They weren't even
numerous enough to create a significant presence in the large
populations of the territories they conquered. When they ran out of
worlds to conquer, they were just absorbed. (012)
It is interesting to wonder why the Visigoths would be proud of
conquering the Basque people. They were either a significant populace
in 500 A.D. or regarded as invincible. Having seen the country, I favor
the latter. Conquering Bizkaia has got to have been more work than it
was worth. But if your purpose was to demonstrate your prowess... (013)
-Ed (014)
--
Edward J. Barkmeyer Email: edbark@xxxxxxxx
National Institute of Standards & Technology
Manufacturing Systems Integration Division
100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8263 Tel: +1 301-975-3528
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8263 FAX: +1 301-975-4694 (015)
"The opinions expressed above do not reflect consensus of NIST,
and have not been reviewed by any Government authority." (016)
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