• Friday, March 03rd, 2017
The Euskaro-Caucasian Hypothesis

I. History of the hypothesis
II. Description of the languages compared
III. Grammatical evidence for Euskaro-Caucasian (excerpts)
IV. Lexical evidence for Euskaro-Caucasian (excerpts)
V. Euskaro-Caucasian Phonological correspondences (excerpts)
VI. Chronology of Euskaro-Caucasian: a family about 9 millennia old
VII. Anthropological scenario of Euskaro-Caucasian: linguistics, archaeology, genetics
VIII. References

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Section: John Bengtson
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  1. 1
    Angus J. Huck 
    Thursday, 9. March 2017

    Bengtson has provided us with a concise and useful summary of the case for Vasco-Caucasianism. The potted history is very valuable, as are the comparisons of core lexicon and the attempts to identify regular sound correspondences.

    Bengtson’s achievement is to take a hypothesis that, for most of its history, has been somewhat speculative and only modestly supported by evidence, reinvigorate it and put flesh on its bones. And what a lot of flesh there is.

    It is necessary to sound a note of caution, however. Bengtson has relied on Michelena’s so-called internal reconstructions, but many of these are wrong. If we wish to cross a chasm, we have to get as close to the edge as the terrain allows. So what we need to do to complete the job is to venture as far back into the prehistory of Vasconic as the data permit. We need to identity Proto-Vasconic, if you like. And we can do that. The place to start is Iberian, a partially attested language spoken 2,000 years ago that is very closely related to Basque, then we can travel back to other much more scantily attested Vasconic languages that are detectable through onomastics and substrate loanwords. These provide us with a much more reliable springboard to cross the chasm than Michelena’s flawed work.

    Bengtson is probably right when he says that Vasconic continuity going back 35,000 years is unlikely. There is quite a formidable barrier in the way of the Cro-Magnon hypothesis, and that barrier is ice. However, Lafon’s hypothesis that Vasconic was brought to Europe by Neolithic farmers cannot stand. Why not? Firstly, 2,000 years have produced little change in the form of Basque. Why would an additional and earlier 3,000 years have been productive of much more radical changes? Secondly, the presence of a Vasconic footprint in most parts of Europe (even Germanic and Slavonic have Vasconic loanwords) tells us that Vasconic spread over most or the whole of Europe at some point in the distant past creating languages that differed not that much one from the other. It seems to me that the melting of the ice is the most likely enabling event.

    The list of supposed shared agricultural terms is not as impressive as it first appears. Many of these words are not specifically agricultural. One or two are based on wrong reconstructions. The branches of Indo-European disagree more than they agree on agricultural terms. Indeed, Latin did not even succeed in bequeathing its word for “wheat” to French. Why would the ancestor of North Caucasian have been more successful in this regard?

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