Indo-European and Basque, pt 2 (with Prof. Juliette Blevins)
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- Опубликовано: 23 май 2024
- Prof. Juliette Blevins (CUNY) discusses her work connecting Proto-Indo-European with Basque with Prof. Tony Yates (UCLA), Dr. Luke Gorton (U. of New Mexico), and Dr. Jackson Crawford in this conversation recorded live with Crawford's Patreon supporters on May 19, 2024. Preceding discussion (of Blevins's work by Yates/Gorton/Crawford): • Indo-European and Basq...
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This is incredibly, incredibly fascinating to me. Even if these videos don't get the most views, I appreciate them greatly. Thanks to Juliette for sharing her work and to Jackson for making this conversation happen. I would gladly watch more mutli-hour discussions of cutting edge academic linguistics.
Thank you! So fantastic that after discussing her work Prof Blevins has joined the conversation. Great style.
What an amazing presenter.
Much waited for follow up. Settling down with coffee and beetroot+chocolate cake.
Same (minus the cake).
😂
Pretty sure bees don't have troots. Aside from that, sounds yum. XD
@@xwngdrvrgolfmao!!
I hope you brought enough cake to share with the whole class.
@@xwngdrvr quit makin me laff shawty
This was a fascinating subject matter, and I hope you continue to cover it. I hope the idea is picked up and worked on in other disciplines, to shed light on it from other angles.
12:00 Mapuzungun or "Mapuche" as stated by professor Blevins, is nearly extinct in Argentina. Chile has the largest percentage of Mapuche descendants and speakers.
Really looking forward to this! So glad you got Prof. Blevins on after the first discussion!
.....can I just SAY, Jackson - as someone with a LIFELONG burning intellectual curiosity (a trait which seems to be DIMINISHING in the 21st century - but HOPEFULLY, will revive soon) ALL around (not JUST with respect to linguistics) your content MASSIVELY indulges it : )
😍😍😍
I've been waiting for this ever since I was one of the _many_ hundreds of viewers who watched your previous video about Prof. Blevins book till the very end. Really excited to start listening now!
I hope you invite a Basque linguist to join the conversation some day.
In academia your authority only derives from your expertise, though, not from your ethnicity or native language.
Are you referring to a linguist who specializes in Basque *other* than Mrs. Blevins, or a linguist who is ethnically Basque?
Basque-ing in the erudition.
Hi, Professor Blevins!
Thanks so much for this. I was fascinated by your previous RUclips discussion about Prof. Blevins' work, and am delighted that she joined you in person for this exposition and discussion which I found very accessible. This is not intended as a criticism, and being an ordinary member of the public I may have misunderstood, but I am puzzled by what was said at 59.53: "Latin has toga ... it doesn't have tegi", given that there is the Latin verb whose principal parts are tego-tegere-texi-tectum, which does mean to cover.
I've waited for this video with more anticipation than maybe any film I've ever seen.
THANK YOU!!!!!
Wonderful and fascinating lecture, thanks for posting!
Appian, Mithridatic Wars chapter 15: "Some people think that the Iberians (Colchian-Georgian Kingdom) of Asia were the ancestors of the Iberians of Europe"
This is so fascinating, I am not a linguist, but a hobby.
Great guest
Yeah I was waiting for this one
It must be so frustrating to work on relationships between language families because there are so many tantalizing conclusions that all seem to be JUUUUUST beyond what we can prove with our data and methods. Same for comparative Indo-European mythology.
Oh, this is so fantastic, I will need to listen devotedly, (more focused is what I mean) I have no doubt there is a relationship unless people are born communicating, but it is so great to know such a great effort and skepticism is being used to find the relationship, too often I wonder how did "they" come to know that? Julliette reinforces my faith in the findings of scholars, and I sincerely wish her the best and hope she finds what she is looking for! And I hope this happens before the book is finished 😊.
oh hell yeah! so stoked for this episode of Three Plus One Ling Circus
Has anyone seen Learn Hittite's video on Prof Blevins' work? On the whole he is quite positive but he has also done videos on for example Indo-Uralic and this hypothesis seems to be gaining a lot of traction in Europe - especially researchers from Leiden and the work resulting from the 'Precursors to Indo-European' collab. How does proto-Basque fit into this model?
Oh is his channel good? I keep getting recommended it.
Val d'Aran in Catalonia could be "Valley of Valley" etymologically?
‘Val’ means ‘valley’ in Aranese (which is a variant of the Gascon dialect of Occitan), and ‘aran’ (written ‘haran’ in the official spelling of Standard Basque- Euskera Batua) also means ‘valley’ in Basque. So, yes, technically it means ‘Valley of valley’
Not could, it's. I mean, it's been accepted for ages. Basque was spoken there till the late middle ages.
This was brilliant!!!
Really fantastic! I just don't see how her hypothesis could even be implausible, unless you posit that the neolithic hunter-gatherers who moved up into the Pontic steppes were an entirely different group of people completely unrelated to the neolithic hunter-gatherers who moved up into Europe to become the Basques, Etruscans, etc.
Yeeeeeessssssss. I had been waiting for this!🎉🎉🎉 let’s hear it now!
Wow! And two hours long. Can’t wait to listen, but might need to wait till morning
Not even half-wat through, but can confirm this is a treasure. The algorithm should recommend this to every user.
Thank you for getting her on the show! I'm excited to watch this later today.
Enjoyed this. Do it again for the sequal
Christmas came early this year
LOVELY!!! My prayers answered!
This'll make good listening at work tomorrow!
Very interesting and informative. 😊❤
This is probably kind of work, where a trailblazer opens up the field, and what's important is that other people absorb and continue it, including linguistic working in other area, archaeologists, anthropologists, geneticists, so the more attention the better. I'm curious, if this is a relic of what you might call, Pre-Yamnaya Indo-European,, if there's a possibility teasing out, Pre-Yamnaya strata in other Indo-European languages. ?
Do you mean the study of Paleo-European and Pre-Indo-European Languages? They aren't Indo-European, but rather the languages of the Anatolian Farmers (EEF), and of the WHG (Western Hunterer Gatherers), which lived in Europea before the Yamnaya expansion. There's no consolidated research on them, but linguists like Robert S. P. Beekes have books on Pre-Greek substrate and Pre-Germanic substrate. Probably the only well-researched Paleo-European languages are Basque and Etruscan. I don't really buy the whole "Indo-European and Basque share ancestry" deal, but you could use material culture by pointing out Gravettian venus figures were found in Ancient North Eurasian sites, although that isn't much evidence of anything considering Indo-European mythology is quite distinct from Paleo-European ones, if not completely contradictory in most factors. Personal pronouns aren't a good indicator because we can also find personal pronouns like "mi" and "mimi" in Africa, which aren't connected to Proto-Indo-European.
Awesome, I really enjoy these talks! More Basque and (Old) Irish / Gaelic stuff please if possible 😊
My curiosity was piqued in the last video given the response of Jackson and Tony which seemed reasonably positive - remnants of the PIE laryngeals in PB are particularly intriguing. In truth I was a little disappointed in some of Blevins presentation - cognates like PB *bihi - many small round objects and PIE *bhei - bee seem tenuous at best. All the more so when bihi in modern Basque refers to seeds or grain - it seems pretty unlikely to my mind that animate objects like bees were conflated with inanimate object like seeds at any point. Many of her other proposed cognates seem more compelling but some of the more problematic one only serve to undermine her argument and you wonder why not just leave them out. An argument is only as strong as it's weakest element after all.
Just for clarification, why do you think of seeds as inanimate?
THis is fantastic. Can the panel have a discussion on Sanskrit and Rishi Poppat's correct interpretation of Panini's formula
I don't really buy the whole "Indo-European and Basque share a connection" deal, but you could use material culture by pointing out Gravettian venus figures were found in Ancient North Eurasian sites, although that isn't much evidence of anything considering Indo-European mythology is quite distinct from Paleo-European, if not completely contradictory in most factors. Personal pronouns aren't a good indicator because we can find 1st person personal pronouns like "mi" and "mimi" in Kiswahili, and it'd be weird trying to say "I conclude that East African languages are connected to Indo-European because it's similiar to 'h₁mé' and 'me'" based off that data, when in likelihood it's probably due to those consonant-vowel pairs being the easiest to pronounce/develop, just like "mama" and "papa". In the same light, Etruscan has "ati" for mother and "apa" for father, much closer to Basque "ama" and "aita" in my opinion. Etruscan also has "mi" and "mimi" 1st person personal pronouns, similiar to Basque "ni".
You also have to take in account loanwords, especially since all throughout Indo-European languages we have words from Paleo-Europeans, mostly being agricultural terms and plants. Some basic words like the Latin, Greek, and Germanic terms for "axe" and "rose" are also most likely Pre-Indo-European derived. Plenty of ethnonyms and toponyms are also Paleo-European, and there's a whole field of study around using hydronyms to discern more data about the Paleo-Europeans. With those features, it would be much easier to group Basque with the rest of Paleo-European languages rather than Indo-European. The linguist Robert S.P. Beekes has books on the Pre-Greek substrate, and I know there's some research into the Pre-Germanic substrate but nothing as consolidated as we have for Indo-European languages; Pretty much the best researched/consolidated Paleo-European languages are Etruscan and Basque.
There's some evidence to show Etruscan is connected to Pre-Greek and Pre-Germanic, but few to prove a connection between Basque and the rest, so there is some room for speculation regarding their actual origins. However, I've heard some propose that Basque is an language introduced by the Iberomaurusians which would explain why it's seemingly unconnected to Berber languages and at the same time unconnected to other Pre-Indo-European languages. It's surprising the majority of Indo-European language even retained, considering it had to compete with the languages of Paleo-European populations which were much larger due to agricultural practices and urbanization than Indo-Europeans, but that's a likely result of Indo-European hyperviolence and societal hierarchical power compared to Old Europeans.
With the word comparisons showed at the nine minute mark, you'd actually be finding more defendable similiarities to Indo-European languages if you replaced Basque with Etruscan, and I don't think anyone claims Etruscan is an Indo-European language.
How does this theory handle the nature of Basque as agglutinative versus the fusional nature of Proto-Indo-European? If there was to be a connection between Basque and Indo-European, it'd have to be before Archaic Proto-Indo-European, as the only agglutinative remnants in it are present in Hittite, Luwian, and the Anatolian Indo-European languages. This is also a feature of Etruscan, being agglutinative, which is why it's perceivably better to group Basque with other Paleo-European languages rather than attributing it to some proposed Indo-European macrofamily.
We also have to take in account that for centuries the Basque have been ruled over and had direct contact with Indo-European peoples, many of which wanted to culturally convert them.
Of course, I don't have a formal doctorate or education in linguistics nor anthropology yet, so what I'm saying isn't really much more than a layman's contribution.
This was super interesting, I just have one question. What do owls, rabbits and ivy have to do with hollowness? Or is the point that we haven't figured it out yet?
She had a slide that owls live in the hollow of trees and rabbits have in-ground hollows. I didn't get the ivy association, sorry.
@@stewkingjr ohhhhh thank you! I was listening as a podcast and didn't see the slides!
I don't believe in isolates. I can't imagine that languages were "invented" in multiple locations independently. It can never be proven one way or the other, but my firm belief is that human language was a single invention, at a time long before the first migration out of the Eastern Africa region where modern humans originated. And thus, all languages are related. A time span of a few hundred thousand years naturally means that languages and language groups have evolved to become so different so as to seem unrelated.
"unassigned" is perhaps a bit more agnostic on the single origin question
I don't think you'll find many people who seriously believe that modern spoken languages are derived from distinct, independent inventions of spoken language. A language family is a set of languages whose relatedness can be established, and a language isolate is just a language that linguists have been unable to assign to any language family. The fact that we can't establish the relatedness of, say, English and Zulu does not mean that they are not related, but just that the relationship has been so muddied by changes over tens of thousands of years (perhaps more) that we cannot now detect it.
@@omp199 Which is what I meant. I just find "isolate" to be a very strong term. "Unassigned", as suggested by the commenter above, is a much better term for it, in my opinion.
This was really interesting! It's very easy for people to dismiss non-mainstream theories like this because of how many unsubstantiated theories there are, but this is certainly food for thought. It wasn't that long ago that laryngeal theory was just a fringe theory, so who knows what this could lead to?
Thank you all for this! Amazing work. I'm not a linguist but in terms of the big picture, everything Prof Blevins says makes a LOT of sense. I'd be surprised if she isn't proven right down the line.
At the same time, while I agree with her on the importance of open-minded academic enquiry based on curiosity, to be fair to the Basque linguists, I do get where they might be coming from.
Aside from the usual point about how "paradigms change one funeral at a time", who'd want to be the local, the euskaditar, who robs the Basque Country of the one thing most people around the world know about them? The _only_ reason many of us know of their existence even, especially the younger generation (since ETA laid down arms).
It isn't hard to imagine why no one there really wants to touch this. Whether you want to advocate for independence from your colonizers or attract tourists, "Our ancestors probably came here a little earlier than the rest of their distant cousins" doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "Our unique language and mysterious origins...."
I keep wondering if you'll manage to get Lakarra to join you for another conversation about this work. If not, it sounds like it'd be worth asking Ander Egurtzegi if he'd mind diving a little more deeply into the Basque side with you. Even if he mostly agrees with Blevins, and specializes in a different time period, he'd likely be able to help us all understand more about the basic Basque points and perspectives. In fact, I hope you've already asked him 😍
Scholars always point to R1b as the likely PIE lineage, but Europeans carry just as much DNA from haplogroup G, the lineage of the Caucuses, which is closely related to IJK, the lineage of the indigenous Europeans and people of the near east. It seems to me R1b is the lineage of the Uralics, and PIE must come to us through our Caucasian ancestors who settled in Anatolia ~12kya. What interests me is that there is evidence of a migration from Anatolia to western Europe ~7.5kya, pre-dating the accepted PIE migration that we observe at around ~4.5kya. Perhaps the Basque-Aquitanians are a long-lost sister clade to IE from the earliest layers of the family, before the northward IE expansion and the contact with Uralic. If it's valid, it would mean the IE family tree probably includes the Pontic and Caspian languages, as well as Basque-Aquitanian, the languages of Old Europe, and Sumerian, among others. This is all complete speculation, however- no relationship has ever been firmly established between any of these language families. The details are lost forever to the sands of time.
🙄 You are very close to the truth.... 🤔🕵♂👍
Would be beneficial to add comparatives from other language families. Some words from Basque sound like Ugric and Turkic. For example, Russian word for father is ОТЕЦ, which has the same root as Turkic and Ugric ATA with old suffix Ц glued with the root OT-AT. Could be a common very old word predating PIE, prototurkic, protougric.
Some have also tried to connect Korean w/ Tungusic, or Dravidian, but these hypotheses are usually seen as even less provable than the Japanese proposition.
720p made this a little challenging at times.
Random thought: horsto - borsto {I think the presentation used a Celtic word for palm of the hand} -faust - fist -five -funf -pyate - pente -panch (a HAND -fist [of a human] is a LEAF [of a tree or bush])
Why does she keep on mention the Iberian Peninsula and never (I think) mentions Aquitania? I mean, ain't Basque an Aquitanian language and Basques arrived to current Basque Country from Aquitania in historical times?
It's complitated. Linguists think that both Indo-European and Basque related languages were spoken in Iberian Basque Country in Late Antiquity. Maybe there was an Aquitanian Southwest migration in historical times that extended the Basque speaking area but it doesn't mean related languages had not been spoken there before.
Probably the isolate languages of Europe should have some sort of ancient parenthood or kinship... Nuragic Tyrrhenian and Basque... With proto Indo European and maybe proto Uralic and maybe some Caucasus language like Georgian( Kartvelian)...
Whether they're related or not is beside the point: the designation of "isolate" is a matter of honesty. It's a way to say that we don't have sufficient evidence. It's not a "yes", but it's also not a "no", just the honest assumption of one until sufficient evidence exists.
For all we know, all our languages can be tied back to a small number of people who survived a population bottleneck, but as weirdly effective as the comparative method is, it only gets us so far and can't account for fashions, slangs, population replacements (which can be various degrees of grimness going from death to cultural hegemony), &c. Mind you, sometimes we have echoes of long dead languages, such as in names, particularly placenames and rivers, but none of that is enough to reconstruct much, even if there's some tantalising stuff there.
What would a similar analysis reveal about Etruscan?
Have read that Greek is derived from a mixing of some form of PIE and some previous existing language, what I wonder?
Would Basque be the last vestige of Western Hunter/Gatherer then?
"Nephew" isn't a cognate of nepōs, it's a descendant via a borrowing from Old French into Middle English. The native English equivalent is the obsolete "neve" from Old English "nefa" (the 'f' was still pronounced as a 'v', since that is the normal allophone of 'f' after a vowel in native English words - voiceless fricatives are regularly voiced after a preceding vowel)
I would have compared Gothic Atta, father.
Then you would just be looking for coincidental resemblances rather than evidence of relatedness. That would be a pointless exercise. If Gothic and Basque are related, then they are related through PIE.
Is there anything non-experts can do to help? I know chance resemblances, loanwords, and common words can throw things off.
Any good non-paywalled resources like language Corpus, etc, or preferred reference works i.e. etymology databases, maps...
Hey ive seen a Skol/Hati Ying yang ragnarok themes tatoo and Runes are around them, now this picture there are many versions of it where the runes are turned so they appear on the other side in another picture etc. Is there a way to find out what it means because i dont really know the language norse/old norse not to mention runes exept of when you explained how to write names of the gods etc in runes and how to pronounce them
It's a cool topic and the discussion was indeed interesting.
Regarding her being ignored, I suspect she encountered the political aspect of the part of the Basque speaking community. Some of those speakers have invested heavily on their language and, to some degree, their cultural identity, being an isolate and therefore special in some way. It wouldn't be farfetched to think it makes those of them more prone to rejecting the possibility of considering connections to other European communities.
Have just seen quite an interesting attempt to put сову на глобус ;)
the genetic evidence we have now seems to indicate that both basque and etruscan peoples developed in close proximity to indo-european languages, probably in the balkans or danube basin, and then moved westward along with proto-indo-european. On the other hand, more aDNA studies could come out next week that change our picture completely.
Since their first video, I've wondered if the R1 Y chromosome represents an ancestral population akin to this proposed macro family, with R1a spreading with PIE and R1b spreading with PB. R1b is most common in western Europe, but peaks among Basques and Irish populations, iirc. The Irish of course have the mythological origin of the Milesians coming from Spain, and before that from Scythia. But the linguistic evidence here of PB influencing Celtic could support that in some way too.
@@dcdcdc556 It wouldn't surprise me if that was correct or at least partially correct. Entirely possible that Basque and Etruscan peoples genetically separated in the pre-horse domestication period when Anatolian developed. The Irish retained a lot of PIE religion/myth that isn't shared by Basques or Etruscans, so positing the Irish as derived from the same ancestors as Basque doesn't follow unless we posit a second wave of Celts settling in Ireland and replacing the previous religion, so that part of it anyway I wouldn't know how to reconcile.
Aren't Etruscans from the Villanovans? From what I recall, they split off from the Urnfield Culture, but there's a possibility they came from Paleo-European populations in the Balkans. Didn't some studies find I2 yDNA in Croatian populations? Villanovans were mostly EEF/WHG, only about a quarter WSH. Plus, there's no linguistic connection between Tyrrhenic and Indo-European languages.
@@koderamerikaner5147 correct. The current genetic evidence leans heavily to urnfield in the y DNA with the mtdna being more Neolithic and early farmer which is similar to the pattern for indo European areas. Its possible there are other explanations or perhaps new evidence changes the view so we can't say definitively they traveled with the urnfield culture but the view that they were from western Asia minor at least is looking quite unlikely.
I can't say that I found anything here particularly compelling, unfortunately. Seems like a case of apophenia to me.
There’s no such thing as “Indo-European”.
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