> Cesar may not be happy to hear this
> but I just think this division in three is BullShit.
> It doesn't even mention Basks and Greeks !!
Larry Trask, The History of Basque,
generally considered to be the best work on the history of the Basque
language, p. 398
"
According to Julius Caesar, while most of Gaul was occupied in his day
by Celts, the southwestern part was inhabited by a people whom he
calls the Aquitani (or Aquitanians) and whom he describes as entirely
distinct from their Celtic neighbours. The Aquitanian language is
attested in the form of about 400 personal names and seventy names of
divinities, embedded in Latin texts. These texts are mostly votive and
funerary inscriptions, but there are also a few of a literary nature.
There are no connected texts in Aquitanian, but most of the names are
compound in form or contain derivational suffixes, and some of them
exhibit what appear to be indigenous case-endings in place of Latin
ones. Given the nature of most of the texts, it is unsurprising that
they frequently stress the sex, age and parentage of a named
individual, a fact which is highly convenient.
That the Aquitanian fragments might reveal a language related to
Basque was suspected by generations of vasconists and romanists, many
of whom pointed to this or that tempting resemblance, and the close
relation, or even identity, of Basque and Aquitanian was openly
maintained by some, beginning perhaps with Luchaire (1877). A list of
the Aquitanian names then known was compiled and published by Seymour
Ricci (1903). But it was only with the publication of Luis Michelena's
long monograph (1954a), surveying and cataloguing the entire corpus of
Aquitanian material, that it became possible to weigh up the evidence.
Briefly, what Michelena found was this: (1) of the forty or so stems
and affixes which are sufficiently frequent to be isolated with some
confidence, more than half appear to be transparently Basque or can at
least be plausibly identified with elements in Basque; (2) so far as
can be determined from the apparently somewhat defective Roman
alphabet in which the texts are written, the phonological system of
Aquitanian is strikingly similar to what is independently
reconstructed for Pre-Basque (see Chapter 3); and (3) the pattern of
word-formation in Aquitanian is identical to that in Basque. One or
two additional texts have turned up since 1954, notably the Lerga
stele discovered in 1960, and these additional materials confirm
Michelena's findings.
This is not the place to repeat Michelena's findings in detail (a
convenient brief sample of annotated Aquitanian texts is provided in
the first chapter of Michelena's 1964a book), but I shall at least
illustrate these findings. Michelena's work has recently been
confirmed and extended by Gorrochategui (1984, 1995).
"
etc
Torsten