Edo Nyland wrote
> I gave you two references, my book and Colin Renfrew's.
Edo, I am aware that Basque is a remnant of a family of languages
that shows that it probably extends back to the Magdalenian culture
of the Ice Age Maximum, circa 18,000 BCE. It is interesting that the
cave paintings of this culture are claosely identified with people
who later speak Basque (from Aquitain to Nevarre).
Edo personally I am not a Basque scholar but I do respoect and admire
the work of Larry Trask who is probably the greatest contemporary
Basque linguist.
Thanks for the reference to Petr Ljandacek: ljandacek@...
<mailto:ljandacek@...> (Los Alamos, NM) and Spektrum der
Wissenschaft (German equivalent to Scient. American) by Dr. Elisabeth
Hamel and Dr. Theo Vennemann. Entitled "Die Ursprache der
Alteuropaer" (Vaskonish war die Ursprache des Kontinents), May 2002
issue.
I will try to access these if I can/
You write
> You state so definitively that Latin was the source of some English
> words, not Basque. But where do you think Latin came from? I told
> you that all I-E languages were invented with the use of Basque and
> I believe I have proved that in my Ling. Archaeology Book.
Edo, I must try to get a copy of your book. Do you sell them? If so
how much?
Trask on this matter states
"Like the Celtic and Germanic languages, the Latin language of the
Romans was an Indo-European language, descended from an ancestral
language originally spoken far to the east. As these Indo-European
languages spread slowly westward across Europe, they gradually
displaced most of the earlier languages, which died out. By the time
the Romans arrived, an ancestral form of Basque, which we call
Aquitanian, was the only pre-Indo-European language still surviving
in Gaul. The position in Spain was much more complicated, with
several pre-Indo-European languages still spoken, including
Aquitanian and the famous Iberian, but all these others were soon
displaced by Latin. Uniquely among the pre-Indo-European languages of
western Europe, Basque has refused to die out and has survived down
to the present day, though, as Q2 makes clear, the language has been
gradually losing territory for a long time."
See
http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/larryt/basque.faqs.html
You asked
> How come all Egyptian pharaohs' names, as far as 5200 years back,
> without exception can be translated into Basque sentences if there
> was no Basque language dictionary? Of course there was. I think you
> should re-examine all those "facts" that were pumped into your
> head and are now uttered by you as gospel. We are talking here
> about a Bronze Age development of incredible importance and all
> academia is doing is poo-pooing and ridiculing the idea while
> refusing to examine the back-up data.
Edo, what evidence do you have of an Early Bronze Age Basque
Dictionary. If such a thing existed surely it revolutionise
archaeology. I am also interested in how you transliterate Egyptian
Pharaoh's names into Basque. Which version of Egyptian do you use -
Wallis Budge, Gardiner or Faulkner's Concise Dictionary of Middle
Egyptian. As an Afro-Asiatic language, I am sure you will know
Ancient Egyptian carries its declensions through a three consonantal
system (C-C-C), in which vowels were usually incidental to
determining the meaning. Thus for instance the name we use for
translating the name of Egypt - eg. "Kemet" meaning "the Black Land",
is in fact KMT. It is modern Egyptologists who have added
the "kEmEt" where "E" stands in place of an unknown vowel. This
makes it almost totally impossible to work out how Egyptian was
*actually* spoken. This is very different in nature than is the
Basque language. There are also huge differences in Phonemes between
the two languages. Like Semitic languages Egyptian shows the
presence of noun classes and gramatical gender through the addition
of a terminal *-t, while Basque has no grammatical gender and no noun
classes. There is also no similarity with pronouns and
demonstratives. Egyptian as an Afro-Asiatic language has a pronoun
system typical of these languages
wi 'I', tw 'you (masc)', tn 'you (fem)', sw (he, him), sy and st
(she, her), *-n 'we', *-tn 'you (plural)', *-sn 'they'
whereas in Basque the pronoun set is
ni `I`, hi `you' (singular intimate), zu `you' (singular unmarked),
gu `we', zuek `you' (plural). The intimate hi is of extraordinarily
restricted use: it is regularly used only between siblings and
between close friends of the same sex and roughly the same age. It
may optionally be used in addressing children.
Unlike vocabulary items, pronoun sets tend to be conserved
enormously. As you see there is very little similarity between
Ancient Egyptian and the Basque language.
You wrote
> He said that what I am doing is destroying the foundation upon
> which I-E linguistics is based, a total paradigm shift, by changing
> from a lovely looking tree-like family relationship to a group of
> totally invented languages without relationships that make much
> sense. The monks doing this work were extremely professional and
> creative. Why is it so surprising that no one has ever found the
> origin of the phantom proto-I-E language, or any inscription in
> that language.
Simple. Because at 3,500 BCE (the time the Proto-Indo-European
language was being spoken in its Urheimat) there was no literacy in
that part of the world. Edo, before 1829 there was no inscriptions
of the Aboriginal Nyungar language too, but this does not mean that
this language did not exist before that date just because the
Aboriginal Australians, like the speakers of PIE were a pre-literate
language.
It is also interesting that in the case of a number of Indo-European
languages (indeed in the case of those languages on which the
similarities for PIE were first built, i.e. Latin, Greek Iranian and
Sanscrit, and later the Anatolian Hittite languages) they existed
*BEFORE* there were monks.
> Look at my L.A. book and follow the tutorial. This was done at the
> U. of Wisconsin and next October I will be there on a week-long
> series of lectures. A long review of my two books is to be found in
> the last issue of the ASCAP Society Volume 4, #2. See pages 28-33
> by Dr. Russell Gardner. www.theascapsociety.org
Unfortunately Volume 4 number 2 does not seem to be posted to their
site yet.
Regards
John