Baffling Basque

Humanity is naturally attracted to mystery, but we are not satisfied when a mystery remains unsolved. Imagine how all of those Brits would have felt if at the end of The Hound of the Baskervilles if, instead of discovering the culprit's hideaway, Holmes himself is killed by the hound and it continues to terrorize the moor for centuries to come. Or what if the folks from CSI stopped solving the crimes, perplexed at how smart those criminals are? I think they might lose one or two of their viewers. Then there are the perennial pleasers - aliens, bigfeet, that indomitable abominable snowman, and most recently, the Knights Templar and their secret treasure. All of these continue to fascinate the general public because they are still unsolved mysteries, but we are trying to solve them. And we especially like a mystery if someone can propose an answer that contradicts the general opinion. We will continue to propose answers until one is so completely unassailable that no one could possible dismiss it. Then the mystery loses its mystique, as have many natural phenomena that were mysteries to our forebears: fire, lightning, earthquakes, and the like. We know the facts, so they are no longer mystifying.

But there is still a ponderous quantity of mysteries out there, and I was rethrown into one this past weekend. We were up in Athens for a wedding, and as Ashley and I are wont to do with in our free time, we wanted to go to a bookstore after the rehearsal dinner on Friday. So we went first to our old haunt, Borders, but the whole shopping center had lost power due to a strong storm passing through. This, I believe, was a fortunate stroke of fate. Rather than turn in sans a bookstore perusal, we went to the slightly further afield Barnes and Noble. As we rummaged our way into the center of the store, I asked an employee what time the store closed. He replied that it closed at eleven, and I felt like I had seen the fellow somewhere before. But I continued on in my rummaging.

When what should I recall but that Lloyd, the amiable employee, was my linguistics teacher several years earlier. So I went back and verified this fact and we began to discuss our lives since we so sadly parted ways post-LING 2100. I told him how I had become very interested in toponyms in England (place names and their etymologies), which led us to the aforementioned mystery:

"Aha!" says he. "I recently read a very interesting article about a linguist who reanalyzed a bunch of European hydronyms (water names - rivers especially) as Basque, proposing that Basque was the original European language, the earliest language that was ever there."

"Mysterious?" you may be thinking. Let me explain why. With the exception of four languages in Europe (Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, and Basque), all European tongues are classified as Indo-European. That is, a long time ago, some chaps who originated probably somewhere in the Middle East started spreading out, and now the languages that originated from that group are spoken from India to America. So Latin and its descendants) are Indo-European, as are Greek, Hindi, German, Persian, and English. Finnish and Estonian were transplants, carried with people groups from the Ural mountain region after the Indo-European languages were established in Europe. Hungarian was a similar transplant.

Basque, however, is unique. A small corner of northern Spain and southwestern France is home to the Basque people and has been for ages. But nobody knows where the Basque people came from, and the Basque language is completely unrelated to all other languages on Earth. There aren't many of these language isolates (as they are called), and Basque is the poster child of them all. So while we English speakers can trace our language first back to England then to the Frisian coast of Europe, then to Saxony, and from there all the way back to the Middle East, the history of the Basque language starts and ends in Basque country. For all we know it has always been there.

As a lover of language, I have always been intrigued by Basque. It was a mystery to me, just as Sherlock Holmes, and one for which I have always desired an answer. With all the complexity of modern scholarship, surely someone should be able to give a convincing explanation for this strange people and their language. I am not the first to by mystified - many throughout the ages have conjectured about the Basque origin. Some tried to establish connections to Armenia, North Africa, Siberia, and even Japan. Others have said the Basque are descended from Aitor, the only chap to survive the flood other than Noah and his family (though I had never heard of him). And of course some have claimed the Basque are the lost thirteenth tribe of Israel while others say they are the survivors of Atlantis.

So back to my discussion with my old linguistics teacher. I was of course interested when he told me about a new study, by a bona fide linguist, that may explain this ancient enigma. Hydronyms, particularly names of rivers, seem to be the most unchanging names in a landscape. For instance, when the Normans conquered England many words in English changed drastically, particularly in the legal realm. But the names of rivers were immutable. The conquering group had no reason to rename rivers; it was not practical or helpful. This has applied very steadily throughout history as conquering peoples replaced others in Europe. So the names of rivers and other bodies of water should reflect very ancient languages, probably the first languages to be established in the region.

The study my teacher spoke of attempted to show that Basque was the original language in Europe and that the invading Indo-European language simply squashed it until it was only extant in its current region. If this was true, then many rivers in Europe would still carry names given in Basque, or derivatives thereof. The author of the study, Theo Vennemann, then postulated many etymologies for hydronyms throughout western Europe, claiming to show that Basque had indeed been the first of all "European" languages, the original, an ancient foundation that Indo-European unfortunately obliterated.

I was very pleased by the idea - this seemed to be a intellectually satisfying theory. So the next day I began to search for the work to give it a read. I found it - it cost $300 and was 1000 pages long. So I found a review instead, published in the journal Lingua. It was a comprehensive and fairly written review, compiled by a large number of respected linguists. Unfortunately, in the 30 or 40 pages of the review, it became very obvious that Mr Vennemann was grasping at straws. A long time student of Basque, he, like many of us amateurs, desperately wanted the Basque mystery to be greater than it was, to be hiding a vast importance that we have yet to discover. Truth be told, the vast majority of the etymologies that formed the foundation of Vennemann's theory are deeply questionable, and the linguist academy still holds that all of the rivers in question have very probable roots in Indo-European language.

I also looked around online, and it seems that the review is in accord with most people's view on the matter. The evidence for Vennemann is untenable, simply wishful thinking. So Basque is still an unsolved mystery, an island in language and history. I'm sure one day it will be solved, but maybe not in my lifetime.

Like many others I'm sure, I have always loved a good conspiracy. It would be cool if the Knights Templar really had a vast hidden treasure or if someone found El Dorado or the Fountain of Youth. But no matter how enticing, we must assess the evidence of the claims. Many people seem to think the Da Vinci code is real, despite all the dozens of books with convincing evidence that it is a complete falsehood. It is just so exciting. Cover ups that stretch across millennia, fortunes untold, eternal youth!!

The reviewers of the Basque theory make something very clear: Vennemann's argument is seductive. It is very well written, convincingly argued, wonderfully appealing. But the facts are in opposition to the rhetoric. So which should we accept?

For now, we must reject Vennemann; we also must reject Dan Brown. And unfortunately we must reject National Treasure (alas!). Facts before rhetoric, evidence before conjecture, particularly when it comes to history.

So there you have it. We still don't know anything about Basque, but is certainly interesting. And while I cannot accept the theory that Basque was the first language in Europe (at least with the current evidence), I'm still holding out for the Atlantis theory.