Re: The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe

Jack Campin - bogus address wrote:
Mark Liberman persuaded Don Ringe to guest-post to the Language Log
on The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe:
<http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=980#more-980>.

It's a long and readable overview of what can be supposed, referring
in particular to Johanna Nicholls, Benjamin Fortson and David
Anthony, but followed by an extensive bibliography. The following
discussion is interesting, too, at least before the predictable
accusations of political agenda.

One kind of argument that didn't feature as much as I would have
expected was looking at relict features that might have been derived
from substrate languages. E.g. there are some iffy arguments that
some of the syntax of English might be of Celtic origin, and a perhaps
even more iffy suggestion that the vowel system of Spanish derives in
part from Basque. Does nobody at all see that as a reasonable line of
inquiry any more, or at least not as solid enough to discover anything
about completely vanished languages?

Ringe is looking back a good deal further than the 1500 years or so of your examples, so it would be even more iffy than there to invoke substrate influence, especially substrates about which nothing is known. I think Ringe is right not to invoke this sort of argument.

I haven't heard before of your Basque/Spanish example. How does this work? The vowels of Spanish are pretty standard proto-Romance. Of course, proto-Romance /e / and /o / (Latin /e:, i / and /o:, u /) are lost, having diphthongised in tonic syllables and merged with /E / and /O / in atonic syllables -- both of these occured in the Late Latin period, and thus also occurs in Italian (though the dipthongisation occurs only in open syllables there) -- but not in Portuguese, I think. I've heard the diphthongisation attributed to the influence of Germanic speakers, which makes more sense than Basque. Most Basque varieties have /a e i o u /, like Spanish, but all its dipthongs involve off-glides, not on-glides like the ones in Spanish and Italian. Pre-Basque was apparently the same, though nasalization occured at one stage in Basque (similar to French and Portuguese, but _not_ Spanish).

OK, I just looked at Larry Trask's "History of Basque", in particular his section 6.13 "The Alleged Influence upon Castillian Spanish". He devotes one paragraph on p 423 to the vowel argument, and using the same basic argument as me concludes "hence there is nothing here to be explained".

One substrate influence that has often been suggested is the First Consonant Shift (Grimm's Law) in Germanic (IE *p>f, *bh>b, *b>p, etc), though of course we have no idea of what the substrate might have been. It occurs to me that if, as Paolo Ramat suggests in the Routledge "IE Languages", the Second (High Germanic) Consonant Shift (IE *d>ts, etc) actually occurred at the same time as the First, just further south, then we might have here evidence for two different substrates. Well, maybe.

John.


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