The Question about Vasconic, Atlantic (Semitic) and Insular Celtic
- Mar 28, 2013
- 7 min read
Vasconic:
The Vasconic substratum theory is a proposal that many western European languages contain remnants of an old language family of Vasconic languages, of which Basque is the only surviving member. The proposal was made by the German linguist Theo Vennemann, but has been rejected by other linguists.
According to Vennemann, Vasconic languages were once widespread on the European continent before they were mostly replaced by Indo-European languages. Relics of these languages include toponyms across Central and Western Europe and some vocabulary in Germanic and Balto-Slavic languages that cannot be traced to a common Indo-European ancestor.
Vennemann proposes that after the last Ice Age, Vasconic people from today’s Basque region of northern Spain and Southern France resettled Western Europe. They gave names to the rivers and places. These names often persisted after the Vasconic languages were replaced by Indo-European languages. This is based on parallelisms in European hydronymy that have been noted by Hans Krahe, and in culture by Marija Gimbutas, that are suggested to be relics of a pre-Indo-European substratum.
Theo Vennemann believes that one of the substrata is Vasconic because typical elements of pre-Indo-European toponyms can be explained through the Basque language, for instance the element aran, Unified Basque haran “valley”, in names like Val d’Aran, Arundel, or Arendal. However, most linguists believe that the probability of the hydronyms to have Indo-European origins is greater.
Another piece of evidence for the Vasconic language, according to Vennemann, is the persistence of vigesimal (base-20 counting) traits in Celtic, French, Georgian, the Resian dialect, and Danish. Vennemann regards the vigesimal system as a trait of the Vasconic language.
Vennemann also adduces evidence from genetics and blood types that show that the Basques share characteristics found throughout Central and Western Europe, especially in typical areas of retreat-like mountains.
Vennemann developed his ideas in a series of papers which were collected in a book called Europa Vasconica – Europa Semitica. A long critical review of this appeared in Lingua 116. The hypothetical Vasconic substratum has been largely rejected by historical linguists. Vennemann’s theories on “Vasconic” toponymy and hydronymy were opposed by the British linguist P. R. Kitson in 1996.
German linguist Dieter Steinbauer argued that a language isolate like Basque is unfit for the reconstruction of a substratum language, as there is little historical data for Basque and that Basque itself has adopted many words from Indo-European languages.
Steinbauer criticized Vennemann for assuming Basque roots with initial consonant clusters (which are commonly believed to be adapted from other languages), for ignoring indications that the ancient Etruscan language seems more closely related to western Anatolian languages, and for several methodological flaws, stating that “a scientific discourse with Vennemann must face insurmountable obstacles”.
Atlantic (Semitic):
The Atlantic languages of Semitic or “Semitidic” (para-Semitic) origin are a disputed concept in historical linguistics put forward by Theo Vennemann. The theory has found no notable acceptance in academic circles, and is criticised as being based on sparse and often misinterpreted data.
According to Vennemann, Afroasiatic seafarers settled the European Atlantic coast and are to be associated with the European Megalithic Culture. They left a superstratum in the Germanic languages and a substratum in the development of Insular Celtic. He claims that “Atlantic” (Semitic or Semitidic) speakers founded coastal colonies beginning in the fifth millennium BC. Thus “Atlantic” influenced the lexicon and structure of Germanic and the structure of Insular Celtic.
According to Vennemann, migrating Indo-European speakers encountered non-IE speakers in northern Europe who had already named rivers, mountains and settlements in a language he called “Vasconic”. He considered that there were toponyms on the Atlantic coast that were neither Vasconic nor Indo-European. These he considers derive from languages related to the Mediterranean Hamito-Semitic group.
Vennemann bases his theory on the claim that Germanic words without cognates in other Indo-European languages very often belong to semantic fields that are typical for loanwords from a superstratum language, such as warfare, law and communal life. Likewise, he proposes Semitic etymologies for words of unknown or disputed origin; for instance he relates the word bee to Egyptian bj-t or the name Éire, older *īwerijū to *ʼj-wrʼ(m), ‘island (of) copper’, as in Akkadian weriʼum ‘copper’.
Other evidences he adduces for a Semitic superstratum are a Semitic influence on the Germanic form of the Indo-European ablaut system and similarities between Germanic paganism and Mesopotamian mythology, for instance the parallelism between Freyja and Ishtar, goddesses of war and love.
The idea that there is a connection between Insular Celtic and Afroasiatic goes back to John Davies (1632). It was expanded by John Morris-Jones in 1913 and developed further by Vennemann. This position is supported by Pokorny (1927–49) and Vennemann identifies Phoenicians as the likely people. A key factor is the dominant word order in Insular Celtic compared to other IE languages, together with lexical correspondences. Another important factor is the identification of the people later known as Picts. Vennemann holds the position that they spoke an Atlantic language. This belief was also held by Zimmer (1898) but is not generally accepted.
Hayim Y. Sheynin, adjunct professor of Jewish Literature at Gratz College, critically reviewed the work Europa Vasconica – Europa Semitica (2003) in which Vennemann lays out his arguments for the existence of a Semitic (or “Semitidic”) superstratum in the Germanic languages. He concludes that Vennemann’s arguments are unacceptable on several grounds.
He notes that Vennemann bases important parts of his main claim on long-outdated and critically rejected literature, that many of the words presented by Vennemann as evidence of an Atlantic (Semitidic) superstratum display nothing more than “mere ad hoc sound similarities”, and that Vennemann’s claims made in reference to Semitic range from “objectionable” to “ridiculous”.
In summary, Sheynin concludes “that [Vennemann] failed in this book not only as comparative linguist, or etymologist, but even in his narrow specialization as a Germanist. … In short, we consider the book a complete failure.”
The book has also been reviewed by Baldi and Page (Lingua 116, 2006). They too are critical of his German part of the theory. There are no Phoenician inscriptions in Britain though traders may have visited the island so the Insular Celtic part of the theory depends on linguistic evidence. The period of the fifth millennium is very early for Celtic speakers in Britain compared with other theories, for example Mallory suggests a date around 1000 BC though more recently a third or fourth millennium date has been suggested by Gray and Atkinson (and more controversially by Forster and Toth).
Vennemann’s view of the establishment of megaliths is not supported by mainstream archaeologists who view their construction as having a local origin. Eska (1994) argues that the change from verb-noninitial word order in Continental Celtic to verb-initial in Insular Celtic is internally motivated.
Baldi and Page say that the strength of Vennemann’s proposals lies in his lexical arguments and that these merit serious consideration. The origin of the Picts is unknown, see discussions by Jackson and by Wainright as well as those by Kitson and by Forsyth.
It is not remarkable that structural similarities between the Insular Celtic and some Afro-Asiatic1 languages continue to exert a fascination on many people. Research into any language may be enlightening with regard to the understanding of all languages, and languages that show similar features are particularly likely to provide useful information.
It is remarkable that the structural similarities between Insular Celtic and Afro-Asiatic languages continue to be interpreted as diagnostic of some sort of special relationship between them; some sort of affinity or mutual affiliation that goes beyond the fact that they are two groups of human languages.
Insular Celtic:
Insular Celtic languages are those Celtic languages that originated in the British Isles, in contrast to the Continental Celtic languages of mainland Europe and Anatolia. All surviving Celtic languages are from the Insular Celtic group; the Continental Celtic languages are extinct. The six Insular Celtic languages of modern times can be divided into:
the Goidelic languages: Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic
the Brythonic languages: Breton, Cornish, and Welsh (another language or dialect, Cumbric, is extinct.)
The “Insular Celtic hypothesis” is a theory that the Brythonic and Goidelic languages evolved together in those islands, having a common ancestor more recent than any shared with the Continental Celtic languages such as Celtiberian, Gaulish, Galatian and Lepontic, among others, all of which are long extinct.
The proponents of the Insular Celtic hypothesis (such as Cowgill 1975; McCone 1991, 1992; and Schrijver 1995) point to shared innovations among Insular Celtic languages, including inflected prepositions, shared use of certain verbal particles, VSO word order, and the differentiation of absolute and conjunct verb endings as found extensively in Old Irish and to a small extent in Middle Welsh.
They assert that a partition that lumps the Brythonic languages and Gaulish (P-Celtic) on one side and the Goidelic languages with Celtiberian (Q-Celtic) on the other may be a superficial one (i.e. owing to a language contact phenomenon), as the identical sound shift (/kʷ/ to /p/) could have occurred independently in the predecessors of Gaulish and Brythonic, or have spread through language contact between those two groups.
The concept of the Insular Celtic languages being descended from Hebrew was part of Medieval superstition, but the hypothesis that they had features from an Afro-Asiatic substratum (Iberian and Berber languages) was first proposed by John Morris-Jones in 1900. Some well-known linguists have been adherents such as Julius Pokorny, Heinrich Wagner, and Orin Gensler. There has been further work on the theory by Shisha-Halevy and Theo Vennemann.
However, the theory has been strongly criticised by Graham Isaac and by Kim McCone. Isaac considers the twenty points identified by Gensler as trivial, dependencies or vacuous. Thus he considers the theory to be not just unproven but wrong.
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