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New insights into Basque language origins? - Printable Version

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New insights into Basque language origins? - Kyng - 11-15-2022

[Image: basque-country.png] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/15/hand-of-irulegi-ancient-spanish-artefact-rewrites-history-of-basque-language [Image: basque-country.png]

[Image: wNJtFDb.png]

More than 2,000 years after it was probably hung from the door of a mud-brick house in northern Spain to bring luck, a flat, lifesize bronze hand engraved with dozens of strange symbols could help scholars trace the development of one of the world’s most mysterious languages.

Although the piece – known as the Hand of Irulegi – was discovered last year by archaeologists from the Aranzadi Science Society who have been digging near the city of Pamplona since 2017, its importance has only recently become clear.

Experts studying the hand and its inscriptions now believe it to be both the oldest written example of Proto-Basque and a find that “upends” much of what was previously known about the Vascones, a late iron age tribe who inhabited parts of northern Spain before the arrival of the Romans, and whose language is thought to have been an ancestor of modern-day Basque, or euskera.


Wow... Basque has to be one of the most interesting languages in Europe (since it's unrelated to any other existing languages), so any new information on it is going to be intriguing.

I wonder what they can figure out here?

RE: New insights into Basque language origins? - Jarkko - 11-16-2022

I wish this wasn't paywalled -_- I perked right up after reading this!

It's always cool when these new finds come out or new historical studies shed new light on what's related to what and how. I don't think I've been this intrigued about something since I found out Altaic had been disproven! :P

RE: New insights into Basque language origins? - Kyng - 11-16-2022

(11-16-2022, 04:20 AM)Jarkko Wrote: I wish this wasn't paywalled -_- I perked right up after reading this!

It's always cool when these new finds come out or new historical studies shed new light on what's related to what and how. I don't think I've been this intrigued about something since I found out Altaic had been disproven! :P

Argh... it isn't paywalled for me, for some reason -_- . I'm guessing it is for people outside the UK or something :( .

Is this article any better?
https://english.elpais.com/culture/2022-11-14/researchers-claim-to-have-found-earliest-document-written-in-basque-2100-years-ago.html

RE: New insights into Basque language origins? - Jarkko - 11-23-2022

Indeed! :D

It's quite something. This either shoots down or pushes further back in time the notion that Basque had its origins in what is now Aquitaine in France.