Vasco-Nubian?

This is something I've been chewing on for more than a year now and yet never got myself to blog about (although I have mentioned in private or in comments here and there). Impelled by the minor but quite apparent NE African influence, genetic and cultural, on the Neolithic peoples of the Levant, whose offshoots eventually landed in Greece triggering the European Neolithic, I decided in the Spring of 2014 to explore, via mass-lexical comparison, if Basque language (and by extension the wider Vasconic family, which I believe now to be that of mainline European Neolithic) might have any relation with Nubian languages. I did not expect to find anything but noise but to my surprise the number of apparent cognates is quite significant. 

My primary analysis was this one but now I have combined it with a comparison with Proto-Indoeuropean (PIE), which is also very probably related to the roots of Vasconic: LINK (open office spreadsheet). 

The synthesis is as follows:

Of course the "cognates" are only apparent cognates at this stage of the research and the evaluation is necessarily subjective. But judge yourselves. 

If we discard the "weak" apparent cognates, the vocabulary correlation between Basque and Nubian and between Basque and PIE is pretty similar. But, in my understanding, both are well above the noise threshold, an example of which could be the PIE-Nubian apparent cognates, which are many many less. 

I must say anyhow that the oblique apparent cognates, that is when one word sounds much not like its strict synonym but a related one (for example words meaning hot and fire), look all very solid and most intriguing. 

Also, when attributing probabilities to origins of Basque words, Nubian appears to be at the origin of almost double the words (26%) that can be attributed to PIE (15%). Of course, for lack of data or because they actually have other origins, the unknown origins apply to the majority of words (56%), double than the Nubian origin ones.

However Nubian here is constituted of three different languages (Dilling, Nobiin and Midob), while PIE is just a single theoretical construct. This last must be done this way because many modern and historical IE languages, notably in Europe, have other Vasconic substrate influences, which must be studied separately from general PIE-Vasconic shared vocabulary. This kind of late Vasconic influence is very much unlikely in the case of Nubian instead. In any case I don't know of any a proto-Nubian Swadesh list readily available. 

Finally I must mention that because the PDF format is horrible for copy-pasting, I chose to re-transcribe the Nubian words according to my best approximation using a normal keyboard (not always the same characters that the original list uses).

Strongest Basque-Nubian apparent simple cognates

• Basque - Nubian languages (English)
  
• azal - àzì, àzzì-di (bark)
• haragi - árízh (meat)
• odol - ógór, èggér (blood)
• buru - úr (head)
• oin - ó:y (foot)
• esku - ish-i, ès-sì (hand)
• hil* - di-ìl (to die)
• euri - are, ara, áwwí, áré, árí, áró (rain)
• harri - kugor, kakar (stone) [notice also the pre-IE root *kharr- speculated to be at the origin of Karst, etc.] 
• lur - gùr (soil, ground)
• haize - irsh-i, éss-í (wind)

There are some others that are shared with Indo-European and with similar subjective "weight", not listing them here to keep things clear. There are also other apparent cognates that are arguably less clear like bat - be (one) that I'm also skipping here but you can find in the spreadsheet.

*Hil (meaning both to die and to kill in Basque, which can't be confused because they conjugate differently) seems ancestral to English ill and kill (this one via a Germanic precursor).

The intriguing oblique cognates

Notice that these words do not mean the same, yet their meanings seem strikingly related.

• Nubian (English) - Basque (English)
• hor, koy, kà:r (tree) - harri (stone) [notice that zuhaitz (tree) can be interpreted etymologically as zur-haitz = wood-rock, so the relation is not that weird]
• ok-i, og (breast) - ogi (bread)
• a-l (heart) - ahal (can (verb), potential, power)
• azh, àz-ír, àzza (to bite) - (h)ortz (tooth), aitz (rock, peak) [some argue that originally "to cut", present in many cutting tool names: aizkor = axe, aitzur = hoe, aizto = knife, etc.*]
• shu, zhúù (to walk) - joan (to go) [often pronounced jun or shun]
• é:zhi (water) - heze (wet) [also archaic particle *iz-, meaning "water" by all accounts: itxaso = sea, izurde = dolphin, izotz = ice, and common in Vasconic river toponymy]
• zhuge (to burn) - su (fire) 
• zhùg, sù, sú:w (hot) - su (fire)
• úr-i, úrúm (black) - urdin (blue) [archaic also green, grey]

*This one is an obvious and very prevalent Vasconic substrate infiltrator in Western IE languages: axe, adze, azada (hoe in Spanish), etc.

How can this be possible?

It is of course a mere working hypothesis and ultimately you judge but I find it hard to disdain. However there is no apparent connection, notably no significant genetic connection, between Basques and Nubians. So how can we explain this?

I have it reasonably clear myself, so I made a map to explain it:

Basque is after all just the last survivor of a once much larger family (Vasconic), a family that most likely corresponds to the languages spoken by the early European farmers (mainline Neolithic of Aegean roots). As that expansion was largely done in about a mere thousand years, I estimate that when both branches met near the Rhine, the two peoples could still understand each other, even if with some difficulty. Only the Southern/Western branch(-es) survived long enough to leave historical evidence, so it is hard to guess how the Northern branch evolved anyhow.

The Nubian linguistic connection is anyhow not the only thing that requires the Levant or Palestinian Neolithic step, also Y-DNA E1b-M78 (mostly V13 in Europe, attested in some early farmers and still very important among Greeks and Albanians particularly) and probably the so-called "Basal Eurasian" component that Lazaridis detected among early European farmers and that could well be the signature of African genetics from the Nile.

Linguistically, also the very notorious presence of Semitic (an Afroasiatic branch) in West Asia is surely another legacy of the same African influences in the Mesolithic Levant. Before this research, I thought it was the only one but now I strongly suspect that at some point Nubian (Nilo-Saharan) languages were also present in the region. Maybe one (Nubian evolving towards Vasconic) corresponded to Natufian proper and the other (proto-Semitic) to Harifian, the semi-desert pastoralist facies of the same wider culture. Can't say for sure.

The chain was once long but now only some of the most distant links remain unbroken. It is difficult to imagine that they were ever connected at all...

To do...

A lot remains to be done, of course:

• These mass lexical comparisons only apply to a few families in the region and the rest should also be tested for. My energies are limited and so are my qualifications as "linguist", so I encourage others, hopefully more energetic and knowledgeable, to expand.
• Grammatical features cannot be analyzed by this methodology. Again my means are limited. 
• Anthropological research would be an interesting complement. So far the only shared cultural trait I could spot would be the use of bells attached to ankles for dancing but there could be others. 
• ...

Basque-Iberian numerals

Basque-Iberian language family theory is back and very strongly so. Even such an staunchly pan-indoeuropeanist¹ fanatic like Villar has to admit to it, even reluctantly and trying to dismiss its relevance. 

The main argument is the recognition of Basque and Iberian numerals as very similar, including even the once suspect IE loan sei (six), which may in the end be Vasconic after all. 

Euskararen Jatorria has these days a whole series on the matter (in Basque and Spanish):

1. Basque and Iberian numerals as explained by (Spanish language) Wikipedia (introductory).

2. Iberian numerals by Eduardo Orduña (→ paper 2005).

3. Revision and improvement of Orduña's theory by Ferrer i Jan (→ paper 2009)

4. Upfront rejection by the high guru of Basque linguistics J. Lakarra (→ paper 2010)

5. Orduña's reply to Lakarra (→ paper 2011)

Ferrer 2009 scheme of Iberian numerals

Orduña 2011: Basque numerals (standard and variants)

So, totally dismissing that self-complacient and power-mongering cultural terrorist of Lakarra, and looking at the obvious facts, we have the following series of correspondences (iberian - Basque). I have transcribed Iberian transcriptional "s" as "z" and "ś" as regular "s", as it seems to correspond with modern and historical Basque spelling:

1. ban - bat [bana: each, bana-tu: divide]
2. bi(n) - bi²
3. irur - (h)iru(r)
4. lau(r) - lau(r)
5. borz(te) - bost, borz, bortz³
6. sei - sei⁴
7. zizbi - zazpi
8. zorze - zortzi, zorzi
9. unknown - bederatzi
10. abaŕ - (h)amaŕ⁵

Additionally we have also the correspondence (20) oŕkei - (h)ogei. With those numbers you can count up to 99 using the vigesimal system common to both languages⁵.

Less clear is whether there is a Basque-Iberian correspondence regarding the number 100 (ehun in Basque). Orduña argued for it but Ferrer rejected the claim. 

It is interesting that the form for 11 in Basque is irregular: amaika (regular would be hamabat but it does not exist in fact). Considering the abaŕ-ke-# form in Iberian, we can now track its origins surely to a shortening of abaŕkeban⁷. Amaika is also used to mean "a lot" in Basque, possibly because most peasants were not too much into numbers in the past.

________

Notes:

¹ Pan-indoeuropeanism: wild hypothesis that rejects that the Indoeuropean family expanded from any single origin and claims instead that it was preceded only by itself from the beginning of times. Oddly enough there are people (and I mean linguists) who believe in it, even if it makes no sense whatsoever. It is a convenient ideological way to deny any respect to other languages which may have been in the area longer, as may be the case of Basque or Dravidian. Winners write history and now it seems that also linguistic theories of the worst kind.

² Notice the obvious Vasconic influence in Latin particle bi-, which is used in many languages nowadays: binary, bilateral, bifocal, etc. 

³ Iberian syllabary would force borzt or even bortz to be  written borzte or similar, as there is no lone "t" sign, only "ta", "te", "ti", "to" and "tu", which can also be "da", "de", etc. Only in the scarce Ibero-Jonian (Greek) script transcription becomes much easier.

⁴ It was typically believed that the numeral sei (6) was an Indoeuropean borrowing (compare with Sp. seis, Lat. sex), possibly under the influence of Christian doctrine (the very word "sex" comes from the Latin numeral, in reference to the Hebrew chastity commandment usually listed under that number) but judging on the Iberian identical form this must revised. However it is true that there is an independent an maybe related IE pattern of similar cognates for this number whose PIE reconstruction is *swéḱs.

⁵ "ŕ" indicates strong r (alveolar trill /r/, as in Sp. "perro"), "r" indicates a soft r (liquid /ɾ/, as in Sp. "pero"). Hence you decline hamar as hamarra but laur as laura, even if both roots are written similarly in standard Basque, which has long abandoned the "ŕ" character for pragmatic reasons (still used but very rarely). 

⁶ This vigesimal system, unknown to most Indoeuropean languages (staunchly decimal), was adopted by Celtic and later by French, which still retains it for the numbers 70 and 90 and their derivatives. Other languages with vigesimal system are Danish, Albanian and a dialect of Slovenian spoken in Italy (all them IE languages); Georgian and Nakh also have it in the Caucasus region; some traditional numerical expressions in English ("score" and other usages) also seem to retain the memory of a vigesimal system. It is an important piece of evidence supporting the existence of a vasconic substrate in much of Europe.

Micro-update: Gascon and other old romances of present-day France also retained at least some expression of this vigesimalism. 

⁷ If -ke- meant "and" in ancient Iberian (Basque eta has been claimed to come from Latin et), can it be argued that the Latin particle -que (also meaning "and") has vasconic origins? In standard theory it comes from PIE *-kʷe but the evidence of its existence seems a bit feeble to my eyes, with almost no alleged derivate being even remotely similar to their alleged ancestor.