Volume 41, Number 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2013

Editor’s Note: The Indo-European-Basque Debate

A considerable portion of this issue of The Journal of Indo-European Studies is devoted to the proposition that Basque is genetically related to Indo-European. The controversial nature of such a proposition hardly needs to be emphasized: even in the early 19th century Schlegel regarded Basque as grammatically very different from Indic, which served for him as proxy for our Proto-Indo-European (Schlegel 1975: 115) and most readers will surely agree with Larry Trask’s opening statement on such relationships in his History of Basque:

Given the vast amount of information we have on the various Indo-European languages, given the degree to which the history of the family has been reconstructed, all the way back to Proto-Indo-European, and given the defiantly non-Indo-European character of Basque, a connection between Basque and Indo-European would seem to be a priori one of the most implausible suggestions that could be made (Trask 1997: 368).

Trask cited a number of what appeared to him as misguided attempts to link Basque genetically with Indo-European, observing that most “proposed only ancient contact, or at best some kind of ancient Sprachbund, rather than a highly implausible genetic link”. The best that seemed possible was a handful of potential borrowings between Basque and Celtic such as Basque adar ‘horn, branch’ and Old Irish adarc ‘horn’ and Basque andere ‘lady’ and Old Irish ander ‘young woman’ (Schrijver 2002), etc. Given the level of hostility to the concept of adding Basque to the Indo-European family, the editor wishes to indicate why this topic appears in this issue of the Journal of Indo-European Studies. The inclusion of Mr Forni’s lengthy article involved a considerable amount of discussion and

2 Editor’s Note: The Indo-European-Basque Debate

The Journal of Indo-European Studies

recommendations from the referees until the paper was in a state in which at least one of them believed that enough of a case had been made. In soliciting other opinions, the editor also received comments from a respected authority on the ancient languages of Iberia who also indicated that Mr Forni’s “article must be considered seriously, even if one does not agree with it.” From an editorial point of view, Mr Forni’s paper is admissible to the Journal of Indo-European Studies because it has been argued in terms of Indo-European comparanda. The validity of his paper, therefore, rests on the integrity of his two data sets (reconstructed Basque and reconstructed Indo-European) and the validity of the methods he has employed in comparing the two data-sets. The commentators approached are generally either specialists in the ancient languages of Iberia or in the assessment of language relationships; one of the commentators champions an alternative theory of genetic relationship (e.g., Bengston 2009) but was requested to concentrate on the validity of Mr Forni’s proposition primarily in terms of his own data set. This is because the editor did not feel that it was appropriate for the Journal to focus on a related but editorially far more difficult question: if Basque is not Indo-European, what is its closest relation? This would entail a comparison between Basque, which, I think, almost everyone would regard a priori as non-IE and another non-Indo-European language or language family — Berber, Iberian, Minoan, Caucasian (in a variety of guises), Burushaski etc. (see Trask 1997: 358-411). Such a comparison would fall well outside the remit of JIES and would be far better suited for Mother Tongue, the Journal of Language Relationship or some other journal not specifically focused on Indo-European. It seemed to me that if the critics are not convinced by Mr Forni’s arguments, they should be able to explain this in terms of either Indo-European or general comparative linguistics rather than replacing Indo-European with another controversial language comparison. In so doing, the debate has hopefully turned on an issue of considerably greater interest to our readers — the theoretical and methodological approaches to assessing language relationships.

Editor’s Note: The Indo-European-Basque Debate 3

Volume 41, Number 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2013

Bibliography Bengston, J. D. 2009 Basque and the other Mediterranean languages. Mother Tongue

14, 157-176. Schlegel, F. 1975 Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, reprinted in Studien zur

Philosophie und Theologie, (= Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel Ausgabe vol 8., 113-440). Munich, Paderborn, Vienna: Ferdinand Schöningh,.

Schrijver, P. 2002 Irish ainder, Welsh anner, Breton annoar, Basque andere. In

Restle, D., and D. Zaefferer (eds) Sounds and Systems: Studies in Structure and Change, 205-219. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Trask, R. L. 1995 Basque and Dene-Caucasian: A critique from the Basque side.

Mother Tongue 1, 3-201. 1997 The History of Basque. London and New York: Routledge.