Hand of Irulegi: ancient Spanish artefact rewrites history of Basque language

[Jilly_in_VA]

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 is 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 the area before the arrival of the Romans, and from whose ancient language modern-day Basque, or euskera, is thought to descend.

Until now, scholars had understood that the Vascones had no written language – save for words found on coins – and only began writing after the Romans introduced the Latin alphabet. But the five words written in 40 characters identified as Vasconic, suggest otherwise.

The first – and only word – to be identified so far is sorioneku, a forerunner of the modern Basque word zorioneko, meaning good luck or good omen.

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

Basque is said to be one of the most difficult languages in the world. There's a Spanish joke that when God wanted to punish a fallen angel, he sentenced him to study Basque for seven years.

[Deep State Witch]

1. Thanks!

I'm fascinated with the Basque culture.

[Igel]

2. It's agglutinative.

Learn what that means, and much of the difficulty fades away. Still, it's typologically non IE with few cognates, so it's a rough row to hoe. Did my most of my grad syntax papers based on data from Basque speaker consultants.

Don't like that the reporter botched "Proto-" with "Common". A protolanguage is an abstract construct based upon sound correspondences, possibly supported by language-change universals. A common language is the language used by a community of speakers prior to language change separating dialects into different languages (with the boundary between those two being a vexed nuisance). Those are distinct from "earlier form of the language," used when a language didn't break apart but merely changed.

I had to learn Common Slavic, kin to Common Slavic. But Proto-Slavic is both ageless and placeless (based on data and reconstructions, not speakers in a time and place). Common Slavic had dialects spoken in distinct locales--Kiev Blaetter in Glagolitic, canonical OCS texts in traditional Cyrillic. And I had to learn Old Russian, Primary Chronicle through Zadonshchina, and OCS and OR differed. These are real distinctions.

At best, Vasconce is Old Basque, but it requires tweaking what "old" means. Perhaps "Early Old Basque." There's only one Basque with various dialects. We can (and some have) reconstructed Proto-Basque, but it's likely nobody spoke it. The data set is partial and biased--just what survived to the present, plus historical attestations (however interpreted), and so the reconstruction is partial and biased, meaning "wrong". Pamplona "early old basque" would have been Old Basque with a twang, a dialect, unless the language had recently spread (even if that meant an influx of "economic refugees" because of Pamplona's economy.

Historical linguistics.

Henning ... Jakobson wasn't wrong.

[GreenWave]

3. Very informative.

I believe the Romans' inability to traverse the difficult terrain helped keep Basque separate and looking like an isolated language in modern times, but perhaps their neighbors got assimilated and some/most of the linguistic connections lost. Please correct if blunders are made in my assumption.