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15. Languages in Prehistoric Europe North of the Alps*

15. Languages in Prehistoric Europe North of the Alps*

15. in prehistoric north of the *

Abstract

The chapter surveys the theory that languages of three families were spoken in Europe after the last ice age: Old European, which is identified as Vasconic, the family of which Basque is the sole survivor; Atlantic. which is under­ stood to be Semitidic, i.. related to the Mediterranean Hamito-. possibly simply Semitic; and West Indo-European languages. The stratal relation­ ships among these three prehistoric language families, as as the nature and direction of contact influences among them, are sketched. with references to the literature where the points made are treated in greater detail. These stratal relation­ ships, and in addition the superstratal relation of Norman French to Anglo-Saxon, are summarized in a graphic Stammbaum for English.

I would like to give a brief survey of my views of the linguistic pre­ of Europe north of the Alps, by which I mean, more generally, Europe north of the main divide which extends from the in the southwest to the northern in the east, or north-east, relatively speaking. I will say nothing about the , and I will also remain silent about possible further languages that may have extended to the area north of the divide but that we really think of as belonging to the south. I After a very brief synopsis of the scope and contents of the theory, I would like to formulate a number of theses, or propositions, with explanations and with references. I begin with a brief sketch (from Vennemann 1998c) which may be viewed as an illustration of thesis G 1 (G for general background).

G 1. Languages of three genetic groups were spoken in prehistoric Europe north of the Alps:

1. Old European 2. Atlantic 3. West Indo-European 258 Languages in prehistoric Europe

To understand the prehistoric linguistic development of Europe, one has to keep in mind that the relevant time to consider is relatively short. There naturally will have been languages in Europe north of the Alps for tens of thousands of years, but in a very precise sense they do not matter. During the last ice age the between the polar ice which reached south into and Northern on one hand and the Alpine ice which reached north into which are now densely populated, this region between two formidable ice sheets were inhospitable to beings. Human beings surviving there as hunters, fishers, and gatherers numbered very few, and f320 experience shows that when people with more advanced economic systems, such as herdsmen and agriculturalists, enter such a region, the languages of the earlier populations vanish, and usually without leaving many if any traces in the languages of the newcomers. The point of this consideration is that the climate in Europe north of the Alps only improved to support large populations about ten thousand years ago, but then rather rapidly, crea­ ting nearly subtropical weather conditions until about six thousand years ago.

G 2. The three genetic groups of prehistoric Europe north of the Alps had the following filiations:

l. Old European: Vasconic 2. Atlantic: Semitidic 3. West Indo-European: Indo-European

Vasconic Semitidic

Basque Old Semitic Atlantic ------European ------

Point 1. The Old European languages I consider Vasconic, i.e. rela­ ted to contemporary Basque, the only survivor of the Vasconic family of languages. Point 2. The Atlantic languages I consider Hamito-Semitic. There exist two views of Semitic, a wider one which includes Egyptian and Libyco-Berber, the latter with Guanche, the extinct pre-Spanish lan­ guage of the Canary Islands, and a narrower one which excludes them. For want of a better term, and a bit on the model of Basque and Vasco­ nic, I call this group Semitidic. But since the languages that left their influence at least in the lexicon of the West Indo-European languages Languages in prehistoric Europe 259 seem to have been most similar to Semitic in the narrower sense, so that the impression often is that they were Semitic languages, I will often simply say "Semitic". Whatever their exact filiation, the Atlantic lan­ guages themselves died out in prehistoric times or, perhaps, in early historic times, namely in the , if my view is correct that Pic­ tish was the last survivor of the Atlantic languages. Point 3. The Indo-European languages are those which ousted most of the other languages from the . Whether they have relatives outside the Indogermania, as is assumed within the so-called Nostratic theory, is of no significance to my theory. I assume the following movements of the speakers of the languages of the f32i three posited families." When the Continent was becoming warmer about ten thousand years ago and the ice sheet was beginning to withdraw from large parts of Europe, both in a northerly direction to­ ward the pole and in a southerly direction into the Alps, the Vasconic Old Europeans moved forward in Western, Central, and starting from Southern , so that nearly the entire Continent be­ came Vasconic.3 If I were permitted to venture a guess on their main economy, which as a linguist I am probably not, I would surmise that gradually it came to be the raising of goats and sheep, supplemented by a primitive form of , while, needless to say, hunting, fishing, and gathering did not cease, having indeed continued to the present day. Why is it plausible to assume that those Old Europeans beginning their gradual expansion spoke Vasconic languages? At the beginning of history, when the first reliable information about languages in Southern France becomes available, the only clearly recognizable non-Indo-Eu­ ropean language of that region, Aquitanian, was Vasconic (Michelena 1954, Gorrochategui 1984, 1987, Trask 1997: 398-402). Therefore it appears to be a reasonable assumption that Southern France was Vasco­ nic before the arrival of Gaulish, Greek, and . There was also Ligu­ rian, but too little material has survived for a genetic identification. Since the Vasconicity at least of a large part of prehistoric Southern France is certain, it appears to me the most reasonable assumption that the first major post-glaciation north of the Alps were in­ deed Vasconic. The system of Old European river names supports this assumption (Vennemann 1994b). Next I turn to the Atlantic peoples. From the fifth millennium on­ ward, Semitidic peoples, bearers of the megalithic culture, moved north along the Atlantic coast to all the islands and up the navigable rivers as seafaring colonizers, until they reached Southern in the middle of the third millennium. Their main economy, if I may guess again, I 260 Languages in prehistoric Europe suppose to have been an advanced form of cattle breeding as well as agriculture including fruit-culture, also increasingly and trading. Why is it plausible to assume that those Atlantic colonists and mega­ lithic builders of the Atlantic Seaboard spoke Semitidic languages? At the dawn of history we find the Western Mediterranean dominated by Phoenicians, a Semitic people; the wars between the Romans and the Carthaginians were the 1322 last chapters in the story of this dominance, essentially describing its decline. The megalithic culture is by many specialists, though not by all, considered of Mediterranean origin. If this view is accepted, a Semitic filiation of prehistoric seafaring colonizers emanating from the Mediterranean and carrying this culture is in my view the default assumption. And since for one of the most intensely megalithicized prehistoric areas, , a Hamito-Semitic pre-Celtic substratum had been suspected and demonstrated by Morris Jones (1900), ascertained by Pokorny (1927-30), and - in my view - estab­ lished once and for all by Gensler (1993), there exists more to go by than the default assumption. My own view, as is easy to see, is merely a generalization from Ireland, or the British Isles, with their well-known megalithic monuments, to the entire Atlantic Littoral, the megalithicized coastal regions stretching from North and to Southern Sweden. As for the spread of the Indo-Europeans into the region I am consi­ dering, I take a rather conservative view. I assume them to have moved, beginning in the sixth millennium, from the Pannonian Basin (the fertile region surrounded by the Carpathian mountains) into the area north of the Alps in all directions, reaching the basin of Paris in the middle of the fifth millennium and about the beginning of the fourth millennium. Their main economy I suppose to have been an advanced form of farming including both agriCUlture and cattle-breeding.4 The theory that the Indo-Europeans brought farming to Europe north of the Alps has independently been developed, and elaborated much further, by Renfrew (1987). But I think Renfrew then caused more harm than good for it by assuming that those farmers directly spread into the areas where we find them at the dawn of history. This is untenable because the southern and eastern Indo-European areas were only Indo-Europeanized much later, essentially between the fourth and the first millennia B.., and by military bands not by farmers. In my view these later great Indo-European migrations or Volkerwanderungen are a result of the militarization of Europe north of the Alps as a conse­ quence of over-population in the fourth millennium, which was itself caused by three factors: a deterioration of the climate, loss of land around the , and advances of the Atlantic peoples in the West. Languages in prehistoric Europe 261

From this theory of the expansion of the three posited linguistic groups, I derive the stratal relationships for the languages of the three families formulated in thesis G 3 1323

G 3. Stratal relationships among the three prehistoric language families

a. The Vasconic Old European languages, the first languages of the three families moving north, eventually became adstrata and, as they were superseded by languages of the other two groups, in­ creasingly substrata of these other languages.

b. The Semitidic Atlantic languages were initially, in their areas of influence, superstrata and adstrata. In the West this affected the Vasconic Old European languages; in the Continental Northwest and in the North, where the Indo-Europeans arrived before the Atlantic peoples, especially in the area which was to become Ger­ mania, it affected the Indo-European languages as well.

c. The Indo-European languages became everywhere in their areas of influence superstrata and adstrata, except for the Continental Northwest and the North where they became in part substrata of the Atlantic languages. In a much later wave of military expan­ sion, in the last millennium B.C., Indo-European languages, viz. , became superstrata and adstrata of the Atlantic languages of the British Isles.

The theory sketched here which assumes a minimum of language families for prehistoric Europe (north of the Alps) is confronted with the opposite proposal that when the Indo-Europeans moved into Europe they found many small languages, some related among each other, some not. This opposite position is the patchwork theory.

G 4. The patchwork theory

Patchwork theory: "The idea that the invading Indo-Europeans would have encountered a linguistically homogeneous Europe seems implausible in the extreme. Far more probably, what the Indo-Euro­ peans found was a patchwork of languages, large and small, some related, some not, resulting from previous millennia of settlement, 262 Languages in prehistoric Europe

displacement and language shift, just like anywhere else. Consider, for example, the linguistic position of the pre-Roman Iberian Penin­ sula" (Trask 1997: 364). The patchwork theory is wrong. 1324

have previously presented arguments against the patchwork theory (Vennemann 1998c) and will not repeat them here. It would not, of course, be wise to preclude the possibility of other languages to have existed in prehistoric Europe at the time under consideration. But the existence of such languages has to be demonstrated and cannot be as­ sumed as a matter of course. Europe north of the Alps after the last gla­ ciation is not "like anywhere else". I would now like to turn to a number of theses relating individually to the Vasconic and the Semitidic contact languages of West Indo-Euro­ pean, which I mark and number with the the letters V and , respective­ ly.

V 1. The original Old European hydronymy of Hans Krahe (1963, 1964) is Vasconic. More generally: The original Old European toponymy is Vasconic.

I have devoted several papers to this question (Vennemann 1993a, 1994b, 1995, 1999a, d, 2000a) and personally think that it stands a good chance of being true.

V 2. Certain Greek mythological names without accepted etymologies can be traced to toponymical or directly to Basque etyma.

Even though I like some of these etymologies (cf. Vennemann 1997d, 1998c) very much, I anticipate that they will be contested. But since Greek does not belong to the West Indo-European languages in a strict sense, they are not central to the theory.

V 3. Certain West Indo-European words without accepted etymologies can be reconstructed as Vasconic loan-words. These for the most part give the impression of substratal loans or, in some cases, of Wanderworter.

I think that a respectable number of such words has been assembled (Vennemann 1995, 1996, 1997a, 1998a, c, f, 1999c). It will be inte­ resting to see attempts at a refutation. Languages in prehistoric Europe 263

V 4. Certain non-indo-European structural properties of the West Indo-European languages can be understood as carry-overs from the Vasconic substrata, among them:

a. the vigesimal way of counting in the , in 1325 Insular Celtic, in Danish, in Albanian, and sporadically elsewhere;

b. the first-syllable accent in Gennanic, Italic. and Celtic;

c. the persistence of prespecifying compared to the early move to postspecifying syntax in Insular Celtic (Basque is ncarly consistently prespecifying, SOY);

d. the comparatively strong drive toward postspecifying attributive adjective placement in Romance, especially if compared to Ger­ manic (postspecifying attributive adjective placement is the only exception to the otherwise consistently prespecifying syntax of Basque).

On point a, Vennemann 1998b may be compared, on point b, Venne­ mann I 994b, on points c and d, Vennemann 2003c. I tUI11 now to some theses concerning the substrata I and superstratal influence of Semitic.

S 1. Certain toponyms around the British Isles and across the North Sea - names referring to maritime objects such as straits and is­ lands that have no accepted etymologies - have been identified as Semitic in origin.

This seems to me to be an area of great potential. Cf. Coates 1988c, Vennemann 1995, 1998h, 1999a.

S 2. Certain features of Germanic and Insular Celtic mythology inclu­ ding Germanic mythological names without etymologies can be traced to Semitic religion or mythology including Semitic names.

These features have long been known but can now be explained within the theory of a once Semitic North-West (Vennemann 1997b. 1998c).

S 3. Certain West Indo-European words without accepted etymologies - especially in Germanic - can be reconstructed as Semitic loan­ words. These for the most part give the impression of superstratal 264 Languages in prehistoric Europe

loans, underlining the advanced culture of the Atlantic seafaring colonists in comparison with the f326 primitive farming societies of the Indo-Europeans.

This is a very fruitful area of study, especially for Germanic etymology, exactly as predicted by the theory of Germanic took many expessions from the superstratal Semitic languages (Vennemann 1995, 1997a, 1998c, d, g and, for the second statement, 1998a, 2000b).

S 4. Certain non-Indo-European structural properties of the West Indo-European languages can be understood as substratal in­ fluence (Insular Celtic) or as superstratal influence (Germanic) of the prehistoric Atlantic languages, among them:

a. much of the Insular Celtic syntax that is more similar e.g. to that of Old Testament Hebrew and Classical than to that of any other Indo-European language including Continental Celtic, a fact which can be explained as the effect of Atlantic substrata in the British Isles at the time of their Celticization, an explanation which is far superior to the assumption of typological convergence or of chance;

b. perhaps the development of the divided word order of the North and West , with preserved Indo-European prespecification in most dependent syntagmas but a shift to initial placement or to modified initial placemene of the finite in sentences, a syntactic system which may be explained as the result of attempts on the part of the coastal Pal reo-Germans to imitate the verb-initial syntax of prestigious Atlantic languages spoken in the region but only at the topmost syntactic level which is the most accessible to imitative modification;

c. perhaps the systematization and functionalization of the verbal and deverbal e-o-zero ablaut in Germanic, for which no explana­ tion outside this theory exists but which may, inside the theory, be explained as having originated in the language shift of the su­ perstratai speakers of Atlantic, i.e. Semitic languages with their all­ pervading ablaut patterns, to Pal reo-Germanic with its several un­ systematic ablauts inherited from Proto-Indo-European. f327

Point a has been sufficiently demonstrated by Morris Jones (1900), Po­ korny (1927-30), and Gensler (1993). Point b is discussed in Venne- Languages in prehistoric Europe 265 mann 2000b and 2003c, point c in Vennemann 1998h and 2000b. - An extension of S4a is El:

E 1. Several specific features of the syntax of English can be explained as the effect of substratal Insular Celtic influence and can in turn in some cases be traced further back to substratal Semitic in­ fluence.

The first statement is surveyed in Preusler 1956 and Tristram 1999, while the second statement is illustrated in Vennemann 2001c, 2002c. As already mentioned, the were in prehistoric times heavily influenced, or rather transformed into a different type, by Semitic substrata. Insular Celtic is Semiticized Celtic. Some of the same linguists who identified the Semitic substratal features of Insular Celtic, such as Pokorny and Wagner, also noticed that some of these features can even be found in English, where they set English apart from the other Germanic and Indo-European languages. This is to be expected, because just as Insular Celtic developed on a Semitic substratum, so English developed on an Insular Celtic substratum. The same people - or rather: their descendants - who gave up their native Semitic langua­ ges and learned Celtic, thereby transforming it into Insular Celtic, later gave up Insular Celtic and learned Anglo-Saxon, thereby transforming Anglo-Saxon into English. This is succinctly formulated as thesis E 2.

E 2. English is Celticized Anglo-Saxon and, by transitivity, Semitized Anglo-Saxon.

Anglo-Saxon ,,~ English II Celtic Insular Celtic

Semitidic

Explanation of symbols: 11 : substratal influence on ,.,.: transformation into 1328

The time levels for these changes are exactly as taught by the theory of language contact. It took several centuries and social upheavals for the Semiticized varieties of Celtic to reach the highest social level and enter into writing, where the pre-Semiticized syntax is found in archaic resi­ dues. And it likewise took several centuries and considerable political 266 Languages in prehistoric Europe and social upheaval for the Celticized varieties of Anglo-Saxon to reach the highest social level and enter into writing, where in Late Middle English the pre-Celticized syntax is found in archaic residues. The for­ mer of these transformations has been amply documented by the cited authors. Also the latter, that of Anglo-Saxon into English in Late Middle English times, has found attention, as already mentioned. These influences, to this point again, are structural not lexical, because they are substratal not superstrata!. It has been a recurring error in the argumentation of those teaching that English has not been in­ fluenced by Celtic that they refer to the fewness of Celtic loan-words. Lexical influence is the major effect of super-stratal rather than substra­ tal contact. And indeed, lexical influence from the superstratum is what we find in Middle English: the massive Norman-French lexical borrow­ ing in the wake of the Norman invasion of 1066. And this influence was swift, because it did not have to work its way up the social ladder but came in at the top, when the French-speaking ruling class switched to English which, after the elimination of the Anglo-Saxon ruling class, was the English of the lower strata. Considering the Continental origin of Anglo-Saxon as well as the substratal and superstratal influences working on it, and abstracting away from other important influences such as those from Latin and Scandina­ vian, we may complete our characteristic of English succinctly as in the­ sis E 3.

E 3. English is a structurally Semiticized., lexically Romanized German dialect.

Norman French

Anglo-Saxon ".. English 11 Celtic Insular Celtic

Semitidic

Explanation of symbols: Jj.: superstratal influence on 11 : substrata I influence on ,,~ : transformation into 1329 Languages in prehistoric Europe 267

Completing this picture with what was said above about Vasconic influences in West Indo-European and about Semitic influences on early Germanic, we receive a new kind of graphic representation of the des­ cent of a language, a genealogical tree, or Stammbaum, for English, as in E4.

E 4. A genealogical tree, or Stammbaum, for English

Atlantic Norman (Semitidic) French ~ Proto-Indo- ,,'* West-Indo-European"'* Germanic> Anglo- ,,'* English European Pre-Germanic Saxon

Old European Celtic ,,'* Insular Celtic (Vasconic) 11 Atlantic (Semitidic)

Explanation of symbols: ~ : superstratal influence on 11 : substratal influence on ""* : transformation into > : development into

This ends my brief survey of how I view the languages of prehistoric Europe north of the Alps and their influences in the shaping of the lin­ guistic landscape of the Continent.

Notes

First published 2003 in: Alfred Bammesberger and , Lan­ guages in prehistoric Europe, 319-332. (lndogermanische Bibliothek.) Hei­ del berg: Winter. 1. E.g. the languages to which Etruscan and Rhretian belong, if Rix (1998) is right in his assumption that the Rhretic language or languages were rela­ tives of the the spoken in Southern and Northern Tyrol (and possibly beyond), 268 Languages in prehistoric Europe

2. A version of this view, in which however the Vasconic languages were not yet accommodated, is contained in Vennemann 1988; an improved version is in the appendix of the 1994a article. 3. Aspects of a theory of a once Vasconic Europe are anticipated in Simon 1930 and Cowan 1984. 4. This is sketched in my 1988 paper and taken up briefly in 1994a. 5. Holland (1980: 29, . 4; 185) for" gedeckte Anfangsstell ung".

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