I once heard...

[Admiralzzyx]

...from some random guy on the internet who read a book that Basque is a Celtic language. My own research into that revealed that it is actually not. Has anybody heard about Basque being Celtic?

[Ty185]

I never heard such things. My introduction into Basque was that it was an isolate language and it didn't seem to be related to anyone. Though there are quite a LOT of theories on where it came from.

[Jipí]

Don't take offense, but it's fun to see new people discuss the same things over and over again... In that vein:



All kinds of claims have been made regarding the relation of Basque to other languages.

[Admiralzzyx]

Has this really been discussed ad nauseam? Lol.

[Timmytiptoe]

Yes. See the quackery thread for other attempts at including Basque in some family.

Though could you ask him what evidence he has? Might be worth a laugh.

[Ty185]

I'm not surprised actually. It seems like one of those things that conlangers love to discuss.

[Admiralzzyx]

I have multiple resources - my two "best" (with the most info) are T.G.E. Powell's 'The Celts', and Dr. Ian Barne's 'Celtic World'. I highly recommend them to any one interested in the Celt's history.
Anyway, there are two different Celtic language groups - Q Celtic, and P Celtic. Q Celtic includes Scottish (not Pictish), Irish, and Manx - why? The Goidelic (another name for Q Celtic) name for "son of" is 'mac', whereas "son of" in P Celtic is 'map', or 'ap'. This is because of ...

... the pronunciation differences. The P Celtic, also known as 'Brythonic' language group includes the Picts, Welsh, Gauls, Cornish, Celt-iberian, and Basque. If you've ever heard Basque spoken, you will see the similarity that classifies it in P Celtic. It does suck, however, that Basque is rarely spoken nowadays by anyone in Spain. Too few people speak it, and it rivals Irish Gaelic in rarity.

Both authors recognize the Basque as Celtic, as do the rest of European historians.

[Ty185]

I sincerely doubt that all European historians and linguists agree on this. It's one of the most hotly contested languages in all of linguistics, come on.

[alice]

Both authors recognize the Basque as Celtic, as do the rest of European historians.

Well, "the rest" with the exceptions of the ones I've read books by, evidently.

Nobody actually knows what Basque is related to, and anyone who claims it's a Celtic language clearly knows nothing about either.

[Jipí]

Ludic Hypothesis: Basque originated as a popular language game of a surrounding native language, but forms eventually grammaticalized, fossilized, and got worn down by millenia of sound change.

[linguoboy]

Ludic Hypothesis: Basque originated as a popular language game of a surrounding native language, but forms eventually grammaticalized, fossilized, and got worn down by millenia of sound change.

That is more plausible by half than most of the theories I've actually heard proposed.

Here, Admiralzzyx, your first lesson in checking sources: Find six "European historians" who "recognize the Basque as Celtic". If "all" of them do, then this should be an absolutely trivial task.

[merijn]

I have multiple resources - my two "best" (with the most info) are T.G.E. Powell's 'The Celts', and Dr. Ian Barne's 'Celtic World'. I highly recommend them to any one interested in the Celt's history.
Anyway, there are two different Celtic language groups - Q Celtic, and P Celtic. Q Celtic includes Scottish (not Pictish), Irish, and Manx - why? The Goidelic (another name for Q Celtic) name for "son of" is 'mac', whereas "son of" in P Celtic is 'map', or 'ap'. This is because of ...

... the pronunciation differences. The P Celtic, also known as 'Brythonic' language group includes the Picts, Welsh, Gauls, Cornish, Celt-iberian, and Basque. If you've ever heard Basque spoken, you will see the similarity that classifies it in P Celtic. It does suck, however, that Basque is rarely spoken nowadays by anyone in Spain. Too few people speak it, and it rivals Irish Gaelic in rarity.

Both authors recognize the Basque as Celtic, as do the rest of European historians.

Either those books are crap, or he is misremembering things. Ask him the page numbers and the exact quotations.
As an MA in linguistics (to be fair in a completely unrelated area, but what the hell) I tell you that Basque has never been regarded as a Celtic language by non-crackpot linguists, I am sure anybody on this forum who has a degree in linguistics or is knowledgeable about language, especially Celtic or Basque, will tell you the same.

[Viktor77]

Falgwia is also a Celtic language. Didn't you know?

[hwhatting]

The P Celtic, also known as 'Brythonic' language group includes the Picts, Welsh, Gauls, Cornish, Celt-iberian, and Basque. If you've ever heard Basque spoken, you will see the similarity that classifies it in P Celtic. It does suck, however, that Basque is rarely spoken nowadays by anyone in Spain. Too few people speak it, and it rivals Irish Gaelic in rarity.

Besides the amusing assertion that Basque is a Celtic language, there is another inaccuracy here - Celtiberian is Q-Celtic.

[Torco]

Besides, its widely obvious that Basque is in fact part of the Mapudungun-Ainu language family
trollface

[Grimalkin]

The confusion probably arises from the fact that there are some genetic similarities between the Basques and Celtic peoples, and evidently some historians took that to mean that Basque is a Celtic language. I don't know. There's no justification for that sort of quackery.

Admiralzzyx - Basque has not been proven to be related to any other known language, past or present. Take any claims that Basque does have any relatives with several pinches of salt.

[Admiralzzyx]

So...my reading was right it seems. Basque is disputed.

[linguoboy]

So...my reading was right it seems. Basque is disputed.

There's no real "dispute". No one has ever produced substantial evidence of a genetic relationship between Basque and any other language or language family. The vast majority of proposals aren't even the least bit credible, just the work of some amateur with a Basque dictionary and too much time on their hands. I can count on one hand the number of hypotheses I've seen which even make any use of reconstructed Proto-Vasconic.

[Bob Johnson]

Basque, and the other members of its language family, Sanskrit and Sumerian, are in fact Salishan.

[Blau]

The confusion probably arises from the fact that there are some genetic similarities between the Basques and Celtic peoples, and evidently some historians took that to mean that Basque is a Celtic language. I don't know. There's no justification for that sort of quackery.

Oh god here we go. I was reading this thread anticipating someone to say something like this, and it annoys me very much evidently. To cut a long story short Oppenheimer (the man who has claimed that British people are Basques) decided they were Basques because of high R1b haplogroup frequencies in the British Isles and amongst the Basque people. Since we all know that Basques are all pure unadulterated Stone Age Europeans, that must be what the "British Celts" are as well! To make it worse he even insists that R1b was in Iberia during the Ice age and that Celtic language was spread through cultural transmission.

Recent research has found that R1b came to Western Europe at the earliest during the Neolithic and its spread coming more around the Bronze Age. This actually means that on their Y-lines the Basque people are relatively recent arrivals. The real thing i don't get though is how Oppenheimer could say that the Celts are actually Basques when Basque people have distinct subclades that aren't even shared by the Celtic people, which means they're a distinct population. I've not read Oppenheimers book yet on the issue but i ordered it and it just arrived today, so i imagine i'm going to be irked throughout the book. Sorry if this came off in a bad way, just trying to explain the issue, i guess people calling the British Celts "Basque" to me is like calling the Basque language "Celtic" or anything else "ridiculous" to people here.

[Grimalkin]

Yes you're right, the high frequency of one haplogroup shared by two distinct populations doesn't prove that they're related...and 'celtic people' are hardly a genetically homogeneous community anyway. What I meant was that I suspect the claim that Basques and Celts are genetically similar is probably the origin of a bunch of pseudolinguistic claims propagated by people who know nothing about linguistics.

[Dewrad]

PROTIP: Genetics has fuck all to do with language.

[Přemysl]

The only connection I've ever seen proposed between Celtic and Basque is a possible Basque origin for certain Proto-Celtic words that can't be explained in PIE. A few words did look reasonable but if that was the threshold for proof then you could make some pretty insane connections between various languages (English is a Sino-Tibetan language because "woe is me").