(...) AQUITANIAN AND LUSITANIAN Not much is known of these two languages—Aquitanian and Lusitanian inscriptions are nonexistent in the original script. The Aquitanian and Basque languages are presently believed to be remnants of an ice age Paleolithic language spoken in Western Europe. Other than a few place and tribe names transmitted by Greek and Latin writers, the main data come from Latin inscriptions found mainly along the high basin of the Garonne in Aquitania. (Gorrochategui, 2003) With regard to the relations between it and the Iberian and Basque languages, the Aquitanian language is a kind of missing link, but a very special one. Aquitanian names resemble the Iberian personal names. Many, especially the god names, are compounded in the same manner as the Iberian ones. The Roman geographer Strabo (Geography, IV,1,1) states that their language and physical appearance demonstrate their kinship to Iberians. Archaeological, toponymical and historical evidence strongly suggest that Aquitanian was a dialect of the Basque language. The evidence appears as votive and funerary inscriptions found along the Rhine River (at Hagenbach), inscribed in Latin characters, which contain some four hundred personal names as well as numerous names of deities. Aquitanian has even been suggested as the forerunner of Basque. (Trask, 1997) As a matter of fact, the Aquitanian language is considered by many to be Old Basque: this because of the coincidence between Aquitanian personal name bases and the Basque lexicon (i.e., meanings of the names can be determined using a Basque lexicon). According to Gorrochategui (1993), most Aquitanian names have admissible interpretations by the Basque lexicon, especially the names of Aquitanian deities. Even less is known of another Iberian language spoken by the Lusitani of western Iberia. The Lusitanians were the most numerous people in the western area of the Iberian peninsula, and even though there are those who point to the Alps as a possible origin, others believe they were an indigeneous Iberian tribe. I concur with the latter as far as it goes, but their ultimate origin, I believe, is Atlantis. With the passage of time the Lusitanian language succumbed to the pressure and prestige of Latin, and as a result has totally disappeared from usage. Due to the brevity of ancient Lusitanian texts, and the fact that only a very small number of Portuguese words seem to be derived from the Lusitanian language (Zdravko Batzarov), the affiliation of Lusitanian remains in debate. Portuguese is, of course, an Indo-European language. The most famous Lusitanian inscriptions are those from Cabeço de Fraguas and Lamas de Moledo in Portugal and Arroyo de la Luz in Spain (shown on the right). All known Lusitanian inscriptions are written in the Latin alphabet. Ulrich Schmoll (1959) proposed a language branch which he called Galician-Lusitanian. And there are fundamental suspicions that the area of the Gallaecian tribes (North of Portugal and Galicia), that is, all the northwestern area of the Iberian peninsula, spoke languages related to Lusitanian, rather than the Keltic as once believed. All these issues are still being hotly debated by professional linguists and philologists. THE BERBER-IBERO-BASQUE LANGUAGE COMPLEX What I will endeavor to show here is that the various dialects of what I believe was the original language of the Atlanteans accompanied the Cro-Magnon people as they swept into the western portions of Europe and Africa from Atlantis. The remains of this phenomenon exist to this day in what I call the Berber-Ibero-Basque Language Complex. This complex stretched from Morocco in North Africa, across Gibraltar into the Iberian peninsula, on up into the Dordogne Valley of France and Brittany, continuing northward to the British Isles. (Click for Map) If such an Atlantic language did exist, we will have identified the Atlantean language, at least provisionally. At the very least, we can ask if such a unified, widespread language did not come from Atlantis, from where did it come? Professional anthropologists have already postulated, in a classic work on European ethnology, that the modern day Basque people of the Pyrenees Mountains (northern Spain/southern France) speak a language inherited directly from Cro-Magnon Man (Ripley, 1899). To give a couple of illustrative examples of the reasons for the above postulation, the Basque (Euskera) word for knife means literally stone that cuts, and their word for ceiling means top of the cavern (Blanc, 1854). Ethnologist Michael A. Etcheverry states his opinion that the Basques, having fought off assimilation by the Romans, Visigoths, Moors and Franks, were themselves the direct descendants of the ice age Cro-Magnon people who had, more than any others, avoided both the modification of their genetic makeup and their language during the following era of Neolithic expansion. (Ryan & Pittman, 1998) Prof. Henry Fairfield Osborn (1915-1923) had long ago declared that the Cro-Magnon people of the Stone Age left two cultural relics that survived into modern times: (1) the Berber-speaking Guanches of the Canary Islands, and (2) the unique Basque language of western Europe. In regard to the extreme age of the Basque language, the distinguished British scholar Michael Harrison once wrote: In support of the theory that Basque, if not an autochthonous language, is at least one of the most primitive languages of Europe, in the sense of its being here before any of the existing others, is the fact that Basque . . . is still a language with no proven congeners. (Harrison, 1974) If Basque was indeed the language of Cro-Magnon Man, it must have once been spoken over a much larger area of Europe than it is now. Today it stands isolated into two tiny linguistic islands, surrounded by languages totally alien in vocabulary, syntax, and grammatical structure (Saltarelli, 1988). According to Harrison, who has done his homework, Basque did indeed cover a far greater area than it does today, reminding us that this fact was recorded by the ancient Carthaginians and Romans (Harrison, 1974). But what about the little-known Iberian language (generally believed to be related to the Berber language of North Africa)? The defunct Iberian language is known to us only through inscriptions (the Iberian script is mainly syllabic, but also partly alphabetic). It was once spoken throughout the entire Iberian peninsula, and through Iberian language specialist William J. Entwhistle (1936) we learn that this language is also related to the modern Basque language. All these languages are agglutinative, as apposed to inflected. One particular Ibero-Tartessian sequence etched in prehistoric bone has lately been discovered at La Coruña in Galicia, Spain, which proves to be of interest (Bouvier, 2003). It is said to depict the old Iberian name for Atlantis, as well as the name of the ancient Iberian city of Tartessos. The inscription has been transliterated as follows: (...)
Posted on: Tue, 01 Jul 2014 19:41:01 +0000
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