There is an important omission in that Guardian article. They cite a Latin professor said to have helped decipher the artifact and then another scholar of Indo-European linguistics:
"Velaza’s colleague Joaquín Gorrochategui, a professor of Indo-European linguistics at the University of the Basque country, said the hand’s secrets would change the way scholars looked at the Vascones.'This piece upends how we’d thought about the Vascones and writing until now ... We were almost convinced that the ancient Vascones were illiterate and didn’t use writing except when it came to minting coins."
What they fail to tell their readers is that Basque is not an Indo-European language at all. It's a language isolate – while Latin, Welsh, German, Danish, Greek, Armenian, Persian, Hindi, Urdu etc. are all related to each other, Basque is the only remnant of the languages that were spoken in Western Europe before the Indo-Europeans took over.
His studies probably relate to contact between archaic Vasconic languages and Indo-European. It is considered fairly likely that languages related to that of the Vascones were spoken more broadly in Western Europe in antiquity, and that they likely had influence to some degree on the Germanic, Romance, and Celtic languages that superceded them.
My understanding is that most genetic studies seem to indicate the Basques likely migrated where they were around the same time as Indo-European/Yamnaya culture -- the copper age. Even looking at iron and bronze age remains, they are not appreciably different in genetic makeup than the surrounding populations.
Similar story for the Etruscans, in fact. High rate of R1b and associated haplotypes.
It seems likely to me that these populations were co-travelers with Indo-European speakers during the copper age. Following the same leads on metal and other resource deposits, and migrating along similar routes. I suspect if it was ever possible to find a "homeland" for these linguistic routes it would be along the Black Sea or Carpathians, next-door to the origins of the Yamnaya culture.
Maybe the Basques/Euskadia/Vascones are the descendants of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, an ancient agrarian population that the Indo-Europeans passed through and blended with (and maybe conquered) on their way west.
Basques have original language but not male line. It's R1b is IE steppe genes. The most probable source of Basque culture is from local native Iberian refugium. As well as Albanian/Illyrian in Balcan refugium. Basques are teared between claiming oldest native euroculture & negating IE conquest that drastically changed genetics & culture of Europe. What's understandable since their story seems unique & conflicted (adding rH- story) like Hungarian.
IIRC Basque (or a predecessor of it) had been spoken for hundreds of years in (what is now the Basque country) before the Roman's conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.
I think it's the oldest surviving language isolate in the world. Contrary to popular belief, Korean is actually no longer considered a language isolate.
If you think about it, all languages and all language isolates (there are many others besides Basque, like Ainu) are really the same age. At any rate, this applies if you assume that people developed language only once. Each language then represents an unbroken chain of transmission to the language of the earliest humans to develop speech, or one branch leading back to the original trunk. Isolates are merely branches that have no surviving twigs of recent provenance – recent enough, that is, to discern genetic relationships with the tools available today.
Language isolates of different ages could only really occur if there were several populations of humans developing speech independently of each other, and at different times.
Languages have different ages. Now obviously you can’t ever draw a clean, exact line between when one language becomes another, but there are also clearly distinct languages and those distinctions can be given upper and lower bounds in terms of dates.
Latin is clearly distinct from English, even though both languages share a common ancestor and English itself was heavily influenced by Latin, both directly and indirectly. Yet it is still useful to make the distinction between them as separate languages and what we call Latin is clearly older than what we call English.
I don’t think it’s at all useful to say Latin and English are the really the same age, even if it’s technically true per your definition.
It's a bit like saying all species are the same age because we all share a common ancestor and there's no exact date when you can say one species became another.
Latin is of course clearly older than (Modern) English, because it was spoken 2,000 years ago, whereas English is spoken today. But Mediaeval Latin was spoken at the same time as Old English; while Latin turned into Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian etc., Old English turned into Modern English.
Arguably, these are just quirks of nomenclature. It's just an accident of history that Old English and Modern English are both called "English", because the difference between Old English and Modern English is just as great (if not greater) as the difference between Latin and Spanish.
The verbal paradigm in Spanish for example retains far more similarities to Latin verb conjugation than is the case with Old and Modern English.
Latin is "older" than English because Latin has been fossilized for over a thousand years due to having no native speakers. A better example would be French and English. Neither is "older" than the other since both are spoken and learned anew every day.
Of course languages known to us only from a certain time period are associated with that time period. They're a snapshot of that linguistic tradition. Living language traditions don't really permit comparisons of age, because they exist in the present.
> if there were several populations of humans developing speech independently of each other, and at different times
We already know of instances of societal-cultural upheaval or even trauma, so severe, that the language undergoes unrecognizable transformation in the form of pidgins. A group of young people from scattered tribes after some disaster, who speak no common language, and who are barely lingual and "re-invent language" for the next generation, seems quite possible over the last several tens of thousands of years, perhaps in multiple times and places.
The similarity of grammar, in unrelated creoles, descended from such pidgin languages, is one of those great tantalizing mysteries in linguistics, and in my view, one that suggests we might just be wired to make a language if we didn't already have one, as do things like the apparent spontaneous emergence of sign languages in deaf communities. The spanner in the workers for that theory is that, of course, those hypothesized people who didn't speak related languages still grew up in lingual communities and were exposed to the idea of language from birth (even the deaf ones, really). Perhaps such events are just a remixing of what already was culturally common, and common to all humans. Indeed, perhaps no community where the link of language transmission has been completely broken, could even survive.
> is one of those great tantalizing mysteries in linguistics, and in my view, one that suggests we might just be wired to make a language if we didn't already have one
Isn't this Chomsky's thesis about humans having an ingrained "grammar" (or proto-grammar, or grammar machinery) from birth?
"Velaza’s colleague Joaquín Gorrochategui, a professor of Indo-European linguistics at the University of the Basque country, said the hand’s secrets would change the way scholars looked at the Vascones.'This piece upends how we’d thought about the Vascones and writing until now ... We were almost convinced that the ancient Vascones were illiterate and didn’t use writing except when it came to minting coins."
What they fail to tell their readers is that Basque is not an Indo-European language at all. It's a language isolate – while Latin, Welsh, German, Danish, Greek, Armenian, Persian, Hindi, Urdu etc. are all related to each other, Basque is the only remnant of the languages that were spoken in Western Europe before the Indo-Europeans took over.