<<Well to be fair most of the academic community that calls it separate is Basque speaking or sympathizing.>>
Try J. P. Mallory of Queens University, Belfast...for one example. An editor of the "Journal of Indo-European Studies", author of _In Search of the Indo-Europeans_ , he calls Basque non-I-E. Perhaps you think Professor Mallory is Basque? Do you think he conformed his view of the matter to some political sympathy for the Basque separatists?
Oddly enough, _The Atlas of Languages_, a common reference text, also calls Basque "an isolated language without known relatives". Have you checked with authors Stephen Matthews and Maria Polinsky to determine whether they sympathize with the explosives-wielding ETA?
Yes, it is an ongoing process of discovery (hey, that's why they call it linguistic theory), and the consensus view is not always correct, but the reasoning process that has led to the current generally-accepted ordering of language families places Basque outside of the I-E tree. Grammar supports this-- the odd ergative case in Basque
would have it relate, if to anything, to ergative-using languages in Asia, South America, and even Australia, not to accusative-using I-E languages.
Basque maybe (who knows?) springs from a common precursor of "Indo-European". Gets pretty thin that far back.
Watch reliance on DNA. On occasion it is indicative of nothing linguistically, since language and genes don't always travel through time together. For example, the Basques could be from the same genetic stock as their neighbors, but have had a language impressed on them ages ago by a vanished, and genetically different, tribe. I doubt it in this case, but DNA/language/culture do not always stay in bed together.
There was an excellent article in Scientific American years ago organizing the peoples (not the languages) of the world on the basis of changes in mitochondrial DNA. The conclusions were not rock-solid, since assumptions had to be made about the rate of natural mutation over time, but the article was still fascinating. As I recall one of her conclusions was that the Ashkenazi are genetically close to the Sephardim. Not exactly a shocking insight, but cool that it shows in the mitochondrial DNA.
John |
