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Languages in prehistoric Europe north of the Alps
Theo Vennemann gen. Nierfeld
University of Munich
I would like to give a brief survey of my views of the linguistic prehistory of
Europe north of the Alps, by which I mean, more generally, Europe north
of the main divide which extends from the Pyrenees in the southwest to the
northern Balkans in the east, or north-east, relatively speaking. I will saynothing about the Uralic languages, 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.
1
After a very
brief synopsis of the scope and contents of the theory, I would like toformulate a number of theses, or propositions, with explanations and with
references.
I begin with a brief sketch (from Vennemann 1998a) which may be
viewed as an illustration of thesis G 1 (G for general bachground).
G 1.
Languages of three genetic groups were spoken in prehistoric Europenorth of the Alps:
1. Old European
2. Atlantic
3. West Indo-EuropeanTo understand the prehistoric linguistic development of Europe, one has tokeep in mind that the relevant time to consider is relatively short. Therenaturally 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 region between the polar ice which reached south intoGreat Britain and Northern Germany on one hand and the Alpine ice whichreached north into regions which are now densely populated, this regionbetween two formidable ice sheets were inhospitable to human beings.Human beings surviving there as hunters, fishers, and gatherers numberedvery few, and experience shows that when people with more advanced
1.
E.g. the languages to which Etruscan and Rhætian belong, if Rix(1998) is right in his assumption that the Rhætic language or languageswere relatives of the the Etruscan language spoken in Southern andNorthern Tyrol (and possibly beyond).
Vennemann, “Languages in prehistoric Europe north of the Alps”, page
2
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, creating nearly subtropical weather conditions untilabout six thousand years ago.
G 2.The three genetic groups
of prehistoric Europe north of the Alps
had the following filiations:
1. Old European: Vasconic
2. Atlantic: Semitidic
3. West Indo-European: Indo-European
Vasconic
Semitidic
Basque Old European
Semitic
Atlantic
Point 1. The Old European languages I consider Vasconic, i.e. related 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 language of theCanary Islands, and a narrower one which excludes them. For want of abetter term, and a bit on the model of Basque and Vasconic, I call this group
Semitidic. But since the languages that left their influence at least in the
lexicon of the West Indo-European languages seem to have been mostsimilar to Semitic in the narrower sense, so that the impression often is that
they
were
Semitic languages, I will often simply say “Semitic”. Whatevertheir exact filiation, the Atlantic languages themselves died out in prehistorictimes or, perhaps, in early historic times, namely in the middle ages, if my
view is correct that Pictish 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 continent. Whether they have relatives outside
Vennemann, “Languages in prehistoric Europe north of the Alps”, page
3
the Indogermania, as is assumed within the socalled Nostratic theory, is of
no significance to my theory.I assume the following movements of the speakers of the languages of
the three posited families.
2
When the Continent was becoming warmerabout ten thousand years ago and the ice sheet was beginning to withdraw
from large parts of Europe, both in a northerly direction toward the pole
and in a southerly direction into the Alps, the Vasconic Old Europeansmoved forward in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe starting fromSouthern France, so that nearly the entire Continent became Vasconic.
3
If Iwere 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 theraising of goats and sheep, supplemented by a primitive form of agriculture,
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-Europeanlanguage of that region, Aquitanian, was Vasconic (Michelena 1954,
Gorrochategui 1984, 1987, Trask 1997: 398-402). Therefore it appears to bea reasonable assumption that Southern France was Vasconic before the
arrival of Gaulish, Greek, and Latin. There was also Ligurian, but too littlematerial has survived for a genetic identification. Since the Vasconicity at
least of a large part of prehistoric Southern France is certain, it appears tome the most reasonable assumption that the first major post-glaciationlanguages of Europe north of the Alps were indeed Vasconic. The system of Old European river names supports this assumption (Vennemann 1994b).Next I turn to the Atlantic peoples. From the fifth millennium onward,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 Sweden in the middle of the third
millennium. Their main economy, if I may guess again, I suppose to have
been an advanced form of cattle breeding as well as agriculture including
fruit
-culture, also increasingly mining and trading.
2.
A version of this view, in which however the Vasconic languages were
not yet accommodated, is contained in Vennemann 1988; an improvedversion is in the appendix of the 1994b article.
3.
Aspects of a theory of a once Vasconic Europe are anticipated in
Simon 1930 and Cowan 1984.
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