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Languages in prehistoric Europe north of the Alps Theo Vennemann gen. Nierfeld

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 say nothing 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 to formulate 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 Europe north of the Alps: 1. Old European 2. Atlantic 3. West Indo-European To understand the prehistoric linguistic development of Europe, one has to keep in mind that the relevant time to consider is relatively short. There naturally 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 into Great Britain and Northern Germany on one hand and the Alpine ice which reached north into regions which are now densely populated, this region between two formidable ice sheets were inhospitable to human beings. Human beings surviving there as hunters, fishers, and gatherers numbered very 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 languages were relatives of the the Etruscan language spoken in Southern and Northern 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 until about 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 the Canary Islands, and a narrower one which excludes them. For want of a better 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 most similar to Semitic in the narrower sense, so that the impression often is that they were Semitic languages, I will often simply say “Semitic”. Whatever their exact filiation, the Atlantic languages themselves died out in prehistoric times 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 warmer about 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 Europeans moved forward in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe starting from Southern France, so that nearly the entire Continent became Vasconic.3 If I were 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 the raising 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-European language of that region, Aquitanian, was Vasconic (Michelena 1954, Gorrochategui 1984, 1987, Trask 1997: 398-402). Therefore it appears to be a reasonable assumption that Southern France was Vasconic before the arrival of Gaulish, Greek, and Latin. There was also Ligurian, but too little material has survived for a genetic identification. Since the Vasconicity at least of a large part of prehistoric Southern France is certain, it appears to me the most reasonable assumption that the first major post-glaciation languages 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 improved version 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. Vennemann, “Languages in prehistoric Europe north of the Alps”, page 4 Why is it plausible to assume that those Atlantic colonists and megalithic builders of the Atlantic Seaboard spoke Semitidic languages? At the dawn of history we find the Western Mediterranean dominated by Phoenicians, a Semitic people; the wars between the Romans and the Carthaginians were the last chapters in the story of this dominance, essentially describing its decline. The megalithic culture is by many specialists, though not by all, considered of Mediterranean origin. If this view is accepted, a Semitic filiation of prehistoric seafaring colonizers emanating from the Mediterranean and carrying this culture is in my view the default assumption. And since for one of the most intensely megalithicized prehistoric areas, Ireland, a Hamito-Semitic pre-Celtic substratum had been suspected and demonstrated by Morris Jones (1900), ascertained by Pokorny (1927-30), and—in my view—established once and for all by Gensler (1993), there exists more to go by than the default assumption. My own view, as is easy to see, is merely a generalization from Ireland, or the British Isles, with their well-known megalithic monuments, to the entire Atlantic Littoral, the megalithicized coastal regions stretching from North Africa and Spain to Southern Sweden. As for the spread of the Indo-Europeans into the region I am considering, I take a rather conservative view. I assume them to have moved, beginning in the sixth millennium, from the Pannonian Basin (the fertile region surrounded by the Carpathian mountains) into the area north of the Alps in all directions, reaching the basin of Paris in the middle of the fifth millennium and Scandinavia about the beginning of the fourth millennium. Their main economy I suppose to have been an advanced form of farming including both agriculture and cattle-breeding.4 The theory that the Indo-Europeans brought farming to Europe north of the Alps has independently been developed, and elaborated much further, by Renfrew (1987). But I think Renfrew then caused more harm than good for it by assuming that those farmers directly spread into the areas where we find them at the dawn of history. This is untenable because the southern and eastern Indo-European areas were only Indo-Europeanized much later, essentially between the fourth and the first millennia B.C., and by military bands not by farmers. In my view these later great Indo-European migrations or Völkerwanderungen are a result of the militarization of Europe north of the Alps as a consequence of over-population in uploads/Geographie/ languages-in-prehistoric-europe-north-of-the-alps.pdf