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Do Basque farm animal names resemble Indo-European ones?
Jonathan Adams ((no email))
7 Nov 1996 00:24:12 GMT
Does anyone know if the Basque names for farm animals, crops and basic farm
implements seem to resemble Indo-European ones? The similarity of the various
Indo-European words for 'sheep', for example, is used to suggest that
Indo-European speakers were farmers and herders, and that they moved into
Europe replacing hunter-gatherer populations or cultures who spoke other
language groups (such as the ancestor of Basque). But if indeed the ancestral
Basque-speakers were hunter-gatherers when the Indo-Europeans first got to
them, they must have learnt farming and herding from the new arrivals. So
wouldn't we expect them to have picked up some basic words for animals and
crops from the Indo-Europeans? Is there any evidence that this occurred? If
not, does that imply that in fact the Basque-speakers were the early neolithics
and that the Indo-European languages are more recent arrivals in Europe?
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