Basque and Georgian cousins?

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
"D. Anthony Tschetter-Breed" <tonybreed at juno.com> wrote:
 
>The story, thoroughly plausible, is that a group of Georgians broke away
>from
>Georgian society (perhaps during a drought; this fact, he said, is found
>in the
>traditional Georgian mythos or oral history).  They traveled west,
>looking for
>a place to settle, and continued until they found a place like their old
>Georgia:
>mountains near the sea, i.e. the eastern Pyrenees.
 
Assuming they took the route north of the Black Sea, it seems strange
that they missed Slovenia, the Cote d'Azur or the gorgeous mountains
near the sea [Costa Brava] of the eastern Pyrinees (the Basque
country is located on the western Pyrinees).
 
>Is this on the level?
 
I'm no expert on Basque or Georgian folk-dances, but as far as the
languages are concerned, there is no reason to assume a special link
between Basque and Georgian.  The two languages share a number of
characteristics, like not being Indo-European and having ergative
morphology (Basque more so than Georgian), and even a few
tantalizingly similar grammatical morphemes (Bq. gu "we", Geo. gv-
"us"), but despite efforts by several people (most notably Rene'
Lafon), nobody has been able to present a convincing case for an
Euskaro-Kartvelian connection.  Current efforts to link Basque to
something else are focusing on North Caucasian (Abkhaz-Circassian and
Nakh-Daghestanian) and the South Caucasian (Kartvelian, Georgian)
hypothesis has been largely abandoned.  The North Caucasian languages
are also not Indo-European and have in part ergative morphology.  I
don't know about their folk-dances.
 
I suspect that another reason people have looked for connections
between Basque and Georgian is the ancient name of the Georgian
kingdom, to wit "Iberia".  But Basque is not Iberian, and the
Georgians call their country Sakartvelo (I have no idea if "Iberia"
is a native Georgian word).  And then modern Azerbaijan (then
probably inhabited by Iranian speaking peoples, of
Scytho-Sarmatian-Alan stock) was called "Albania" in those days, so
what's in a name?
 
 
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam