Iberia (PS)

[Larry Trask]

In my earlier posting, I forgot to mention one further point:
there is no evidence for Basque speech in the Ebro valley in
Roman times.

Aquitanian, the ancestral form of Basque spoken in the Roman period,
is overwhelmingly recorded only north of the Pyrenees.  We have only
three Aquitanian inscriptions from south of the Pyrenees, all of
them in eastern Navarre, and none of them very close to the Ebro.

Moreover, the western half of the historical Basque Country is full of
toponyms which are plainly not Basque and which might well be IE.
Prominent here is the big group of names in <-aka> and <-ika>,
like Mundaka, Meaka, Sondika, Muxika and the famous Gernika.  These
names are common in the west, but become rarer as we move east, until
they finally peter out altogether.  They are absent on the northern
side of the Pyrenees.

Accordingly, some specialists have concluded that Basque was very likely
not spoken in Roman times in a large part of the Spanish Basque Country,
and that Basque-speakers only moved in later -- most likely soon after
the collapse of Roman power in the west.

It is also noteworthy that clearly Basque toponyms, so numerous in
the mountains, become rarer as we move south toward the Ebro, and are
almost non-existent in the Ebro valley itself.  (I omit Basque names
whch are obviously calques on, or adaptations of, Romance names.)

Of course, this paucity of Basque toponyms in the Ebro valley might be
explained simply by the early disappearance of Basque from that region.
In the 12th century, the Basque-Romance frontier seems to have run at
least roughly along the Ebro, but three centuries later it had moved
substantially further north.  Even so, if the Ebro valley had been
inhabited by Basques for a couple of thousand years before this, we
might hope to find a few more Basque toponyms there.

True, the Romans reported that the people they called the Vascones
inhabited much of modern Navarre, down to the Ebro.  And, true, the
European names for the Basques derive from this Roman name.  So we
might reasonably conclude that the Vascones spoke Aquitanian/Basque.
But there exists no hard evidence that they did, apart perhaps from
those three inscriptions.

In sum, then, we cannot demonstrate that Basque was ever spoken
anywhere in the Ebro valley before the early medieval period.
Maybe it was, but we can't say that it was.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)