Ancient Mediterranean languages

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Altmediterrane languages or Mediterranean ancient languages called languages around the Mediterranean almost exclusively in the ur- or early era were spoken each region. This includes, on the one hand, the language situation before the dominance of Greek , Latin and Arabic in the corresponding colonies and domains, and, on the other hand, for the northern area, the old European languages before the spread of Indo-European . This does not imply a linguistic classification of these languages, neither as a language relationship to one another nor as a demarcation from others. The only languages ​​of this group that are still actively used today are Basque and some Berber languages .

General

Almost all ancient Mediterranean languages ​​disappeared in antiquity . Some of the language groups belonged to the pre- Indo-European languages . They were already resident in the Mediterranean region before the arrival of Indo-European speaking population groups. Some of them, such as Phoenician or Ugaritic , belonged to the Semitic languages .

Spread of the Phoenician language. Example of a Semitic language in the group of the ancient Mediterranean languages, shown here as a yellow outline

For some languages ​​there are written records, for others there are several reports in Roman and Greek sources. Research in historical linguistics has been able to reconstruct a few words from given place names and substrate words .

history

According to the linguist Harald Haarmann , these languages ​​go back to the Paleolithic populations of Europe, which has also been proven by human genetic studies. These population groups have a high frequency of blood group O and the negative rhesus factor . These are characteristics that still apply to today's Basque population.

Distribution of the haplogroup R1b (Y-DNA) in the recent, resident population of Western Europe.

In addition, a certain haplogroup of the Y chromosome , such as haplogroup R1b (Y-DNA) , can be found in its greatest distribution in the recent population of Western Europe, namely in the south of England with about 70%, in northern and western England, Wales , Scotland , Ireland with up to 90%, in Spain with 70%, in France with 60%.

In Portugal it is over 50%. For the Basques it is 88.1%. The latter value suggests that the various ancient European tribes that lived in Western Europe before the arrival of the Celts were carriers of R1b. The European variants indicate a founder effect . Several gene conversion events have occurred in Europe .

There are only a few written documents in the ancient Mediterranean languages. Therefore, they cannot be reconstructed adequately and it is unknown whether they belonged to one or more language families. The relationship between some of these languages, such as Basque and Iberian , has been and is discussed in science, but has not been able to establish itself as a doctrinal opinion.

The ancient Mediterranean languages ​​were introduced by the immigration of Indo-Europeans from around 4400 BC. In the Balkans and the Mediterranean area. But even at the turn of the ages there were numerous ancient Mediterranean language islands around the Mediterranean . Almost all of these languages ​​became extinct in the first centuries of our era, when the simple population of the Mediterranean area gave up their own languages ​​after the Roman conquest in favor of Latin or Vulgar Latin and later the Romance languages that developed from them . Only Basque ( Vasconic Hypothesis ) is spoken by a little less than a million people to this day.

This reconstruction assumes the correctness of the Kurgan hypothesis , which is widely accepted in linguistics , while other hypotheses on the origin of the Indo-Europeans, such as the Anatolia hypothesis , are also represented in archeology .

Overview of the ancient Mediterranean languages

  • Tartessian (southern Spain; written documents from the period between the 7th century BC and around 200 BC )
  • Iberian (Eastern Spain; written tradition 5th to 1st century BC )
  • Aquitaine (northern Spain, southwestern France; writtenless; set in late antiquity)
  • Basque (Basque Country, northern Spain, southwest France, spoken to this day)
  • Ligurian (north-west Italy, south-east France; without writing; lost during late antiquity)
  • Paleosardic (Sardinia; without writing; lost during late antiquity)
  • Camunian (southern Alpine region; inscriptions from the 1st century BC)
  • North Pikenish (Province of Pesaro and Urbino; ​​inscriptions from the 6th century BC)
  • Rhaetian (southern Alpine region; inscriptions approx. 500 to 15 BC )
  • Etruscan (Tuscany; written documents 7th - 1st century BC)
  • Sican (uncertain; central and southwestern Sicily; survived only in very fragments; perished during antiquity)
  • Old European (Southeastern Europe; possibly written documents from the end of the 6th to the middle of the 4th millennium BC; lives on in loanwords from ancient Greek and other old Balkan languages)
  • Minoan , younger stage: Eteocretic (Crete; written documents in Linear A from the middle of the 3rd millennium BC to the 12th century BC, in hieroglyphic script from approx. 2000 BC to the 16th century BC . Chr. )
  • Kypro-Minoan , younger stage: Eteokyprisch (Cyprus; written documents in Kypro-Minoan script and Levanto-Minoan from approx. 1500 to the 12th century BC; inscriptions in Cypro-Syllabic 11th-3rd century BC. )
  • Hattish (Central Anatolia; no written tradition of its own, but there are sprinkles in Hittite texts in the Hittite language; disappeared in the 15th century BC)
  • Hurrian (northern Mesopotamia; literature 2230 - approx. 1200 BC; submerged around 1000 BC)
  • Urartian (eastern Anatolia and southern Caucasus region; written documents approx. 850 BC - approx. 600 BC; perished before the turn of the ages)

This list does not take into account Semitic languages such as the Akkadian language , various Canaanite languages or the Aramaic languages and other Afro-Asiatic languages ​​of the Mediterranean region in antiquity.

literature

  • Harald Haarmann: World history of languages. From the early days of man to the present. Volume 1703, Becksche Reihe, Munich 2010, ISBN 3-406-55120-3 .
  • Harald Haarmann: Lexicon of the lost languages. Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-47596-5 .
  • Kausen, Ernst: The language families of the world. Part 1: Europe and Asia. Buske, Hamburg 2013. ISBN 978-3-87548-655-1 . (Chapter 6)
  • Uwe Hinrichs (Ed.): Handbook of Eurolinguistics. Vol. 20 Slavic study books , Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 2010, ISBN 3-4470-5928-1 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Harald Haarmann: Lexicon of the fallen languages. Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-47596-5 , pp. 36-37.
  2. ↑ Dieter H. Steinbauer: Vaskonisch - Original Language of Europe? In: Günter Hauska (Ed.): Genes, languages ​​and their evolution: How related are people - how related are their languages? Universitätsverlag, Regensburg 2005, ISBN 3-930480-46-8 .
  3. ↑ Ornella Semino, A. Silvana Santachiara-Benerecetti, Francesco Falaschi, L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Peter A. Underhill: Ethiopians and Khoisan Share the Deepest Clades of the Human Y-Chromosome Phylogeny. In: The American Journal of Human Genetics. Volume 70, Issue 1, January 2002, pp. 265-268.
  4. ^ R. Gonçalves, A. Freitas, M. Branco, A. Rosa, AT Fernandes, LA Zhivotovsky, PA Underhill, T. Kivisild, A. Brehm: Y-chromosome lineages from Portugal, Madeira and Açores record elements of Sephardim and Berber ancestry. In: Annals of Human Genetics. Volume 69, Issue 4, July 2005, ISSN  0003-4800 , pp. 443-454. doi : 10.1111 / j.1529-8817.2005.00161.x . PMID 15996172 .
  5. ^ KL Young, G. Sun, R. Deka, MH Crawford: Paternal genetic history of the Basque population of Spain. In: Human biology. Volume 83, Number 4, August 2011, ISSN  1534-6617 , pp. 455-475. doi : 10.3378 / 027.083.0402 . PMID 21846204 .
  6. ↑ NM Myres, S. Rootsi, AA Lin, M. Järve, RJ King, I. Kutuev, VM Cabrera, EK Khusnutdinova, A. Pshenichnov, B. Yunusbayev, O. Balanovsky, E. Balanovska, P. Rudan, M. Baldovic, RJ Herrera, J. Chiaroni, J. Di Cristofaro, R. Villems, T. Kivisild, PA Underhill: A major Y-chromosome haplogroup R1b Holocene era founder effect in Central and Western Europe. In: European journal of human genetics: EJHG. Volume 19, Number 1, January 2011, ISSN  1476-5438 , pp. 95-101. doi : 10.1038 / ejhg.2010.146 . PMID 20736979 . PMC 3039512 (free full text).
  7. ↑ SM Adams, TE King, E. Bosch, MA Jobling: The case of the unreliable SNP: recurrent back-mutation of Y-chromosomal marker P25 through gene conversion. In: Forensic science international. Volume 159, Number 1, May 2006, ISSN  0379-0738 , pp. 14-20. doi : 10.1016 / j.forsciint.2005.06.003 . PMID 16026953 .