Chinese and Basque are related

[Queercommie Girl]

This hasn't really got anything to do with socialism as such (though it would mean I will more explicitly support the Basque independence movement :D), but there is an interesting (but still disputed) linguistic theory stating that the Chinese language is actually related to Basque, as well as other language groups scattered across Eurasia and North America. They all belong to a language supra-family called the Dene-Caucasian languages, or sometimes called (especially in China) the Sino-Caucasian languages (In Chinese: 汉-高加索语系).

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dene-caucasian_languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Den%C3%A9-Caucasian.JPG
http://ehl.santafe.edu/maps5.htm
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B1%89-%E9%AB%98%E5%8A%A0%E7%B4%A2%E8%AF%AD%E7%B3%BB (Chinese)

On the hypothetical proto-Dene-Caucasian language:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Den%C3%A9-Caucasian_language

According to this theory, proto-Sino-Tibetan and proto-Basque split as late as 8000 years ago, or around 6000 BCE.

Dene-Caucasian languages could have once spread across much of Western Europe, before the migration of Indo-European peoples into the region from Western Asia, who had more political power due to their wheels and horses, and replaced much of the pre-Indo-European languages in the region. Basque is the only surviving pre-Indo-European language left in Europe, and Basque is not just pre-Germanic and pre-Roman, but actually pre-Celtic as well.

Here is a book that explains the Indo-European dominance of the human world, from a materialistic perspective:

http://books.google.com/books?id=rOG5VcYxhiEC&dq

Argues that the domestication of the horse and the use of the wheel by the prehistoric peoples of the central Eurasian steppe grasslands facilitated the spread of the Proto-Indo-European language throughout civilization.

[Queercommie Girl]

http://starling.rinet.ru/images/globet.png

A family tree of human language families.

[Queercommie Girl]

http://www.enter.net/~torve/trogholm/wonder/indoeuropean/indoeuropean1.html

Another interesting hypothesis on this topic.

[Queercommie Girl]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Proposed_area_of_Vasconic_languages.png

The spread of Basque-like (Vasconic) languages in Western Europe, before three waves of Indo-European speakers arrived: (starting from as early as 4000 BCE) Celtic, Italic (Romans), and Germanic (Visigoths).

The Celtic peoples largely co-existed peacefully with the Vasconic peoples, but the militaristic Roman and Germanic peoples did not. But it is very possible that large regions of Vasconic-speaking peoples existed long into the Middle Ages.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f1/Dama_d%27Elx.jpg/250px-Dama_d%27Elx.jpg

How ancient Vasconic peoples may have looked like. (Source: ancient Iberian statue)

[Bad Grrrl Agro]

Why do I feel that you we're expecting me to read this? Jajaja! But yeah, that's awesome.:thumbup1:

[hatzel]

I've read a few things claiming that Vasconic languages were once widespread over Europe, before being replaced by Celtic and later Germanic / Romantic languages. Somebody comes to mind who was looking at the names of old towns and geographical features in Finland, looking for the pre-Finnic population there. I didn't consider him particularly convincing...and it's pretty tough anyway, given the obvious Indo-European influence on the Finnish language, long before even reaching their current location...Iranian numbers, seemingly Indo-European-influenced pronouns. It almost seems silly to split languages into families nowadays, given the amongst of linguistic 'cross-fertilisation' that's clearly gone on...

[Queercommie Girl]

I've read a few things claiming that Vasconic languages were once widespread over Europe, before being replaced by Celtic and later Germanic / Romantic languages. Somebody comes to mind who was looking at the names of old towns and geographical features in Finland, looking for the pre-Finnic population there. I didn't consider him particularly convincing...and it's pretty tough anyway, given the obvious Indo-European influence on the Finnish language, long before even reaching their current location...Iranian numbers, seemingly Indo-European-influenced pronouns. It almost seems silly to split languages into families nowadays, given the amongst of linguistic 'cross-fertilisation' that's clearly gone on...

The Finns speak Uralic languages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages

Linguistics is an objective science, not something that can be decided by subjective opinions.

There is no explicit evidence to show that Vasconic languages were spoken beyond Western Europe. Other non-Indo-European languages were spoken in those areas probably, but they would be unrelated to Vasconic languages.

Also, there is no evidence of the Celts actually displacing the Vasconic peoples. Vasconic languages only began to gradually fade away in the Roman era.

[hatzel]

I do speak Finnish, by the way :) There are reasons to believe that there are non-Uralic influences in its early stages, though. For instance, the numbers 8 and 9, kahdeksan and yhdeksan, are though to be two (kahde-) and one (yhde-) from an Indo-Iranian ten (much like the Greek 'deka' and Latin 'decem'), suggesting some kind of interaction between these two peoples. The pronouns, particularly first and second person, also have similar forms to their corresponding Indo-European forms. Or, they do as far as the the first person, minä (sing.) and me (pl.) and second person, sinä (sing., originally *tinä) and te (pl.) have the same m- > t- progression we expect (me, thee, mich, dich etc.), whilst the third person...well, that's hän, which is effectively identical to the Swedish, han, but that definitely predates Swedish contact, so I assume it's just a coincidence. They could all be coincidences, in fact, and that's the issue. It could be proof of inter-familial contact of languages 'back in the day', or it could just be a complete coincidence that proto-Uralic forms (seen across the language family, compare with Hungarian 'mi' and 'ti') happened to be identical to proto-Indo European forms (*(e)me and *te). Hence it's a pretty shady area, if we're going to start saying 'the fact that this language and this language has this or that thing in common means that they are related', when in fact there are few, if any, languages which don't have some foreign influence in them, so how do we then decide how much influence from this or that language family there has to be before we class it as a creole or whatever. Is Finnish, through heavy Baltic and Swedish influence, a Germano-Balto-Finno-Ugric language, or what's the deal? :lol:

Anyway, this guy whose name I have forgotten looked at the names of pre-Finnic features, and said stuff like "oh, the name of this valley looks similar to the Basque for 'green valley'" and stuff. As I said, I didn't find him convincing, but he argued it, and wrote something about it...I'll try to find out his name, though, or any info about it. I know I read it, though :) But still, he was doing much the same thing, looking for these similarities...they can easily be misconstrued, on one hand, or they could point to pretty widespread cross-language modification...

[Queercommie Girl]

Uralic languages like Finnish were no doubt heavily influenced by their Indo-European neighbours, in the same way that Basque was influenced by Spanish and French, and Middle English became quite different from Old English due to Norman influence, and Modern Mandarin became quite different from Middle Chinese due to Jurchen/Manchu and Mongol influences.

But fundamentally, Finnish is not an Indo-European language, and Chinese is not an Altaic language.