Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Long Ranger update ...

People who deal with linguistic prehistory very far over the horizon are known as 'long rangers' — I've often heard it used derisively but they've embraced the term. The NYT article from yesterday gets into that territory with Basque substrates in Britain and such. The long rangers have their own groups and discussion lists of course (see here, for the clearest example) If you join the Yahoo group "Mother Tongue Long Ranger", word is that you'll see a longish letter by Vitaly Shevoroshkin (University of Michigan) sketching some of the history of proposals about pre-IE substrates in Europe. This work posits a (North) Caucasian presence in early Europe and sees Basque as a part of that family. ('Traditional' historical linguists don't buy any genetic relationships with Basque, labeling it an 'isolate'.)

2 comments:

Rafa Saiz Elizondo said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Rafa Saiz Elizondo said...

Sorry for this not being just a comment, but a petition. Could you send me the text of the NYT article, please?

I am basque, biologist and translator, and I am very fond on Oppenheimer's and Cavalli-Sforza's hypothesis about long-term variation of human tongues and genetics and their geographical distribution.

My e-mail is: rafasaiz@euskalerria.org

Thank you.