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To: LN2Campy
The Basque language is not related to ANY other world language. It is truly a linguistic oddity. You can find some info on this on the web, like here for example. Now, Finnish, on the other hand, is most closely related to Hungarian... which provides an interesting window onto migration patterns there.
46 posted on 12/06/2001 3:03:06 PM PST by austinTparty
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To: austinTparty
(Thanks austinTparty)

A History of the Basque Language

By Manfred Owstrowski, a German linguist and professor

I. Language families and genetic language relationships in Europe
Most of the languages spoken in Europe belong to one single language family: Indo-European. Basque is the sole surviving non-Indo-European language in Western Europe, it is classified as a language isolate. Besides Indo-European, there are to be found languages of four other families in Europe; the Uralic family and the Altaic stock are represented, and we have to add two language families in the Caucasian area, namely South Caucasian and North Caucasian.

The Indo-European language family can be divided into 11 branches, consisting of living and/or extinct languages of Europe and parts of Asia: Indo-Iranian, with Sanskrit and modern representatives like Hindi and Punjabi on the Indic side and Persian, Kurdish, Pashto and many other languages on the Iranian side; Armenian; Classical and Modern Greek; Albanian, which presumably is a descendant of the ancient Illyrian language; Italic, originally consisting of Osco-Umbrian and Latino-Faliscan, today represented by the modern descendants of Latin, the Romance languages (Rumanian, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese and others); Celtic, with Irish (= Gaelic), Welsh and Breton still spoken; Germanic, with the extinct Gothic language, North Germanic (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic) and West Germanic (German, Dutch, Frisian, English); Baltic, here we have to mention Lithuanian and Latvian; Slavic, with Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbo- Croatian, Bulgarian and some others; Tocharian, which is divided into two languages (called „Tocharian A“ and „Tocharian B“) once spoken in an area of western China; finally, Anatolian, a group of long extinct languages (e.g., Hittite and Luwian) of what is now Turkey. All these branches of Indo-European are believed to go back to a single proto-language, called Proto-Indo-European. The area where Proto-Indo-European was originally spoken (the Proto-Indo-European „homeland“) is still a matter of dispute, but various hints point to Eastern Europe, north and north-east of the Black Sea, and it seems to be rather clear that Indo-European languages are relatively late intruders in Western Europe. Concerning the time when Proto-Indo-European must have been in use, one may think of the end of the stone age in Europe.

....snip....(I've read reports from linguists that the 'mother tongue' originates in Anatolia.)

50 posted on 12/06/2001 3:35:25 PM PST by blam
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To: austinTparty

My gggg- grandfather was born in Temesvar Hungary, what is now Timisora Romania, and what at one point was part of Austria. My DNA shows no Hungarian but does show small amount of Finland, however it is known he was at least part Jewish. I cannot find anything else about him not even name of his wife. Ancestry.uk has six family trees with his name on them but it’s blacked out and even though I signed up for world explorer 3-month trial it won’t let me access these :(


269 posted on 09/01/2023 6:50:16 AM PDT by kelly4c
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