Some think the Basque are an isolated remnant of Cro Magnon man in Europe.
I skimmed through his biography after Googling his home page. Interesting.
I'm skeptical, too, on methodological grounds. "Basque" is a cultural designation based largely on language, and our knowledge of the Basque language and the people who speak/spoke it is pretty recent, dating back no earlier than--I would infer--the Greco-Roman period. "Ainu" seems to be a more racial designation, but once we start talking about Ainu religion we're getting into a cultural definition based on fairly recent knowledge from the past millennia-plus or so; whereas this article makes statements about Ainu religion in 5000 BC, long before any written records in Japan, and it also makes inferences about Ainu migrations based on projecting backwards from current knowledge of the Ainu language to hypothetical migrations that supposedly may have taken place "millennia ago". This procedure seems very speculative to me. The linguistic argument also seems very weak--this type of linguistic argument from common-sounding words was common in the 19th century but has fallen out of favor because of problems with this method that have since been pointed out.
Edo Nyland is famed nonsense non-scientist. But very entertaining. His methods are so far fetched that it is possible to prove the connection of any words in any language.
He has a homepage where you can see his method of analysing and reconstructing relationships between words and names. It is very entertaining for someone with enough brains and geeky enough. I'm not sure if the guy is serious and just plain crazy, or if he does it to annoy or mock serious "comparative linguists".
His homepage:
http://www.highspeedplus.com/~edonon/
Even so it is a great post. As far as I am concerned, the past, like the present, was complex and development multifacited.
Their language is unique, and I believe their race is well over 20,000 years old. Interesting............FRegards
The biggest danger in social science is the allure of romantic wistfulness.
Since you have an interest in archaeology, how do you go back and review posts you made years ago? Is there a shortcut, or do you just have to back up in the My Comments screen for hours?
bttt
fascinating
Must be hallucinatin'. They're about as similar Gnu and butch.
Most of the links seem very tenuous to me -- which would be obvious since the two languages are separated by the entire breadth of the Eurasian continent and by eons. I thought there was a link between Basque and Chechen, is that correct? If it can be proved that Basque is related to any of the Dravidian languages we could then move with comparisons further east. The strange thing about Dravidian is that though they are mostly in southern india, there is one language still alive in Baluchistan -- Brahui. Finno-Ugaritic is another strange family, but I doubt they're related to the Dravidian or Basque langauges.
It's interesting, nevertheless; thank you for posting it. b
It's interesting, nevertheless; thank you for posting it. b
bump
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Interesting post (as usual) blam. I'd just like to remind everyone that in comparative linguistics you have to be very careful in drawing conclusions from a small number of pairs of matched words. In any pair of unrelated languages, each of a few thousand words, with only a limited number of consonantal and vowel combinations, one predicts a small number of matches by pure chance. One needs to show that the number of independent matches are significantly larger than would be generated by chance.