Iberian language


The Iberian language was the language of an indigenous western European people identified by Greek and Roman sources who lived in the eastern and southeastern regions of the Iberian Peninsula in the pre-Migration Era. The ancient Iberians can be identified as a rather nebulous local culture between the 7th and 1st century BC. The Iberian language, like all the other Paleohispanic languages except Basque, became extinct by the 1st to 2nd centuries AD, after being gradually replaced by Latin due to the Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.
Iberian is unclassified: while the scripts used to write it have been deciphered to various extents, the language itself remains largely unknown. Links with other languages have been suggested, especially the Basque language, based largely on the observed similarities between the numerical systems of the two.

Geographic distribution

Iberian inscriptions are found along the Mediterranean coast of the Iberian Peninsula, reaching up to the Hérault river in the south of France. Important written remains have been found in Ensérune, between Narbonne and Béziers in France, in an oppidum with mixed Iberian and Celtic elements. The southern limit would be Porcuna, in Jaén, where splendid sculptures of Iberian riders have been found. Further inland the exact distribution of the Iberian language inscriptions is uncertain. It seems that the culture reached the interior through the Ebro river as far as Salduie but no further.
Among the pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula the following might have spoken the Iberian language: Ausetani, Ilergetes, Indigetes, Laietani, Cassetani, Ilercavones, Edetani, Contestani, Bastetani and Oretani. Turduli and Turdetani are believed to be of Tartessian language.
For some scholars, such as Velaza, Iberian could have been the language spoken by the autochthonous population of these territories, while for others, such as De Hoz, Iberian could have been more of a lingua franca.

History

The origin of the language is unknown. Although Iberian ceased to be written in the 1st century AD, it may have survived in some areas until the Visigothic period, according to Menéndez Pidal.
There are several theories about the geographical origin of Iberian. According to the Catalan Theory, the Iberian language originated in northern Catalonia, where the earliest Iberian inscriptions are documented . Its expansion towards the north and south would have been due to broad population movements in times not long before the first written documents, from the 11th to the 10th century BC, given that the Iberian language appears homogeneous in Iberian texts and, if it was of greater antiquity, dialectalization should be evident. The presence of non-interpretable elements such as Iberian anthroponyms amongst inscriptions in this area is not considered statistically significant.

Writing

The oldest Iberian inscriptions date to the 6th century BC or maybe the 5th century BC and the latest ones date from the end of the 1st century BC or maybe the beginning of the 1st century AD. More than two thousand Iberian inscriptions are currently known. Most are short texts on ceramic with personal names, which are usually interpreted as ownership marks. Many coins minted by Iberian communities during the Roman Republic have legends in Iberian. The longest Iberian texts were made on lead plaques; the most extensive is from Yátova with more than six hundred signs.
Three different scripts have remained for the Iberian language:
The northeastern Iberian script is also known as the Iberian script, because it is the Iberian script most frequently used. The northeastern Iberian inscriptions have been found mainly in the northeastern quadrant of the Iberian Peninsula: chiefly on the coast from Languedoc-Roussillon to Alicante, but with a deep penetration into the Ebro valley. This script is almost completely deciphered.
All the paleohispanic scripts, with the exception of the Greco-Iberian alphabet, share a common distinctive typological characteristic: they use signs with syllabic value for the occlusives and signs with monophonematic value for the remaining consonants and for vowels. From a writing systems point of view they are neither alphabets nor syllabaries; rather, they are mixed scripts that are normally identified as semi-syllabaries. Regarding their origin there is no agreement among researchers; for some they are linked only to the Phoenician alphabet, while for others the Greek alphabet played a part.

Southeastern (or Meridional) Iberian script

The southeastern Iberian script is a semi-syllabary too, but it is more similar to the Tartessian script than to the northeastern Iberian script. The southeastern Iberian inscriptions have been found mainly in the southeastern quadrant of the Iberian Peninsula: eastern Andalusia, Murcia, Albacete, Alicante and Valencia. This script is not completely deciphered.
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Greco-Iberian alphabet

The Greco-Iberian alphabet is a direct adaptation of an Ionic variant of a Greek alphabet to the specificities of the Iberian language. The inscriptions that use the Greco-Iberian alphabet have been found mainly in Alicante and Murcia.

Description

Current extent of linguistic knowledge

Very little is known for certain about Iberian. The investigation of the language is past its initial phase of transcription and compiling of material, and is currently in the phase of identifying grammatical elements in the texts.
The hypotheses currently proposed are unconfirmed, and are likely to remain so unless the discovery of a bilingual text allows linguists to confirm their deductions.

Phonology

Vowels

Iberian appears to have five vowels commonly transcribed as a e i o u. Other modern languages on the peninsula such as Basque and Spanish also have such systems. Although five-vowel systems are extremely common all over the world, it has been suggested that this may point to a Sprachbund amongst the ancient languages of the Iberian peninsula.
The front vowels appear more frequently than the back vowels. Although there are indications of a nasal vowel, this is thought to be an allophone. Judging by Greek transcriptions, it seems that there were no vowel length distinctions; if this is correct then Iberian uses the long ē as opposed to the short epsilon.

Diphthongs

It seems that the second element of diphthongs was always a closed vowel, as in ai, ei, and au. Untermann observed that the diphthong ui could only be found in the first cluster.

Semivowels

It is possible that Iberian had the semivowels and . The fact that is lacking in native words casts doubt on whether semivowels really existed in Iberian outside of foreign borrowings and diphthongs.

Consonants

There are a number of known affixes, especially applied to last names. For the Iberian language these seem to be postpositional, and apparently more agglutinative than fusional.
The best-known are the following:

Lexicon

There are some words for which there has been surmised a more or less probable meaning:
Thanks to the Latin Inscription of the plaque of Ascoli, which includes a list of Iberian cavalry soldiers in the Roman army, the forms of Iberian proper names have been unraveled. Iberian names are formed mainly by two interchangeable elements, each usually formed of two syllables, which are written together. For example, the element "iltiŕ" can be found in the following names: iltiŕaŕker, iltiŕbaś, iltiŕtikeŕ, tursiltiŕ, baiseiltiŕ or bekoniltiŕ. This discovery was a giant step: from this moment it was possible to identify with some kind of confidence the names of persons in the texts. Nevertheless, the list of components of Iberian names varies between researchers. The basic list comes from Untermann and was recently updated by Rodríguez Ramos ; complementary data and criteria can be found in the Faria papers.
The following list includes some of the elements proposed as components of Iberian names: abaŕ, aibe, aile, ain, aitu, aiun, aker, albe, aloŕ, an, anaŕ, aŕbi, aŕki, aŕs, asai, aster, ata, atin, atun, aunin, auŕ, austin, baiser, balaŕ, balke, bartaś, baś, bastok, bekon, belauŕ, beleś, bels, bene, beŕ, beri, beŕon, betan, betin, bikir, bilos, bin, bir, bitu, biuŕ, bolai, boŕ, boś, boton, ekes, ekaŕ, eler, ena, esto, eten, eter, iar, iaun, ibeś, ibeis, ike, ikoŕ, iltiŕ, iltur, inte, iskeŕ, istan, iunstir, iur, kaisur, kakeŕ, kaltuŕ, kani, kaŕes, kaŕko, katu, keŕe, kibaś, kine, kitaŕ, kon, koŕo, koŕś, kuleś, kurtar, lako, lauŕ, leis, lor, lusban, nalbe, neitin, neŕse, nes, niś, nios, oŕtin, sakaŕ, sakin, saltu, śani, śar, seken, selki, sike, sili, sine, sir, situ, soket, sor, sosin, suise, taker, talsku, tan, tanek, taneś, taŕ, tarban, taŕtin, taś, tautin, teita, tekeŕ, tibaś, tikeŕ, tikirs, tikis, tileis, tolor, tuitui, tumar, tuŕś, turkir, tortin, ulti, unin, uŕke, ustain, ḿbaŕ, nḿkei.
In some cases linguists have encountered simple names, with only one element for a suffix: BELES, AGER-DO and BIVR-NO are in the plaque of Ascoli, neitin in Ullastret and lauŕ-to, bartas-ko or śani-ko in other Iberian texts. More rarely there have been indications of an infix, which can be -i-, -ke- or -ta-. In rare cases Untermann also encountered an element is- or o- prefacing a proper name.
In the elements that formed Iberian names it is common to encounter patterns of variation, as in eter/eten/ete with the same variations as in iltur/iltun/iltu; kere/keres as lako/lakos; or alos/alor/alo and bikis/bikir/biki).
Some Iberian onomastic elements have look-alikes in Aquitanian or Basque. This has been explained by Vascologists like Mitxelena as an "onomastic pool". However, since the meaning of most Iberian words remains opaque to date, the connection remains speculative except in a very small number of cases. An ancient sprachbund involving these two languages is deemed likely by some linguists. But as Trask notes, Basque has been of no help in translating Iberian inscriptions.

Influences on other languages

External relations

Iberian and Basque

Whether Iberian and Basque are two languages of the same language family is still a much-debated question. Many experts on Iberian suspect that there is a relationship of some sort between Iberian and Aquitanian, a precursor of the Basque language. But there is not enough evidence to date to ascertain whether the two languages belong to the same language family or whether the relationship is due to linguistic borrowing. Lexical and onomastic coincidences could be due to borrowing, while the similarities in the phonological structures of the two languages could be due to linguistic areal phenomena. More scientific studies on Iberian language are needed to shed light on this question.
From a historical perspective, the first features where a relationship between Basque and Iberian was claimed were:
Although other pairs have been proposed, the meanings of these Iberian morphs are still controversial. The main arguments today which relate to coinciding surface forms between Basque and Iberian are:
In 2005 Eduardo Orduña published a study showing some Iberian compounds that according to contextual data would appear to be Iberian numerals and show striking similarities with Basque numerals. The study was expanded upon by Joan Ferrer based on terms found on coins, stating their value, and with new combinatorial and contextual data. The comparison proposes the following:
The basis of this theory is better understood if we compare some of the attested Iberian compounds with Basque complex numbers :
Even so, Orduña does not claim this comparison to be a proof of a family relation between Iberian and Basque, but rather owing to Iberian loanwords in the Basque language. In contrast, Ferrer believes that the similarities could be caused due to both the genetic relationship or the loan, but indicates that the loan of the entire system of numerals is rare.
Joseba Lakarra has rejected both hypotheses: loan or genetic relationship. Lakarra’s arguments focus almost exclusively on the field of Basque historical grammar, but also arguments, following de Hoz hypothesis, that the hypothesis of the borrowing has already turned out implausible due to the limited and remote extension of the territory where Iberian was spoken as first language in South-East Spain.
Javier de Hoz considers plausible the internal contextual and combinatorial arguments that would support the hypothesis that these Iberian elements could be interpreted as numerals. In fact, concerning the specific values, he considers valid the proposed equivalences between Iberian ban with 'one' and between Iberian erder with 'half', according to the marks of value found in coins, while he considers that the rest of the proposed equivalences are a working hypothesis. Regarding the equivalence between the possible Iberian numerals and the Basque numerals, he agrees with Lakarra that the shape of the documented Iberian forms does not fit the expected protobasque forms. Finally, he considers that the greatest difficulty in accepting this hypothesis is, paradoxically, its extent and systematic nature, because if it was correct, it would result in a close relationship between Iberian and Basque, which should allow the identification of other relationships between Iberian and Basque subsystems, as clearly as this one, relationships that no investigator using reasonable linguistic arguments has been able to identify.
Eduardo Orduña insists that the Iberian elements proposed as numerals are not only similar to the Basque numerals, but also combine as numerals and appear in contexts where numerals are expected. He observes Lakarra not dispute these arguments . As regards the de Hoz hypothesis about considering the Iberian language as a lingua franca, Orduña remarks its hypothetical character, although Lakarra presents that hypothesis as an established fact. The problems of this hypothesis have been collected by Ferrer in a later work. Regarding the phonetic difficulties indicated by Lakarra, Orduña argues that its proposals are compatible with the Proto-Basque reconstructed of Michelena, which is for chronology and security the reconstruction that an iberist has to consider, while the hypothesis of internal Basque reconstruction of Lakarra has a vague chronology and a much lower degree of security. Finally, contrary to his first opinion in favor of the loan, concludes that the most economical hypothesis to explain the similarities between the Iberian numeral system and the Basque numeral system is the genetic relationship.
Francisco Villar notes that the similarities between Iberian numerals and Basque numerals are of the same order as those documented among Indo-European languages and consequently argues that the only sustainable hypothesis at this point is the genetic relationship between Iberian and Basque. Villar also believes that if the reconstruction of Proto-Basque proposed by Lakarra is incompatible with the evidence derived from the numerals, the reconstruction must be corrected, as like all reconstructions, is hypothetical and perfectible.

General works