This book surveys earlier attempts to demonstrate a genetic relationship between the Basque language and various languages in the Caucasus, and analyzes their shortcomings in methods and focus, while acknowledging a residue of valid evidence, assembled over the course of more than a century. The author has added to the earlier evidence: the current book proposes more than 600 Euskaro-Caucasian etymologies. The focus is placed on the comparison of Basque with North Caucasian. (In this model, “South Caucasian” [Kartvelian] is “unrelated” to the other two families.) The book also includes a comprehensive comparative/historical system of Euskaro-Caucasian phonology, which analyzes regular correspondences of vowels (including a postulated Euskaro-Caucasian ablaut system), vowel umlaut, unit consonants and consonant clusters, and “irregular” phonetic developments (metathesis, haplology, assimilation, dissimilation, expressive forms, contamination and blending). There is an overall emphasis on lexicon (etymology) and phonology; morphology occupies a comparatively smaller place, though there are discussions of productive and submerged morphology (chapter V), pronouns, (pp. 406-412), and verbs (pp. 413-443). Finally, the book includes the proposal of a holistic anthropological scenario for the Euskaro-Caucasian hypothesis, in which results from genetic linguistics, archaeology, and human genetics are synthesized, concluding that a population speaking a Euskaro-Caucasian language arrived on the coast of Spain ca. 7.5 – 8 millennia ago, bearing a Neolithic culture that included cultivation and processing of grain and pulse crops, husbandry of small and large cattle and swine, and dairying practices. Recent genetic results indicate that the transmission of this language and culture to the present-day Basque Country was primarily by demic diffusion, with some secondary admixture with local hunter-gatherers. The evidence shows that the modern Basque language is not a lineal descendant of the unknown language(s) spoken by European Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, but rather the descendant of a colonial language that arrived in Iberia no more than eight thousand years ago.

12. The presentation of extensive illicit claims means a costly intrusion on the working time of careful scholars who must inspect the total data and detect flawed equivalence claims. The disassembly of illicit trees is a time-taking and potentially annoying business which displaces useful scholarly work. 13. The dissemination of such extended claims gravely misleads the public, a public not equipped to test for such technical failures. (Hamp 1998: 15).

The Basque language has been the object of multiple attempts to link it genetically to nearby and distant languages in both space and time. However, none of them has achieved the standards demanded by the comparative method and, above all, they have not assumed the objectives of diachronic comparison; namely, such attempts have been of no use when it comes to (nor have they proposed) illuminating aspects of the structure and evolution of the language and, therefore, they are inadmissible by the comparative method as it has been developed in truly established language families. In this chapter we summarize the achievements of the classic approach to reconstructing Proto-Basque by Koldo (Luis) Mitxelena and present certain additional productive ways to approach the analysis of the prehistory of the language. Following the introduction, we recall the basic data in order to trace the (pre)history of the language (§2), we compare and contrast traditional (§3) and more recent (§4) hypotheses that have attempted to address the origins and genetic relationships of the language. In §5 we carry out a wholly negative evaluation of these hypotheses, both in terms of their practical errors and as regards their conception of the goals of comparison in scientifically stable families. In §6 a (basically phonological) paradigm of MitxelenaÕs standard reconstruction is presented and in §§7-9 we propose three ways to expand on and dig more deeply into that reconstruction (§7. Canonical form, §8. Diachronic typology, and §9. Grammaticalization) that elicited such great interest in reconstructing and explaining the diachrony of the language. In §10 we add a few brief notes about chronology and in §11 some methodological reflections on a crucial topic in the reconstruction, Old Common Basque. We end (§12) with a brief conclusion.

This paper presents new proposals for the reconstruction of Proto-Basque accentuation, as well as the development and chronology of the main accentual systems of the modern dialects, grounded in phonetic, historical and typological evidence. It is the first attempt to reconstruct Basque accentuation from a pre-Roman stage to the dialectalization that followed Common Basque. We suggest that Old Proto-Basque had prosodic prominence in the root, i.e., [(C)V.'CVC]. This system evolved into phrase-level prominence in Modern Proto-Basque, giving rise to unaccentedness in non-phrase final positions, with marked stress only introduced later, through Latin loanwords (2nd–3rd century CE). This would become the common system, which still persists in the west. Not long after the dialectification, word-level systems developed in non-western areas, first as peninitial and then as penultimate stress (in eastern dialects). Finally, we propose that the Goizueta prosodic system can be derived fro...