Where does Basque come from?
A4. It doesn’t really “come from” anywhere — it’s just been there for a very long time. Western Europe has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years, but for most of that time writing was unknown and hence we have no records of the languages spoken. In the second half of the first millennium BC, writing was introduced into southern and eastern Spain by the Phoenicians and the Greeks, but it didn’t reach the ancestral Basques farther north. It was only the Roman conquest of Gaul and Spain in the first century BC that brought writing to the Basques, and only from that time do we have any written records of the Basques. Like the Celtic and Germanic languages, the Latin language of the Romans was an Indo-European language, descended from an ancestral language originally spoken far to the east. As these Indo-European languages spread slowly westward across Europe, they gradually displaced most of the earlier languages, which died out. By the time the Romans arrived, an ancestral form o
A4. It doesn’t really “come from” anywhere — it’s just been there for a very long time. Western Europe has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years, but for most of that time writing was unknown and hence we have no records of the languages spoken. In the second half of the first millennium BC, writing was introduced into southern and eastern Spain by the Phoenicians and the Greeks, but it didn’t reach the ancestral Basques farther north. It was only the Roman conquest of Gaul and Spain in the first century BC that brought writing to the Basques, and only from that time do we have any written records of the Basques. Like the Celtic and Germanic languages, the Latin language of the Romans was an Indo-European language, descended from an ancestral language originally spoken far to the east. As these Indo-European languages spread slowly westward across Europe , they gradually displaced most of the earlier languages, which died out. By the time the Romans arrived, an ancestral form
