Protect your bp.

A Newfoundlander once told me the safest way to protect your pooper around gomos is to either pretend to shit yourself or genuinely soil your trousers.

Then I inquired how he came about this knowledge and he replied about his father telling him when he was a young boy, about the dangers of hitchhiking and gomos.

I've yet to practice this technique, but I'm sure it will come in handy one day.

I was told it is useless to keep your ass to the wall if you let your mouth open during sleep.

Wanna hear my opinion of it?

 

First let's name some facts:

funnily enough, Basque are no more WHG or EEF than surrounding populations – their genetic differentiation from the rest is a result of development since the Iron Age onwards:

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/pasteur-03199264

 

Now consider the older fringe theory (Dumézil most prominently) that the Basque languages are related to the languages of Caucasus:

http://euskararenjatorria.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Euskaro_Caucasian_2_pp.pdf

 

Well, I'm personally inclined to believe that Basque are actually a language from the northern foothills of Caucasus (Circassia), that was carried into Europe alongside their neighbouring Indo-European; that is, that the Yamnaya and Corded Ware cultures were, in fact, NOT monolingual, and that proto-Basque was one of the languages that entered Europe this way.

This is similar to how Magyars invaded Europe, alongside other, mostly Turkic-speaking groups, despite their language not being Turkic they were part of the same migration.

Whatever you wrote there is not an opinion of the vasconic substrate theory.

It is, because the key proposition to Vasconic substrate theory is that Vasconic languages were already spoken when IE speakers arrived.

...so you're proposing there was actually a Sprachbund instead of a substrate based on genetics?

Vennemann doesn't really have anything else than some toponymy and base-20 counting system to support his hypothesis.

While yes – toponymy is indeed substrate – simply seeing a sequence as basic as "ar(a)n" in different places and claiming it must come from basque word "haran" (especially: note how his Val d'Aran, Arntal, never have that initial h- which is IMPORTANT in Basque – "aran" is a plum) is hardly an argument. The rest of the claims are mostly the same thing too.

But, yes, base-20 counting is a clear sprachbund thing. Same with the couple words he names that are shared with Celtic and Germanic – they're mostly related to iron age technologies, so likely wanderwords related to spread of tech (just like how industrial tech terms all over the world can be traced to various European languages).

Not very interesting criticism tbh.

Aren't there certain pockets in Europe that have a closer genetic link to Basque? Wouldn't it be wiser to eliminate the influence of Latin and other languages that proceeded their arrival and colonisation to figure out where they developed their language and from whom they delineated from?