People sometimes wonder what language would have been spoken during the Bronze Age, or the Neolithic, or even the Ice Ages in Europe. Linguists can provide some interesting ideas about this question. To begin with, languages are usually grouped into “families” with more or less similar words, grammars, and sounds. Beyond linguistic families, it is much more difficult to determine relationships.
In Europe, the dominant language family during historic times has been Indo-European which includes almost all the languages spoken there today including all the Slavic, Celtic, Romance, and Germanic languages. Linguists are relatively certain that these are the same languages that were spoken in the Iron Age and Bronze Age, about in the same regions they are spoken today. Most archaeologists think that the Indo-European languages were introduced into Europe together with bronze technology at the beginning of the Bronze Age (c. 2000 BCE–varying depending on location) by warrior bands that invaded Europe and originated from the Ukrainian region. Other archaeologists think that Indo-European languages arrived much earlier as part of the Neolithic colonization of Europe (c. 7000 BCE) together with domesticated plants and animals and pottery. What language was actually spoken in Neolithic times is problematic. It is clear that Neolithic people came to Europe from the Near East, bringing with them plants and animals native to the Near East such as wheat, barley, sheep, and goats. Presumably they also spoke languages that were members of linguistic families that are still represented in the Near East.
As for the later (Upper) part of the Paleolithic, before the Neolithic, it seems safe to say that the hunter/gatherers of that time spoke non-Indo-European languages. There are several possible candidates for the types of languages spoken at the end of the Paleolithic (c. 35,000-12,000 BCE). These consist of pockets of non-Indo-European languages that are still spoken in Europe including:
1/ Basque, spoken around the Pyrenees Mountains in southern France and northern Spain;
2/ Saami, spoken by reindeer herders in northern Scandinavia, together with Finnnish and Estonian;
3/ Etruscan formerly spoken in the Northwest of Italy, but now extinct;
4/ Hungarian, established when the Magyars from Siberia, speaking a Finno-Ugric language, took over the Hungarian basin c. 900 CE.
Etruscan can’t be evaluated very well because not enough was recorded about it before it became extinct with the Roman conquest. Hungarian is too recent an introduction to be relevant to Ice Age languages. That leaves Basque and Saami, both of which are found in what can be considered marginal refugia for populations displaced by incoming agriculturalists or Indo-Europeans.
Saami: It has been suggested that the Saami may have been the original reindeer hunters in the southwestern heart of Upper Paleolithic Europe, when glaciers occupied most of Scandinavia and Scotland. As the glaciers melted, the grasslands (which supported large herds of reindeer and other herbivores) moved farther north and were replaced in southwestern Europe by forests that did not support many herbivores. In this scenario, the reindeer hunters of the Ice Age simply followed the reindeer herds as they gradually moved farther and farther north and became the Saami reindeer hunters of today in Finland and northern Sweden and Norway. The Saami language is part of the very large language family called “Finno-Ugric” that extends all the way to Mongolia, so that the Saami may have actually originated in the Far East and displaced any original Upper Paleolithic reindeer hunters in northern Scandinavia sometime over the last 12,000 years.
Basque: The Basque region is close to the southwestern European Upper Paleolithic heartland. In the Basque scenario, when Neolithic groups arrived and took over fertile lands for their crops and animals, the original Upper Paleolithic hunters and gatherers took refuge in the Pyrenees Mountains which were far less suitable for agriculture. While we can’t be certain that Basque was really a descendant from Upper Paleolithic languages (and that it wasn’t a language brought in by Neolithic groups–which seems unlikely given the light skin and eye color of Basques in contrast to the darker skin and eye color of groups from the Near East), Basque is probably the best candidate that we know of for being derived from Upper Paleolithic populations in Southwestern Europe.
In order to make the story in The Eyes of the Leopard as realistic as possible, I decided to use Basque names for many of the main characters. Thus, for example, in Basque:
Bakar means ‘alone;’
Benat means ‘brave as a bear;’
Edur means ‘snow;’
Ekain means ‘summer;’
Izar means ‘star;’
Lorea means ‘flower;
Urtzi means ‘sky;’
and Osane means ‘remedy.’
I hope this will help add yet more realism to your reading of The Eyes of the Leopard.
