11-18-2022, 09:35 PM
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Solipsist
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Kolmannessa kerroksessa
Gender: Male
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Re: History geekodrome
Written Basque may be 1,000 years older than anyone thought | The Economist
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Shards of pottery often tell historians useful things, but even the geekiest archaeologist would admit they are not very exciting to look at. Not so a discovery in Irulegui, in Spain’s Navarre region, last year: a life-size bronze cut-out of a hand, green with age, with a small hole indicating that it was meant to hang, perhaps over a door. It was found in a village destroyed in a war of the 1st century BC.
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Quote:
Still more important is the short inscription, five words in an intriguing script. Experts recognised it as a version of the writing systems used for the now-extinct Iberian and Celtiberian languages, present on the peninsula before the Roman conquest. But this language was neither of those. The researchers were stunned to find that they could make out the first word—in Basque. “Sorioneku”, meaning “good fortune”, was staring the researchers in the face. A descendant of that word, zorionak, is used in the Basque “Happy Birthday” song today.
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Quote:
The previous oldest known writing in the language [...] date from the 10th century; Basque writing proper does not really begin until the 16th century.
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