This book is the most comprehensive and detailed treatment of the Euskaro-Caucasian hypothesis, i.e., a proposal that the Basque language is most closely related to the North Caucasian language family. A more or less similar hypothesis was developed in the twentieth century by prominent scholars, including C.C. Uhlenbeck, Georges Dumézil, and René Lafon. The efforts of these savants, and others, while important, were rather sporadic and consisted of scattered articles, and they never developed a comprehensive phonological and morphological model of Euskaro-Caucasian. Their work on the hypothesis ceased with the death of the last of them, Dumézil, in 1986. On the other hand, thanks to advances in our understanding of Basque phonology and etymology (mainly by Luis Michelena [Koldo Mitxelena]), and in North Caucasian phonology and etymology (e.g., by Balkarov, Shagirov, Abdokov, Chirikba, Nikolaev & Starostin), and improved linguistic methods, it has become possible for the author to develop a comprehensive Euskaro-Caucasian phonological structure, including regular sound correspondences of vowels and consonants supported by significant numbers of etymologies. These correspondences, in turn, allowed the author to evaluate objectively the etymological proposals of earlier investigators (which led to the modification or outright rejection of many of them), and also provided clues to discovering some original etymologies. The nucleus of the Euskaro-Caucasian hypothesis is "old," beginning in the nineteenth century, but the "new paradigm" alluded to in the provisional title refers to (a) a focus on the North Caucasian language family as the closest surviving relative of Basque (as opposed to the "South Caucasian" = Kartvelian family), (b) a new and comprehensive scheme of comparative phonology, (c) new discoveries in comparative morphology, and (d) several hundred lexical and grammatical etymologies that supersede the more haphazard comparisons offered in earlier works. "John Bengtson is one of the brilliant linguists of our time." [Igor M. Diakonoff, Oriental Institute, St. Retersburg, Russia. 1999.
Author Biography:
John D. Bengtson, born in 1948 in Tanganyika (now part of Tanzania), is an American historical and anthropological linguist. He has studied at the Lutheran Bible Institute, Golden Valley Lutheran College, Grebbestad Folkhögskola, and the University of Minnesota. He is a past president and currently vice-president of the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory, and has served as editor (or co-editor) of the journal Mother Tongue (1996-2003, 2007-2015). He has also served as a researcher for the Evolution of Human Language project (sponsored by the Santa Fe Institute) since 2001. His areas of specialization include Scandinavian linguistics, Indo-European linguistics, Dené-Caucasian (Sino-Caucasian) linguistics (including Euskaro-Caucasian), comparative mythology, etymology, and paleolinguistics (the study of prehistory through linguistic evidence). He is the author or editor of three books and more than seventy published articles. Bengtson lives in Minnesota.
