Introduction

It is a typically held opinion that the Basque language—from its first medieval testimonies confined to the Basque Country, Navarre, and some neighboring areas in Huesca, Burgos, and La Rioja, which were subsequently lost—is a genetically isolated language, in spite of the numerous attempts to relate it to other languages, from the Hamitic to the Caucasian ones, as well Old European, Proto-Indo-European itself and macrofamilies like Dene-Sino-Caucasian and Ural-Altaic (references to these proposals can be found in Trask 1995; Campbell 2011; Lakarra 2018a; Bakker 2020). For a long time it was taken as read, or at least as a null hypothesis, that the Basque language was related to the Iberian language, so that the former was an even later phase of the latter which in ancient times extended throughout the Mediterranean flank of the Iberian Peninsula. The deciphering of the particular writing system used in Iberian inscriptions by Gómez Moreno in the 1920s and subsequent advances in the interpretation and combinatorial analysis of Iberian texts from the 1950s onwards led to the confirmation that, with the exception of some typological similarities in the phonological inventory, of the apparently agglutinative nature of the language and certain striking lexical coincidences, Basque was of no help when it came to understanding them. This is in sharp contrast to what happened with the Celtiberian texts, which have received a fairly satisfactory interpretation with the aid of the linguistic comparison with Celtic and Indo-European.

Aquitanian is understood as the ancient language spoken between the Pyrenees, the Garonne river and the Atlantic Ocean according to a text by Caesar (Bellum Gallicum I, 1). We know Aquitanian only by means of onomastic material—around 200 personal names and some sixty names of different gods—transmitted secondarily in Latin inscriptions from the imperial era, mostly between the first and third centuries ad, with a few examples that may date from the fourth or fifth centuries ad. There is, then, no text, however short, written in Aquitanian.

In Luchaire's pioneering study (1877) it was demonstrated that Aquitanian names were different to Gaulish names documented in other parts of Gaul, even in Aquitanian territory itself, while there was a fairly good comparison with quite a few Basque words.