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Northeastern Iberian script
Levantine
Barkeno, Iberian for Barcelona
Script type
Semisyllabary
Some of the characters stand for letters, which are linguistic phonemes. Other characters stand for syllables, which are linguistic morphemes. The list of signs, either alphabetic or syllabic, is called a signary.[1]
DirectionLeft-to-right Edit this on Wikidata
LanguagesIberian, Basque
Related scripts
Parent systems
Phoenician[2]
Child systems
Northeastern standard dual, extended dual, and non-dual Iberian signaries[3]
Sister systems
Celtiberian script
Northeastern Iberian script in the context of paleohispanic scripts

The northeastern Iberian script, also known as Levantine Iberian or Iberian, was a member of the epigraphic family of paleohispanic scripts located roughly in eastern Spain, concentrated in the northeast, and in Aquitaine of southern France. The script is a type of writing, or graphemic representation, not a type of language. Linguistics does not apply except only incidentally.

A classification similar to that of a language family is used analogously for epigraphy, but the branches and stems are not languages. The same writing type might be used for more than one language, and the same language might be written in multiple writing types. This distinction appears in the modern concept of different fonts for the same text.

The name of the script reflects an earlier overuse of the term Iberian, which seemed to appear everywhere and have to do with everything on the Iberian Peninsula. In the areas of languages and scripts contradictory usages began to develop. Iberian at first meant having to do with the Iberian Peninsula. With this understanding linguists named the unknown language of northeastern Spain, inferred from a number of sources, Iberian. Some would equivocate that Iberia does include a small section of southern France on the east. The distribution of the script, however, settles the question. There is no way the country of Aquitaine north of the Pyrenees can ever be considered Iberia, and yet the script is there, minimally.

The two classic names for the peninsula are quite ancient, or pre-Roman (as the scholars say): Iberia and Hispania. The Greek sources liked Iberia, which, they asserted, was one country with one population, the Iberians. Whether they were inventing a population as a figure of speech to suit the geography or were just uninformed is a question for Greek geography.

The figure of speech is perhaps truer, as they also believed that Iberian derived from the Ebro River of northeastern Spain. The river began in the region of the Celtiberian script and flowed down through the country of the northeastern Iberian script to what the geographers called the inner sea along what vacation-minded moderns call the Azure Coast. Celtiberian is an ancient Greek name intended distinguish the Celtic-speaking population from the Iberian-speaking inhabitants of the lower river. The Romans, on the other hand, though admirers of Greek geography, preferred the native name they had encountered on occupation, Hispania, the source of Spain and Spanish.

Development of the field[edit]

Humboldt, a great scholar, author of the Vasco-Iberian Hypothesis, but, like any other human, not always right.

The modern scholars, about to found a new field that would comprise the study of scripts evidenced in the thousands of inscriptions that had been accumulating, whether on coins, on stones, on pottery or on some other media, were thus presented with two best names: Iberian or Hispanic. An opportunity presented itself when Emil Hübner undertook to catalog the Latin inscriptions of Spain according to the internationlly agreed-upon format; that is, a volume of numbered inscriptions for each nation. His initial work, published in 1869 as Inscriptiones Hispaniae Latinae, "Latin Inscriptions of Spain," with a supplement in 1892, was followed by a work on the Christian inscriptions in 1871 with a supplement in 1900.

Hübner was fortuitously in the right place at the right time with the right interests and credentials, to view and study the pre-Roman inscriptions simultaneously with the Roman. His parallel volume on that topic, Monumenta Linguae Ibericae, "Inscriptions of the Iberian Language," was published in 1893. By lingua Iberica Hübner meant, as he explained in the Praefatio, monumenta antiqua paeninsulae ibericae, "ancient inscriptions of the Iberian Peninsula."[4] The modern field was thus launched under the name of the peninsula. Iberian also was thus the name of the language spoken on the peninsula. Hübner had accepted the Vasco-Iberian Hypothesis proposed earlier by Wilhelm von Humboldt, that the pre-Roman inscriptions on the Iberian Peninsula all represented the same language, Basque, so that the Iberian language was really Basque.[5]

The young Manuel, dogged advocate of a theory he knew to be right.

The next major contributor was Manuel Gómez-Moreno Martínez.[6] An avid linguist, script enthusiast, as were his parents, prolific writer (300 books), he turned his attention to the scripts, and discovered many of its secrets, which many consider decipherment. The key to the spelling of the script was found on the coin legends. Hübner had assumed with others an alphabetic spelling. There is not very much room on coins for legends, however, perhaps a few syllables. Roman and Greek coins generally depend on abbreviation. Martinez proferred another solution. He guessed that some characters were syllables rather than letters, after an eastern model. Some eastern languages, such as Hebrew, have signs only for the consonants, with vowels implied. Only these consonant signs are written. The reader must know what vowels a written word implies. To make things easier and less equivocal, formal Hebrew places a sequence of dots under the consonants, which indicate the vowel, which is called pointing.

There is no pointing in Iberian, but Martinez reconstructed a number of syllablic signs representing a stop and a vowel. Otherwise a sign can be assumed to represent a letter. This interpretation worked. Martinez found himself reading names, which he cross-compared to Latin names in Latin inscriptions. He called his newly discovered system a semi-syllabary, his own innovation. None had previously been reported. In the early days of phonetic writing the Phoenician alphabet was applied innovatively to many languages. This application was good for several hundred years until it was totally replaced by Latin. Martinez presented his conclusions in a small group of books between 1922[7] and the mid-20th century while surviving a civil war and a world war.

Martinez' theses, which he developed and presented roughly mid-century, were more or less at odds with Humboldt and Hübner. In that sense Martinez is regarded as the founder of the field. The data he used, however, had been collected over centuries. The public was in a mood for script decipherments. In the 1950's Michael Ventris had deciphered Linear B, a script for writing the Greek language. In that case the language was known. Once the values of the syllables were known, immediate strides were made in decipherment.

For the Northeast Iberian script Martinez perceived that although instances in Basque country could be tied to Basque, the others could not. The then unknown language remains unknown. Martinez retained the name Iberian although it had been shown to represent neither all nor only the peninsula. Linguists began to try to avoid the concomitant use of Iberia and Iberian. Iberia the peninsula became just the peninsula or the Hispanic peninsula. The most important change that Martinez effected was the distinction between scripts and languages. Each type needed its own classification. There was sufficient confusion about the terminology to warrant the calling of international colloquia to resolve the problems in a standard way, similar to the colloquia held for Linear B.

In 1974 the colloquia or congresses began. These were sponsored at irregular intervals by universities, the first being the University of Salamanca. The format of a colloquium is pretty much the same as it has always been for all the other fields: check-in, meetings and discussions between professionals, presentation of pre-scheduled papers, and within a few years after, publication of the papers in some sort of dedicated volume or volumes. In this case the volumes were identified by a formulaic series name: Actas del n Coloquio sobre Lenguas y Culturas Prerromanas de la Península Ibérica date.

Antonio Tovar, a leading philologist, author of the first chapter of the report on the first colloquium in 1974 described himself as being in the role of initiator of a new act. With all due respect, the new act would replace the old-fashioned approach of Hübner with the discoveries of Martinez. He viewed the congress as an opportunity "to meet with friends and colleagues interested in the same problems of epigraphy and languages of ancient Hispania, to take stock of results and to encourage us to continue working...."[8]

The keynote for the future is expressed cryptically in the phraseology of the first paragraph: problemas de epigrafía y lenguas de la Hispania antigua. There is not a word in this definition about Iberia or the Iberian Peninsula. The topic of "antique Spain" comes up again in the speech: "Our German colleagues already use, with the advantage that their language gives them to form compounds, a term for this specialty: Althispanistik. Apparently his antigua comes from German alt, "old," but the new school has not yet finished developing this term, which it contrasts to Iberian.[9]

Something like a polite war of the words ensued. Another colloquium, Actas II, is held in Tübingen in 1976 under the same formulaic series title professing to cover the Lenguas y Culturas Prérromanas de la Peninsula iberica. Actas III in Lisbon in 1980 replaces Prérromanas with Paleohispanicas, as does Actas IV in Victoria in 1985. Colonia in 1989 and Coimbra in 1994 are back to Prérromanas, but Paleohispanicas recaptures the title in 1997 at Zaragoza and from then on keeps it.

The response of the linguists was not to use Iberian in the general sense anymore, but to innovate a more specific term, paleohispanic. Hispaniic is not confined to the peninsula; moreover, paleo- or "ancient" calls to mind that the Romans unified the country under their own language, which became Spanish, obliterating both the local languages and the local scripts.

Distribution of the script[edit]

The inscriptions that use the northeastern Iberian script have been found mainly in the northeastern quadrant of the Iberian Peninsula: largely along the coast from Roussillon to Alicante, but also with a deep penetration in the Ebro Valley. The northeastern Iberian inscriptions have been found on different object types (silver and bronze coins, silver and ceramic recipients, lead plaques, mosaics, amphores, stones (steles), spindle-whorls etc.), representing 95% of the total finds (over 2000 items), and nearly all the scripts were written from left to right. The oldest northeastern Iberian script date to the 4th or maybe the 5th century BCE. The modern ones date from the end of the 1st century BCE or maybe the beginning of the 1st century CE.

Languages written in the script[edit]

The northeastern Iberian script, also known as Levantine Iberian or Iberian, was the main means of written expression of the Iberian language, but has also been used to write Proto-Basque as seen in the Hand of Irulegi.[10] The Iberian language is also expressed by the southeastern Iberian script and the Greco-Iberian alphabet.

Typology and variants[edit]

Description of the type[edit]

A northeastern dual Iberian signary (Based on Ferrer i Jané 2005)
A northeastern non-dual Iberian signary.
Lead plaque from Ullastret using the northeastern dual signary.
Lead plaque from Penya del Moro mountain (Sant Just Desvern) using the northeastern dual signary
Iberian Coin, probably from Navarra with the legend benkota/baskunes using the northeastern non-dual signary

The northeastern script was very nearly deciphered in 1922 by Manuel Gómez-Moreno Martínez, who systematically linked the syllabic signs with the occlusive values. The decipherment was based on the existence of a large number of coin legends (some of them bearing Latin inscriptions) that could easily be linked to ancient place names known from Roman and Greek sources.

Shared retentions[edit]

To understand the relationship between northeastern Iberian and southeastern Iberian scripts, one should point out that they are two different scripts with different values for the same signs. However, it is clear they have a common origin and the most accepted hypothesis is that northeastern Iberian script was derived from the southeastern Iberian script. Some researchers have concluded that it is linked to the Phoenician alphabet alone, but others believe the Greek alphabet also had a role.

All the paleohispanic scripts, with the exception of the Greco-Iberian alphabet, share a common distinctive typological characteristic: they represent syllabic value for the occlusives, and monophonemic value for the rest of the consonants and vowels. In a writing system they are neither alphabets nor syllabaries, but are rather mixed scripts that are normally identified as semi-syllabaries. The basic signary contains 28 signs: 5 vowels, 15 syllabic and 8 consonantic (one lateral, two sibilants, two rhotic and three nasals).

Shared innovations[edit]

There are two variants of the northeastern Iberian script: the dual variant is almost exclusive to the ancient inscriptions from the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE and its distinctive characteristic is the use of the dual system. This system was discovered by Joan Maluquer de Motes in 1968 and allows differentiation of the occlusive signs (dentals and velars) between voiced and unvoiced by the use of an additional stroke. The simple sign represents the voiced value whilst the complex sign represents the unvoiced value. The non-dual variant is almost exclusive of the modern inscriptions from the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE.

Notable instances[edit]

In recent years four northeastern Iberian abecedaries or signaries have been published: the Castellet de Bernabé signary, the Tos Pelat signary, the Ger signary and the Bolvir signary, all of them belonging to the dual variant of the script.

See also[edit]

Citations[edit]

  1. ^ Ruiz Darasse 2019, p. 197
  2. ^ Ferrer i Jané 2017, p. 1
  3. ^ Ferrer i Jané 2017, p. 2
  4. ^ Hübner, Ernst Willibald Emil (1893). "Praefatio". Monumenta linguae Ibericae (in Latin). Berlin: Reimer.
  5. ^ Hoz Bravo 2019, p. 8
  6. ^ Hoz Bravo 2019, p. 9
  7. ^ Gomez Moreno Martinez 1922
  8. ^ Tovar 1976, p. 1
  9. ^ Tovar 1976, p. 7
  10. ^ Jones, Sam (2022-11-15). "Hand of Irulegi: ancient bronze artefact could help trace origins of Basque language". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2023-06-18.

Reference bibliography[edit]

External links[edit]

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeastern_Iberian_script