Hesperic

Hesperic is a language family proposed by Jörg Rhiemeier, who speculates that some geographical names of central and western Europe, most notably, the Old European hydronymy, come from a group of languages related to, but not part of, the Indo-European language family. Both families, and perhaps a few others, form the larger Europic language family.

The Hesperic hypothesis

The idea behind the Hesperic hypothesis is that the spread of agriculture in Neolithic central Europe was connected with the spread of a language family related to Indo-European. Most archaeologists assume that the spead of agriculture in Central Europe was demic, i. e. connected with substantial migrations of farming people into areas previously occupied by hunter-gatherer populations which were absorbed into the new society. This would also mean that new languages arrived in the area. The Proto-Hesperic language would have been the language of the Linear Pottery culture.

The Black Sea Flood

The Black Sea deluge theory, which was proposed by the geologists Walter Pitman and William Ryan, posits that until about 8,000 years ago, the Black Sea basin was filled by a freshwater lake with a level at least 100 metres lower than the current sea level, until the ocean burst through the Bosporus in a cataclysmic event dated originally by Pitman and Ryan at 5500 BC, though newer estimates place it up to 1,200 years earlier (around 6700 BC). Before that catastrophe, the area where now are the Bay of Odessa and the Sea of Azov was fertile land which was probably inhabited by Neolithic farmers who would speak Proto-Europic, the common ancestor of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Hesperic. When the flooding happened, many of these farmers survived by fleeing north and west along the great rivers (probably, as the horse was not yet domesticated and the wagon not yet invented, travelling by boat). With them, these people carried their farming culture and their language. In the area north of the Black Sea, Proto-Europic evolved into Proto-Indo-European. In the Danube basin in Central Europe, it evolved into Proto-Hesperic.

The Linear Pottery, Funnel Beaker and Bell Beaker cultures

The first Neolithic farmers of central Europe, the Linear Pottery culture, would have been the first speakers of Hesperic languages. They occupied an area which stretched from eastern France to western Ukraine. The Funnel Beaker and Bell Beaker cultures are Late Neolithic cultures which probably emerged from the Linear Pottery culture, spreading into southern Scandinavia and western Europe, respectively. The Bell Beaker culture would spread Hesperic languages to the western France, the British Isles, the Iberian peninsula and Italy.

The demise of the Hesperic family

The Hesperic family reached its climax in the Early Bronze Age. Then, it was gradually obliterated by Indo-European languages which moved into central Europe from the east. By the year 500 BC, the whole formerly Hesperic-speaking area was occupied by Indo-European languages, though some isolated pockets of Hesperic languages may have survived longer, but eventually disappeared as well.

Hesperic conlangs

Jörg Rhiemeier's interest in the Hesperic family has a second side: he speculatively re-creates some of these languages, expanding upon the meagre evidence we have at our disposal, as conlangs. So far, he concentrates on the Albic languages, a branch of Hesperic spoken in the British Isles by the British Elves, who form a branch of the Bell Beaker culture.