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 spread 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.

A Black Sea Flood?

A controversial matter among geologists and archaeologists is the 'Black Sea Flood', which according to Walter Pitman and William Ryan happened about 8,000 years ago when the rising ocean reached the level of the Bosporus strait and the Black Sea, formerly a freshwater lake, became connected to the Mediterranean Sea. If this flood happened, Proto-Europic, the common ancestor of Indo-European, Hesperic and Danubian, could have been spoken in some of the area inundated in this event.

The Starčevo culture

The Starčevo culture of the Balkan peninsula may have been the people who spoke Proto-Europic about 8,000 years ago. This was one of the first Neolithic cultures of Europe; from there, the Neolithic cultural package spread northwest into Central Europe and northeast into the Pontic steppe.

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. It is likely that the displacement of the Mesolithic languages was not complete but some of those languages survived. (At any rate, Basque and probably also Etruscan are not Hesperic.)

The demise of the Hesperic family

The Hesperic family reached its climax in the Early Bronze Age, when Hesperic languages were spoken in an area encompassing most of western and central Europe - about 2.5 million square kilometres inhabited by perhaps 5 million people (at that time a great number) - making Hesperic one of the great language families of Earth. 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.

The structure of Proto-Hesperic

Little can be said about the structure of Proto-Hesperic. The vocalism of the Old European hydronymy seems to indicate that Proto-Hesperic had three vowels - */a/, */i/ and */u/, of which */a/ was the most frequent. This is likely to be a continuation of the Proto-Europic state of affairs, as such a system appears to have been in place in the pre-ablaut stage of PIE. The consonant inventory may have been like that of PIE as reconstructed by the glottalic theory, but the glottalized stops probably already had lost their glottalization, with the voiceless unglottalized stops being aspirated.

Even less can be said about the morphosyntactic structure of Proto-Hesperic; if, as appears likely from internal reconstruction in PIE, Proto-Europic was an active-stative language, Proto-Hesperic could have been such a language as well, but that is uncertain - after all, PIE did change into an accusative language.

Hesperic conlangs

Hesperic
Spoken in:	Europe
Timeline/Universe:	League of Lost Languages
Total speakers:
Genealogical classification:	Hesperic Albic further languages on the continent
Basic word order:	varies
Morphological type:	varies
Morphosyntactic alignment:	varies
Created by:
Jörg Rhiemeier	2000-

Jörg Rhiemeier's interest in the Hesperic family has a second side: he speculatively re-creates some of these languages in the framework of the League of Lost 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.