Languages that are islands
One of the positive aspects of having more access to visiting other places is that we can travel to very distant places and vice versa, people from other countries also come to our lands
PalmNot long ago, a child asked me what some people were saying. The child was puzzled because the sounds he heard seemed to be Catalan or Spanish, but he couldn't understand a word. I listened closely, and sure enough, it was one of the two suspects: Basque, or Euskera. The other usual suspect that baffles our ears is Greek. Both languages have sounds we're used to, particularly the vowels, but of course, we don't pick up much from either one. The crucial difference is that, with a little instruction (and once you've mastered its spelling), Greek is more accessible to us: we recognize words (or parts of words) that we use often—especially those related to medicine—the way sentences are structured isn't so different, and learning it isn't as slow as when you're so slow at it (for example). But Basque is different, very different. Basque belongs to a group of languages that challenge linguists daily because their origins remain unclear. These languages appear to have no close relatives. This is because all their close relatives have disappeared, making it incredibly difficult to pinpoint their exact origins.
Population Origin
We must imagine the origin of the world's population as a very large, round link from which different chains hang. Each chain represents the path taken by a group of humans thousands of years ago, on foot or by sea, across the planet. Each chain is made up of more links, slightly different from one another, just as languages gradually differentiate. If suddenly all but one link disappears from a particular chain, it becomes much more difficult to know where it came from, who it was related to in the past, and how it arrived in that part of the world. It has become an island, disconnected from everything else.
Isolated languages each represent a mystery, a challenge for comparative linguistics that resists being solved.
Linguists are aware of more than ninety isolated languages. Sometimes people think that a language isolate must be a language with few speakers, remote, spoken in a jungle, or high on a difficult-to-access mountain ridge. This isn't always the case, and the best example is Japanese. This language has more than 120 million speakers, but its classification has been so debated that today it's relegated to the category of language isolates and, for the moment, has no clear relative. The mystery of Japan's languages is twofold because Japanese wasn't the first language to arrive on those islands. There was already another one, Ainu. The Ainu are mainly found in Hokkaido and have suffered greatly from the policies of language suppression by both Japan and Russia. So much so that it's in serious danger of extinction, and in 2007 it had little more than a dozen speakers. Its origins are so ancient (they were already in Hokkaido in 5000 BC) that it's not known for certain where they came from or to whom they are related. Possibly from one of the various Siberian migrations.
Another isolated language, this one with more than seventy-seven million speakers, is Korean. Who would have thought that languages with as many speakers as Japanese or Korean, so well-known, were isolated languages?
Linguists collaborate with historians, archaeologists, and even geneticists in order to obtain more and more evidence in support of one hypothesis or another. It wouldn't be the first time that a language classification has been refuted, or that the history of a people has been rewritten. For example, in the list of isolated languages, one of the first is Aquitanian. Everyone who has studied any Latin will remember Caesar and his book De bello Gallico (The Gallic Wars), especially because of its first line, which all Latin students are required to translate. It is precisely in this passage that the Aquitanians are mentioned, and we are told that they are quite different from the Celts and the Belgics, both in terms of language and laws and culture. In recent years, the collaborative work of archaeologists and linguists has supported the idea that these Aquitanians are actually the predecessors of the modern Basques. Much evidence points in this direction. If this is fully confirmed, then one isolated language can be removed from the list, but the mystery will remain: where did the Aquitanians come from and to whom were they related?
Obviously, there are isolated languages that have already disappeared, such as Sumerian (spoken in ancient Mesopotamia), Iberian (spoken in our lands), or Etruscan (spoken mainly in northern Italy during the time of the ancient Romans). In cases like these, the work of linguists becomes even more difficult, but that doesn't mean it's impossible.
Origin of languages
Who knows if new technologies might aid linguists in their research? Artificial intelligence can be used for more interesting things than creating humorous images or videos. In fact, it's being applied to reading texts written on clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia, greatly accelerating their interpretation. Perhaps one day it can be applied to Iberian texts to determine if they truly had a direct connection with the Aquitanians, or to uncover the origins of the Ainu language of Hokkaido, or so many others whose origins remain shrouded in mystery.
