Are there any 3000 year old Northern European languages that modern humans could communicate with?

Question

Follow up to Could a well versed archaeologist understand and speak languages that are 3000+ years old?

I have an archaeologist who finds some inscriptions that are at least 3000 years old while excavating some ruins in Northern Europe. It takes him some time, but he manages to track down one of the world's leading specialists in this language to help him with the translations. Due to some handwavy mumbo jumbo, these two scientists manage to awaken a supernatural being that has been in a sort of stasis since the inscriptions were first written.

At a bare minimum, I would need these scientists to be able to read and write in a common dialogue that the supernatural being would understand, but I would prefer them to be able to have a spoken dialogue.

What would be the best language for the supernatural being to know to allow for this?

Answer 1

You are in luck; we actually do know one three thousand years old European language, maybe one and a half. We also do know another (non-European) language spoken three thousand years ago which is quite conceivable that the ancient supernatural being might know.

1. Homeric Greek.

   There are millions of people who can read Homer's and Hesiod's works in the original. We are even pretty certain that we know how pronounce them in a way which is not all that far removed from the original. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days were originally composed in the 9th, most likely 8th or maybe 7th century before the common era, so 2700 to 2900 years ago, most likely around 2800 years ago.

   At that time the Greeks were busy using their ships to trade all over the Mediterranean, so their language was already beginning to be known internationally. Not so much as option number 3, but still plausible.

   (The major advantage of Homeric Greek is that there are many people in the modern world who know it well enough to communicate. This is how the stranded Natucketers begin to communicate with their Tartessian frenemies in S. M. Stirling's celebrated Nantucket series beginning with Island in the Sea of Time.)

2. For completeness, we should also mention the remote possibility that the ancient supernatural being knows some sort of very archaic Latin. It is not at all likely, but hey, maybe his daughter dated a particulary exotic adventurer from Alba Longa, which, at that time, was the most important Latin city. (Rome did not exist yet.) (Yes, there was a people called Latins.) The main problem is that at that time Latin was a small language, spoken by an insignificant small nation in central Italy, and one would have to explain how come the ancient supernatural being knows it.

3. The great language of trade widely known at that time around the shores of Europe was Phoenician.

   • The Phoenicians actually traded as far north as Britain in the right time-frame, and they were the dominant long-distance traders in Europe at that time.

   • Phoenician was actually written at that time, so it is plausible to find inscriptions.

   • Phoenician is quite similar to the oldest layers of Biblical Hebrew, so that it is quite easily believable that a modern scholar would quickly make sense of it. (There are very many people who study Biblical Hebrew.)

So basically, that's it: if they are to communicate orally without spending time actually learning each other's language, it would be in Homeric Greek or in Phoenician.

If there are inscriptions to be found and quickly deciphered, they would most likely be in Phoenician.

4. But! It is perfectly conceivable (and, it my opinion, it would make a great episode in the story) that the inscriptions are in the parent language of Proto-Germanic written with a local adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet. At that time, that very late Indo-European dialect which gave rise to Proto-Germanic was spoken in southern Scandinavia and maybe the Jutland peninsula; and you are speaking exactly about the time when the Phoenician invention of the alphabet was spreading like wildfire west and east -- it was such a simple idea, it makes writing so easy, why on Earth didn't we think about it! If it spread to the west, and it spread to the east, why not also to the north?

   (We know Proto-Germanic a lot better than Proto-Celtic, mainly because the Germanic languages are much more conservative than Celtic languages and thus the reconstruction is much easier, because Germanic languages are attested at an earlier stage, and because Proto-Germanic has so many more living descendants than Proto-Celtic. Its immediate parent language must have been an Indo-European transitional dialect of Proto-Indo-European already with the distinctive Germanic vocabulary, but without the defining First Germanic Consonant Shift.)

Note about the idea of some sort of Proto-Basque: While we are certain that the ancestors of the Basques spoke a language which is the ancestor of Basque, we unfortunately don't know anything much about that language. Yes, it must have existed. No, we don't know it. Not that very few people study it; no: we simply have very very little data (basically, a handful or names recorded by the Greeks and the Romans) so that, at present, we don't even pretend to have the foggiest idea about it.

Answer 2

Basque.

The Pre-Indo-European languages are any of several ancient languages, not necessarily related to one another, that existed in Prehistoric Europe and South Asia before the arrival of speakers of Indo-European languages. The oldest Indo-European language texts date from the 19th century BC in Kültepe, now in Turkey, and while estimates vary widely, the spoken Indo-European languages are believed to have developed at the latest by the 3rd millennium BC (see Proto-Indo-European Urheimat hypotheses). Thus, the Pre-Indo-European languages must have developed earlier than or, in some cases alongside, the Indo-European languages that ultimately displaced them.1[2][3]

A handful of the languages still survive; in Europe, Basque retains a localised strength, with fewer than a million native speakers...

The Basque language is definitely old enough for your purposes. Whether an ancient speaker would be intelligible at all is a different matter but you can sort it out in the fiction. Once your scholar catches on that some nouns and verbs are Basque, if the god is willing to be patient they can sort out accent and sentence structure with a little work.

There is also lots of fun theories about where Basque came from which range from the scientific to Atlantis-type theories; read a little and pick what you like!

---

A map showing the shrinkage of the Basque language area during historic times.

http://www.kondaira.net/irudiak/euskararengaleraeng.jpg

Answer 3

There are two questions that need to be unpacked from what you've written. One -- the language - has been addressed in the linked question. The other is this: what writing system did these archeologists find this 3000-year-old language written in?

There are four known writing systems from 1000 BC we can expect an archeologist to recognize, & perhaps even understand. (Actually five, if we include written Chinese.) They are Egyptian hieroglyphs, Luwian hieroglyphs (used in parts of Anatolia), cuneiform, & the Phoenician alphabet. (The Mycenaean Linear scripts fell out of use by 1000 BC.) I don't know of any examples of the Egyptian or Luwian systems being used beyond their territories, let alone to represent other languages.

While a number of languages have been written using cuneiform, reading cuneiform is a very specialized skill: I took a class in Hittite language years ago, & the instructor simplified matters by omitting teaching cuneiform. (All of our texts were transliterated.) So unless your archeological party happened to have a professor in Semitic languages along, I figure all they could do is say, "Hey, this is written in cuneiform!"

The Phoenician alphabet makes a little more sense: the Phoenicians spread the use of their writing system thru the Mediterranean, & it was later modified to use with Etruscan & Greek. Even an archeologist with only a superficial knowledge of the topic could at least transliterate the inscription, & make a guess at the language it was written in. (IIRC, any competent archeologist working in European topics would know English & one or more of German, French, Italian & Spanish, as well as have some knowledge of Latin &/or ancient Greek. So they could guess from a transcription that it was written in either Proto-Celtic or Proto-Germanic.)

To say more, one would need to do more in-depth research.

Answer 4

So far so good for central and southern Europe!

But your guys are going to be working in northern Europe! At 1000 BC, your best bet is going to be a Uralic language (e.g., such as are spoken in Finland and along the Arctic Ocean coastlands.

It's thought that the Uralic languages got their start in relatively close proximity to the Indo-European family, and some have posited that those two families share a common ancestor.

Sadly for your intrepid duo, there are no records of anything written in any Uralic language before the 1200s. So, if what the archaeologist finds is a sample of actual Uralic, this would be a bonanza for philology! That would be like finding Schleicher's Fable in the flesh for the Indoeuropeanists! Assuming the writing itself can be deciphered & read, it should at least sound familiar to a Uralicist. So, yes, eventually they'd be able to talk to this ancient being.

We really don't know anything at all about what languages were spoken in the rest of Northern Europe at that time. Clearly, the Celts, Slavs & Teutons moved in on somebody, we just don't know who. Could be related to Uralic, could be related to Basque, could be related to Etruscan. Who knows!