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How say the philologists here?
It's pretty much in line with what linguists and anthropologists have been saying for years. Remember, language is not genetically determined. Folks pick up another language quickly if it's valuable to do so. The Latin-speaking Romans did not replace all the Gaulish-speaking people in what today is called France, but the latter did learn Vulgar Latin quickly. The reverse is true when the Franks invaded. Their Germanic language left an impact on the language, but by and large the people kept speaking their Romance language(s).
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I was interested in the Basque connection. Where's the evidence, or did he just pluck that out of the air based on the timeframe?
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Sorry, Max, I didn't read much past the title and the first couple of paragraphs. Now that I read it more carefully, Dr Oppenheimer sure does have some peculiar notions. I'd like to see his write up. Dr. Oppenheimer has relied on work by Peter Forster, a geneticist at Anglia Ruskin University, to argue that Celtic is a much more ancient language than supposed, and that Celtic speakers could have brought knowledge of agriculture to Ireland, where it first appeared. He also adopts Dr. Forster’s argument, based on a statistical analysis of vocabulary, that English is an ancient, fourth branch of the Germanic language tree, and was spoken in England before the Roman invasion.
English is usually assumed to have developed in England, from the language of the Angles and Saxons, about 1,500 years ago. But Dr. Forster argues that the Angles and the Saxons were both really Viking peoples who began raiding Britain ahead of the accepted historical schedule. They did not bring their language to England because English, in his view, was already spoken there, probably introduced before the arrival of the Romans by tribes such as the Belgae, whom Julius Caesar describes as being present on both sides of the Channel. He seems a little confused here. English has been considered Germanic by most linguists for hundreds of years. You don't need any statistical method to figure that out. I'm not sure how he can prove that English arrived before the Romans using DNA. And on to the Basque: That has not stopped the attempt. Stephen Oppenheimer, a medical geneticist at the University of Oxford, says the historians’ account is wrong in almost every detail. In Dr. Oppenheimer’s reconstruction of events, the principal ancestors of today’s British and Irish populations arrived from Spain about 16,000 years ago, speaking a language related to Basque.
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More information on Dr Oppenheimer: Wikipedia article and another article in Prospect. I suppose I'll have to get his book.
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More information on Dr Oppenheimer: Wikipedia article and another article in Prospect. I suppose I'll have to get his book. I did note that his theory for the geographical origin fits the theory that Basque might be related to Aquitanian. Isn't it still just possible that he's another Euro-skeptic Brit who can't abide the idea that his ancestors were Krauts? 
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Isn't it still just possible that he's another Euro-skeptic Brit who can't abide the idea that his ancestors were Krauts?The thing about Basque, and other language isolates like Sumerian, is that it attracts all kinds of crackpot linguistics. From what I remember, there's not much to Aquitanian other than some names, place and personal, but it is uncontroversially accepted as an earlier version of Basque (see Larry Trask's prehistory of Basque. But the Aquitanians, at least, were located georaphically close to the Basques. Theo Vennemann has a theory about a Pan-European language, of which Basque is a remnant. Europe's a pretty big space to be monolingual during the stone ages though. Whenever I read about language and genetics I have a suspicion close to hand of what the alternative motives of the writer are. Historical linguistics is unfortunately comingled with a lot of racist blather, especially in its early, 19th century years. So, yes, perhaps Dr Oppenheimer has some problem with German ancestors ...
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Max, I recently picked up Dr Oppenheimer's book. I'm still reading it, but I'll be the first to admit he's got some kind of axe to grind. He's seriously into Celtoscepticism. On the language side of things, he's using results from Prof. Isidore Dyen at U of Hawaii. Dyen is into lexico-statistics, which is kind of a rewarmed glottochronology. Though there is at least one other historical linguist, Donald Ringe at UPenn, doing similar work in what is going by the name of cladistics. More later. I also noticed two entries over on Language Log that take him to task: this and that.
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