"zorioneku tenekebēkiŕateŕen oTiŕtan ezeakaŕi eŕaukon."

This sentence, which was recently found on a bronze hand in Irulegi, is almost certainly Euskara, that is to say, Basque—more precisely, it is almost certainly Aquitanian, the Vasconic ancestor of Euskara of the time, and if not, then it is almost certainly another Vasconic language. Let's try to figure out what it says. In the end, we'll come up with a few plausibilities, but nothing rock-hard, or I should say ironclad, beyond the "zorioneku" ~ "zorioneko" already identified by Javier Velaza and Joaquín Gorrochategui, as described in the excellent El País article here.

Before we begin, let's establish and number two points about the development of Basque with some references. You may wish to skip over these at first, and then refer back to them as needed. I am certainly not a native speaker of Basque, and still far from fluent, so comments correcting me on any of this are greatly welcome.

EDB stands for The Etymological Dictionary of Basque and HB for The History of Basque, both by Larry Trask. FHV stands for Fonética histórica vasca (2nd ed.), Mitxelena 1977. SOBV stands for Suppletion in the Old Basque Verb "To Give": A Typological Perspective, by Bernard Comrie and Gontzal Aldai (download link).

1. The number of verbs that are treated as synthetic verbs in Basque, and the number of situations in which those verbs are treated as synthetic verbs rather than periphrastic verbs, has been in decline over the past five centuries in which we have ample Basque literature attested. Nowadays in speech, one may find eight to fourteen verbs total (synthetically) inflected, depending on the speaker: the all-purpose auxiliary izan/ukan/*edun "to be, to have"; egon "to be (cf. Sp. estar)," eduki "to have (southern dialects, cf. Sp. tener)"; the verbs of motion joan "to go," etorri "to come," ibili "to walk, to go about"; jakin "to know"; irudi "to seem"; some subset of etzan "to lie, be in a place (statically)," erabili "to use," and ekarri and eraman, both related to "bringing" or "taking"; and for a fancy flair, maybe iraun "(of duration) to last" and ihardun/jardun "to busy oneself (doing)." In written language, there are technically 25, but this is more of a diachronic and cross-dialectal catch-all, and some of these would be understood by few speakers. It would stand to reason that the number of synthetic verbs was far greater in the past, especially in light of what is known about the rise of periphrastic constructions; see also SOBV, and a discussion towards the end of this post about a runestone from about a thousand years ago.
   
   
2. Tourists often marvel at how similar (southern) Basque phonology is to that of Spanish, despite their being unrelated; the evidence seems to show that the same would likely have been true of Aquitanian and Iberian two thousand years ago. Due to the work of Hugo Schuchardt around the turn of the century and then especially Koldo Mitxelena mid-century, among others, one may deduce that /p/ was likely absent or near-absent, /m/ comes from /b/, and "tx" /tʃ/ has hardly had a long life thus far independent of a diminutive or affectionate allophone of "z" /s/ (HB §3.8). One glorious consequence of this is that zorionak themselves were always "good birds"—birds have long been used to scry; for instance, the English word "auspices" < Lat. auspex comes from avi-spex, "birdwatcher"—and then txori, the affectionate form, came to be the exclusive form used for birds, leaving zori behind only in omens, blessings, and congratulations. But we still have zakur alongside txakur "dog." Another, relating to our study of the present text, is that etxe "house" could possibly have been eze two thousand years ago. However, the affricate is not word-initial here, and etse shows up in the bizkaiera (Biscayan), zuberera (Zuberoan), and erronkariera (Roncalese) euskalkiak (dialects of Basque) (etxe in EDB), so it is best to treat etxe independently.
   
   

All our knowledge, or should I say, guesses, about the phonetic values that may have been represented by the runes in the present inscription has been deduced from work on the Iberian scripts. This work was already well underway by Manuel Gómez-Moreno a hundred years ago. The runes in the bronze hand inscription match the runes of the Iberian inscriptions shockingly well; in fact, there is only one rune in one place, looking like a capital T, that does not tend to show up in Iberian.

The runes of the northeast Iberian inscriptions constitute a semi-syllabic script that went through two phases. First, in the 4th and 3rd century BCE, they made distinctions between voiced and voiceless velar and dental plosives. Then, in the 2nd and 1st century BCE, they no longer made that distinction.

Above: The northeast Iberian script as it was in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE.

Below: The northeast Iberian script as it was in the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE.

What could account for the transition? Well, it is fairly clear from the study of the corpus of Iberian inscriptions that Iberian either had no native distinction between the phonemes /k/ and /g/ (as has been the case e.g. with Finnish through most of history) or between /t/ and /d/, or that such distinction was so nearly universally contextually conditioned, with so few native minimal pairs, as to be negligible. Another possibility is that it was "on its way out" and no longer productive after a certain era in the history of Iberian. Perhaps since the semisyllabary was used so often to write Phoenician, Celtic, Celtiberian, and Greek personal names and place names, the scribes felt that it should be important to retain those distinctions, even though they weren't native to the language, but later reneged on this.

The bronze hand inscription matches the later semisyllabary. It uses the square lollipop "ŕ" five times and the triangle r only once, in "zorioneku"; it has "te" twice, mirror images of each other, and other than that, only "ta" once from the "t" series. It has the signs for "ka," "ke," "ki," "ko," and "ku" each exactly once; of the "b" series, it has only "be," once; the lone vowel symbols "a," "e," "i," "o," and "u" show up 3, 7, 3, 3, and 1 times, respectively; "s" is twice, "n" five times, and that's it, other than the mystery symbol that looks like a capital T already mentioned above, which shows up once, for a sum total of 40 signs in four lines as 8+13+13+6, where the last sign of the second line is written up above for lack of space. There is also a vertical stroke as word-separator 6/13 of the way through the third line.

The most remarkable thing about this inscription is how unremarkable it is, both as an inscription in the Iberian script and for Basque phonology. Inscriptions in the Iberian language frequently wrote "te" either way, and nonce or rare characters, such as the "T"-looking thing, showed up not infrequently. With regard to Basque phonology, perhaps the most interesting thing to investigate is the distribution of the glyphs rendered "r" (left-facing obtuse isosceles triangle) and "ŕ" (rhombus lollipop). José Antonio Correa Rodríguez mentions in Los semisilabarios ibéricos: algunas cuestiones (1994, in Archivo de Prehistoria Levantina XXI, p.337) that they could well denote a flap /ɾ/ and a trill /r/, respectively, in Iberian, and this claim was neither entirely novel nor unreasonable. If it is indeed the case, then it matches the Mitxelena pre-Basque phonology laid out in HB §3.8 and EDB p.14 exactly, as well as modern Basque. However, it may be folly to assume all of (A) this is the case for Iberian and its transcription, (B) it was in Aquitanian as well, (C) the scribe of this Vasconic dialect followed the convention faithfully, and (D) such distinction in modern (southern) Basque remains inherited directly from that in Aquitanian, as the sum of these four assumptions will lead to some puzzling issues below.

One final note on phonology: in HB one is apprised frequently of an l/r alternation, and the Iberian inscriptions certainly add weight to this (e.g., in the numbers), as well as a possible n/r and/or n/rr.

With that introduction out of the way, let's get to the sentence as I wrote it at the top of this article: "zorioneku tenekebēkiŕateŕen oTiŕtan ezeakaŕi eŕaukon." I take no liberty in this transcription, other than using the Basque letter "z" to represent /s/, representing the T graphically, and treating both line breaks and the vertical line as word breaks. Now let's do it again, taking a few liberties:

Zoɾioneku deneke bēgirateren oTirtan ezeakari eraukon.

Here the capital Z is just sentence-initial caps, and I have used the phonetic transcription I mentioned above for the two types of "r." But more importantly, I have made choices with the plosives: "d" versus "t" and "g" versus "k," based on nothing other than what recalls more Basque comparanda. And I have made a space in the middle of "denekebēgirateren" for the same reason.

With this new version in place, a few things jump out at (the Basque speaker, presumably, and certainly) the Basque learner:

Zoɾioneku deneke

"Zorioneko denek" is an almost perfectly natural, or at least understandable, way to begin a sentence in modern Basque. It means "They who is lucky/blessed" are the subject of a transitive sentence, and so it is also a no-brainer for any sort of hamsa inscription.  Unfortunately, the number concord is as bad as it is in the English translation. But it is important to keep in mind that the Basque definite article as distinct from the distal demonstrative, as well as the relative compulsoriness of determiners, are probably only as old as they are in the Romance languages (HB §4.1, p. 199), and so the ergative singular/plural -ak/-ek pair may well not have been then what it is today. And refer to Correa Rodríguez, La Lengua Ibérica (also 1994), p. 283, for the claim that "ke" was the common way to also transcribe final /k/ in Iberian.

Denek, by dint of this same grammar, also means "all" (in the ergative plural) in modern Basque, and it is certainly possible that this was already the case then: "All blessed..."

However, if you would like to leave the last "e" in, there is another, perhaps better, possibility: "deneke" may well be the ancient form of the future, "will be." As Trask says,

"Lafon's view, very plausible, is that -ke could anciently be attached to virtually any finite form to convey a sense of indefiniteness, possibility or probability...in the past, the morph -ke had another function: it marked futurity...ikusi duket meant 'I'll see it',.... Azkue (1905) remarks that such forms were still just about alive in his day...[in Zuberoan and Low Navarrese] etorri dateke means...'he has undoubtedly come (by now)'." (HB §4.7)

Thus a benediction would begin, "Blessed will be."

bēgirateren

The next word, "bēgirateren," is also immediately recognizable. But in order to proceed here, we must dispel an idea that Mitxelena had in 1957: that the Basque verb begiratu "to look, watch" derives from Latin vigilō "I watch (sthg.) through; I remain awake." Mitxelena acknowledges here that the transformation of the first vowel would be unusual (zubihotz), but he is also undervaluing here the enormous  productive weight that the root begi "eye" has had in Basque, as well as perhaps the causative infix -ra-. However, if you are unmoved from the loan etymology camp, then it would be highly unlikely for Basque to have gotten such a loan by the first century BCE, and I provide another segmentation below that does not require begiratu.

The "bē" of "bēgirateren" consists of "be"+"e," and since there was almost certainly no vowel length distinction in Aquitanian, some may be prone to conclude that this implies a word boundary. However, meaningless erratic repetition of vowels was the norm in all comparable writing systems in the ancient world, for example in Hittite and Mycenaean Linear B, and so it likely means nothing here other than that the scribe was feeling particularly "e"-y at that moment.

Its ending has a straightforward and clear derivation. As mentioned already (HB §4.1), articles were not compulsory, and perhaps did not even exist as such, in this era. So this is simply the genitive of the gerund, "of looking" (-te > -tze being a more recent innovation) and so the inscription would begin,

"Blessed will be the looking's..."

Yet another difficulty with ascribing begira to this part of the inscription is why the r wouldn't instead match the ɾ of Zoɾioneku. There seems to be no reason to believe that this r was ever trilled, rather than flapped, adding yet another difficulty to what many may see as an already strained identification.

Another possibility for the segmentation that takes care of some of these difficulties is beegirateren (again, trilled rs) as the optative prefix be- plus some form of egin. However, this is not without its own problems, or at least required steps. be- only attested in synthetic (finite) verb forms anywhere, and so one wonders whether to try to resolve the rest as a gerund or instead a main verb. The infix -ra- could denote the causative, but again, why write a trilled r? Inconsistency on the part of the scribe would seem to be the best bet.

One may also remark that we already have eragin and eginarazi as far as causatives, and so is postulating yet a third version really necessary? To answer this, lapurtera zaharra (Old Lapurdian) comes to the rescue with egirai, a noun of unknown meaning, and egiramu, claimed to be "an action done by ostentation" and possibly "worship" (FHV pp. 506–7, cited in EDB on p. 164).

Another possibility, as long as we're riffing, is begi-r-ate-ren "eye-door's." It is exceedingly common in Basque to insert an intervocalic r between the components of a compound noun, but here there would be probably even less motivation for a trilled r.

Finally, one exciting hypothesis would be a melding of two: perhaps we are seeing a step in the evolution of the verb begira that indicates a missing link between be+egin/egirr- "eye-do" on the one hand and the meaning of "look" on the other. This would be in line with so many other verbs in basque, such as lo egin "to sleep (do sleep)" and so egin "to look (do a glance)." The -gi of begi "eye" is perhaps a morpheme in common with the (Buber, speculative) -ki of uzki, "eye of a needle," and perhaps the be- alone was enough to form this verb. But this idea is fraught with problems: whenever begi begins compounds, it is always begi- or bet-; long vowels are untoward to postulate for any stage in the history of Basque; be- shows up in far more body parts than just eyes, such as belarri "ear." So the be+egin of the subjunctive be- is perhaps more plausible than this, even though it seems it may behoove us to reanalyze what looks like a participle as a hitherto unknown kind of finite verb form.

The next word, oTirtan, is the most difficult of the entire inscription, so let us leave it for last.

ezeakari

Next we have ezeakari, where again the r is trilled. It seems straightforward to ascribe this to *eze+ekarri "not to bring," although the position of a negative before an infinitive is very abnormal in modern Basque, as e+e > e+a is a very common transformation in Basque. On the purported ancestor *eze of ez "not," see FHV p. 422, cited in EDB on p. 187.

Another possibility is eze-aka-ri, var. ezea-ka-ri, where eze is supposed to be the ancestor of modern etxe "house." At a first glance, this seems promising: we know z > tx, houses are often the targets of charms, and there even seems to be a dative -ri, which makes for nice concord with the next section about eraukon. But there are difficult, perhaps intractable problems with this analysis: z > tx is very unlikely for "house," as explained in point (2) of the introduction; the -a- is perhaps anachronistic, but at least certainly in the wrong position; the distributive -ka makes adverbs ("house to house, house by house), not nouns, and so should not be inflected; and finally, it seems to be the wrong r for -ri anyway.

(Formally, hezeak+harri "fresh (pl.)+stone" could also work, but by Basque grammar, they could not be part of the same constituent here, which among obvious reasons makes this exceedingly unlikely.)

eraukon

Finally, we have eraukon. This is almost certainly close to the Old High Navarrese drauco and (old, but unknown dialect) arrauça (in modern spelling drauko and arrautza) of Urtzi Reguero Ugarte's article here. The -n ending could easily indicate past tense here. If so, then ezeakarri erraukon together would mean something like "gave for him/her/it not to bring" or "caused to have it not brought," or if the prefix e- relates somehow to the imperative as in ezazu, then "may he/she cause not to bring." My dive into the literature relating to the causative *eradun of the transitive verb *edun and the morpheme -ko began with SOBV but got to be quite extensive, so I've moved it to an appendix in this post.

(Another possibility is erra-uko-n, "in roast/brazen forearm," but this is silly for syntactic as well as semantic reasons.)

oTirtan

Swinging back to oTirtan. This one is still a mystery, not least because the T is not a standard Iberian letter. It does show up in the Greco-Iberian alphabet, and there represents a /t/ as in the Greek alphabet, but a direct connection would be implausible, as not only are the centuries wrong, but the Iberian script already has a perfectly good glyph for /ti/.

One enticing possibility is that the Aquitanians, having alveolar and/or palatal consonants beyond those found in Iberian, repurposed the T of Greek (and Latin) fame to represent one of them. But what would it have been? According to Mitxelena (HB §3.8, EDB p.14), our options are three: tz ts s, most likely realized as something like /t̪s̻/, /t̺s̺/, and /s̺/, respectively, since this is how they are in modern Basque. That is to say, the z is pronounced somewhere between the /s/ of English or Latin American Spanish and the z of Castilian Spanish or /θ/ of English thing, while the s is pronounced like the s of Castilian Spanish or Gopher from Winnie-the-Pooh (but without the whistling).

I left out the lone z as an option, as it's already attested twice with the s symbol in the inscription. So what are we left with? Well, Iberian already has two sibilant-or-affricate glyphs, the one that looks like an angular S used in zorioneku and another, denoted ś, that looks like an M, unused in this inscription. It has been unclear what exactly the distinction between these two was, but given the new evidence from this bronze hand, the (I would say already leading) theory that the S was like an /s/ is greatly reinforced. (However, for an opposing view, well informed by adaptations of names, see Rodríguez Ramos' 2004 article here.) Given this, it seems straightforward that at least one of tz ts s was transcribed, at least in Aquitanian, by the ś of Iberian script, again, unattested here; the added glyph T would be used for another. Regardless, all three of otzirtan, otsirtan, and osirtan are plausible here, with the first two perhaps being more likely based on the glyph T alone.

I give five possibilities here: that it corresponds to modern osin, otxin, otso, etxe, or ortzi. All of them are fraught with issues, but perhaps reanalyzing the grammar and sound changes could make one of them more plausible. In every case the ending is the inessive -tan "in" of determiners and common nouns with no article. Unfortunately, I would have to part ways with Trask here in his hypothesis (HB 4.2) that the ending -tan should be analyzed as -ta-n with the "collective -(e)ta," possibly derived from or influenced by Latin collective -eta, preceding the original locative ending -n. Anyway, Trask viewed his hypothesis as speculative and in want of older data.

For the first two, we must presuppose a (diachronic or synchronic) -n/-r(-) alternation; for the next two, meaning "wolf" and "house" respectively, the only possibility I can think of for the -irtan ending is hiri "city," so "in Wolf-city" or "in House-city," which are supremely silly, and I will leave it at that.

osin "depth (deep place), esp. of a river": the phonology is perfect, modulo the -n/-r(-) alternation already mentioned above. Unfortunately, s was the least likely of the three possibilities (requiring us also to attempt to defend the hypothesis that ś was the/an affricate in Iberian), and worse, this seems to be just a very unlikely noun to find here. It is possible that the secondary meaning of "Abyss" was already present at this time, making osin somewhat more likely for a hamsa: "Blessed will be in the Abyss of viewing / he/she granted not to bring." Not great.

otxin: Miel-Otxin, a character of the Lantz carnival, burned in effigy each year. This is near impossible, since otxin was in medieval times a coin of 8 (Sp. ocho) reals, or 4 pesetas, and so miel-otxin almost certainly derives from "(of) 1000 otxins," his reputation being that that was what he stole. Still, it is possible that it is a reanalysis of a name in some older legend, so I left this in. However, this leaves no clue as to what it would mean to be "in otxin."

ortzi: in various dialects through time, "sky, thunder, storm, daylight, lightning, thunderclap" (EDB). Right out the gate, this is fraught with problems. The forms containing r before the affricate certainly seem to be the older forms for every reason, and are paramount in High Navarrese to boot. A tempting idea is perhaps ostil / oztil "rainbow," but this is a Gipuzkoan and clearly not High Navarrese form, not to mention the lengths we would have to go to talking about "reversed affricates."

If Trask is right, oTirta-n is a superior segmentation, making our job at once easier (we can reject everything) and harder (there are no leads).

Of course, it is also possible that the character T denotes a sound uninfluenced by Greek T. In that case, ohil and ohiltu, "savage" and "to chase away," respectively, are the only additional etyma I found to come into view.

Zoɾioneku deneke bēgirateren oTirtan ezeakari eraukon.

"Blessed will be in the looking's Abyss / that he/she has caused not to bring"

"May all blessed in the oTirta of doing not bring it to it"

or something like that.

or something not like that.

APPENDIX

SOBV (download link) claims that the root -rau- is transparently the causadive of *edun (root -u-), and as Urtzi Reguero Ugarte mentions in NOR-NORI-NORK saileko perifrasietako aditz laguntzaileak goi-nafarreraz: azterketa eta proposamen berria (Auxiliary verbs of  NOR-NORI-NORK series periphrastics in Upper Navarre: analysis and a new proposal) (2018), 

"Mende berean Iruñean sarituak izan ziren olerkietan draue eta digu (Ezkurrak), drauco, dion, digu (Aldazek) eta eman çigu, ematen dió (Elizaldek) ditugu; bietarik alegia" ("In poems lauded in Pamplona in the same century [XVI], we have draue and digu, drauco...") (p. 685).

And:

"Mendebaldera jotzen badugu, Bizkaian adibide bakarra Refranes y Sentencias errefrau bilduman dago eta, beraz, Bizkaitik kanpo bildua izan daiteke: Arloteari emayoc arrauça, escatuco dyc zoça (RS 25)" ("If we turn to the west, the only example in Bizkaia is in the collection Refranes y Sentencias proverbs and therefore it may have been collected outside of Bizkaia...") (p.687). (A footnote goes on give Eneko Zuloaga's explanation why it was almost certainly not Bizkaian dialect.)

Of particular interest to us here are the two forms drauco and arrauça (in modern spelling drauko and arrautza) of Reguero Ugarte's (and his source Céline Mounole Hiriart-Urruty's 2011) reconstructed infinitive *eradun "to cause to have." The form at the end of our Irulegi bronze hand inscription, "eraukon," having a trill, should be written erraukon to compare. Absolutely everything about this form  can be pieced together from these two attested inflected forms together with the e- prefix present in the infinitive, and the ubiquitous -n verb ending, which shows up in various disparate verb forms, including past, subjunctive, and relativized. But what would its tense, mood, valence, register, persons and numbers, and relativized-status be? The -ko(-) form does not appear in Batua (modern standardized Basque), but we have bizkaieraz (in Biscayan) jako and jakon for the all-purpose auxiliary in NOR-NORI valency (without direct object but with direct object) 3s.3s in the present and past, respectively (i.e., Batua zaio, zitzaion) (Buber). It's quite potentially this and a few forms like dako in Lapurdian (Low Navarrese) that complete the picture, and so if this is the case, it may have been the case not only 500 years ago, but also 2100 years ago! The intervocalic -k- was perhaps inserted in these situations in these dialects without meaning, but simply to avoid the vowel cluster auo.

Let's try and find the first of these two synthetic forms, drauko, in context. Here I use the collection analyzed in Goi-nafarrera arkaiko eta zaharra (Archaic and Old High Navarrese), also by Reguero Ugarte. (Corpus)

Gorputç sanduari (To/On the Holy Body), Miguel Aldazen, 1609 (pp. 215–17).

"Egun guiçona deytçen du Jayncoac bere mayera, eta dacar çerutic ematen dion oguia. Icusaçu gozo daten 5 ogui bedeycatu au, eta xauro jaten dela, bademaquen biçia. Alaber, eman diroque damurequi ilçea, 10 jaten dela bidegabe aren ogui sandu au. Iayncoa dugu jatean, jan egaçu graçian. Emen dago estaliric 15 çeru gucien arguia, guztian beçayn oso dela den chipienen çatian. Gure begui becatorec estacusque iguzqui au. 20 Ala oray estaliric datorquigu jatean. Nay du jan degaçun çuc legue sanduen arora, çure arima eramateco 25 sandu guztien artera. Iayncoa dugu jatean, jan egaçu graçian. Betidanic badaqui jale dela guiçona. 30 Ala, jatean il baçe, jatean drauco viçia. Baya gayzqui jaten duenic eçin doaque çerura, çeren onen jatean dago 35 aren irabaztea. Guiçonac boçic jan diro, çeren baytio fedeac bide dela jaten badu, graçias Jayncoa datela. 40 Iayncoa dugu jatean, jan egaçu graçian. Ian baño len oroyt çaite nola bertçe ortçegunean onen artean eman çuen 45 gaysto bati ogui au. Emen dago guerturic erioa eta biçia. Eliçac erraten digu bata nola bertçea. 50 Otoy eguioçu ongui jate au emen diçula, eta guero berequi çeruan biçi luçea. Iayncoa dugu jatean, 55 jan egaçu graçian."

("We have God in the food, let us eat in grace. He always knows that the eater is the man. Or, if he died in food, in food he causes it to have life.")

Confessio generala (pp. 436-7).

"Ni, becatari au, confessaçen nayçayo Iaungoyco gucis poderosoari, andre dona Maria beti virginari, Ioandone Miquel ayngueruari, Ioandone Ioanis bautistari, Ioandone Petri eta Paulo apostoloey eta sandu guciey eta çuri, ayta confessore orri, neure becatu eguines, erranes, pensatues. Enea da culpa, enea da culpa, enea da culpa gucis andia. Argatic, otoyz eguiten draucot andre dona beti virginari, Ioandone Petri eta Paulo apostoloey eta sandu guciei eta çuri, ayta confessore orri, çaraten Iaungoycoaren aurrean ene otoyzguille."

("Therefore, I give a prayer [cause a prayer to be made] to the lady-saint ever-virgin")

It is perhaps not without question what tense drauko(t) is from these examples, but from the nature of the texts the present tense is abundantly likely. Beyond that, everything else is clear. It is ditransitive (meaning having both direct and indirect object), with third-person singular direct and indirect objects. The -o- morpheme seems to be doing the work of indicating the 3s. indirect object, as can be argued is the case in dio(t), the standard auxiliary. (The presence of -t always indicates 1s. subject, and its absence 3s. subject, in a finite verb with this pattern, such as the present indicative.) Perhaps is is then worthwhile to compare:

Tratacen da nola ençun vear den meza, Juan Beriain, 1621. Borzgarren capituloa (Ch. 5, p. 394).

"Escritura sagratuac contacen du ece sandu patriarca Abrahanec, emanica sineste Iaungoycoari, eguin çuela obra bat ayn andia, nola seme bat içan eta hura ofrecicea aren divina magestadeari. Ala, bada, jaquinica Elizac fedea cinestatcen dutenec bear dutela obras eracutsi, credoa acabatu eta sacerdoteac ofrecicen dio Iaungoycoari duena, bayta oguia eta ardoa; andic fite içul draçon obeturic eta medraturic. Eta ayn medratua izanen da ece ofrenda pobrearen lecuan emanen baytio Christo gure Iaunac vere gorpuza eta odola. Da Iaungoycoaren condicioa gureganic errecibicen duena errecebicen baytu guri gauza obeagoac emateco, eta ala medra gaytecen."

("God, then, knows that those who believe in the faith of the Church must show works, complete the creed and the priests offer to God what they have, as well as bread and wine; from now on they will return improved and matured." [Some words uncertain])

Of interest relating to dative 3s. -o- is the Sørup runestone, found on the island of Funen in Denmark, the hypothesis of the Basque nature of which was presented beautifully by Stig Eliasson in 2007 and 2010. In particular, the purported verb at the beginning of the inscription, mþsrnes.sn, to be compared with bazeranestson, seems to be an affirmative ditransitive causative past form, with 3pl. absolutive (object) and 3s. dative and ergative (subject). Eliasson does not make a claim as to the verb root itself, but it seems clear to me that it is the purported vanished -nes- "speak" of Irigoyen's enusquera "Basque; way of speaking."

And while I have your attention, I also submit that the isifuþrlak of the runestone relates to "silent/secret futhark (alphabet)," the author's admission that she or he made the runes speak in an enigmatic way.

A transcription of McKenna's speech from "Alien Dreamtime."

I just watched "Another Discourse on Method," a trailer for an apparently excellent movie. It reminded me of something I think about, often unsuccessfully: the foundation of fact. But tonight I remembered something I had concluded about it before: at the core of the issue is emotion. I can imagine someone arguing the contrary to the death, that emotions are explainable in terms of past experience, the collective memory, and possibly physics; unfortunately, I cannot argue against this standpoint, so if it's brought in we've found a circular (once I've set up my alternate reduction, of those other things to emotion) description. So assume it hasn't been brought up. I think you'll find my version palatable and (perhaps surprisingly) at least as solid.

The first thing you should notice (if you've watched the trailer; chances are you haven't) is that the interviewed do a lot of fumbling. They have presumably been asked a question along the lines of "what is the foundation of fact?" and (let me watch it again) they answer saying things like "It's just common..conception and..perception and..consensus that would..would determine what we think, are facts" and (to what makes karma a truth?) "Because it's..inev—it's..it's perv—it happens, it's—I mean, there's no way around it." They expect the answer to be right there for the interviewer: belief in fact probably being a foundation for much of what they do, they expect to be able to explain what it is well. As they fumble along, they continue to discount the possibility that they'd actually have to stop and think for a while before being able to adequately respond.

Catch me on a bad day, and I'd probably do the same. But what I concluded a while ago is that emotions are really the basis for facts. At this stage of the game, we continue to believe that computers can't tell fact from fiction, but why? Might it not have something to do with their lack of emotion? If we programmed a robot with a face to smugly assert, "Yes, Columbus got to America in 1492, I'm sure of it," nodding briefly, would it fool you into believing it could recognize a fact?

If we view mathematics as the study of true statements, which math teacher is more convincing: the one who mumbles articulately, gaze fixed on the board, deriving line from previous lines through standard rules of inference and some "obviously"'s, or the one who stares at you menacingly and asks, "Now do those two lemmas look like they're aching to be used together, or what?"

When Galileo drops a ball down a ramp for the second time with the aid of an orchestra playing presto with distinct thirty-second notes and locks his whole thought and being onto its position, he is preparing himself for an emotional release: Yes, as it reaches the finish line, yes, I do recognize that combination. That combination of that part of the song and the view of the ball right there, it has special meaning to me. I've linked it to success, meaning I set myself up to experience a positive reaction to it, at the same time linking all other combinations of parts of the song with that view to experimental failure. Ah, I recognize this linkage, too: this linkage I have performed, it is the linkage I set up when doing an experiment. I have come to associate the presence of an orchestra, a ramp, and a ball with experiments. I have also set up a pathway whereby recognizing all this impels me to further action. He walks over to his vellum and writes laurus, success. That's indeed how long it takes it to get there from that height; I'll debate it with you to the death on the basis of the particular emotional nature of the vivid memory of the second run: yes, every time I check, it's there. Positive. That was a successful measurement.

Ever seen something you don't know what it is? Like a crevice full of pulp in a tree, unexpected road garbage while driving, or one of those newly installed emergency lights? My obsessive nature is returning. Once every few minutes, while I'm not doing one of a very few things, like teaching, it comes back to me. Like a brushfire it sets in, runs its course, and lays its site to waste in a matter of seconds. I end up feeling like there's nothing I can do about it. But in retrospect I guess it's better than parched constancy. I wish I could figure out how to take it and extend its life, so as to turn it into something a little less ruinous, and mix it in with related emotions, or any other emotions at all, to such an extent that something's always happening there. Then it would be less like a brushfire and more like the glow of a summer day, along with beach balls and hawks and streamers and maybe a toolbox or a stolen neon sign. And for some reason, this hubbub of flux through the background would induce the opposite effect on that thing behind the background that currently spends most of its life trying to figure out what the hell keeps on gutting the background, namely, it could quiet down, and then I'd probably be able to focus on things (ideas, plans, puzzles) again. Not that I was ever that good at it. I just feel like there's a multitude of us around now who feel we've been denied the prospect of living a life not one hundred percent governed by a very limited set of specific bullshit ideas. Maybe the problem is that it's all a wash when you end up with six billion people able to communicate with each other in an instant: nothing can any longer be tried, experimented with, tested out without the whole freaking village knowing; nothing can be essentially different or unusual without the regular cabal of critics come to describe and consequently destroy it.

On another (related) note, it surprises me how many ideas are put on the back burner by scientists because they seem like they might be true but it's impossible to discover a medium for them. Like gaia theory; when's the last time you heard about that? I think it's a neat idea, but there are plenty more like it, about evolution, consciousness (empirical results of course), and language, to name a few. Aren't we a few millennia overdue for a new set of core sciences and areas of research? Of course, they have to be discovered and examined first. I just get the feeling that maybe it's never going to happen, not at all that we couldn't understand it but that our minds aren't capable of pursuing trains of thought that would result in its manifestation. I also feel like we lose something by centralizing the "historical" account of every investigation into our past. In the game of life, for instance, there are multiple possible pasts for most scenarios (all those scenarios that have a possible past, perhaps? Comment if you know!). A group of creatures in the game of life could devise a method of checking their surroundings and deducing past circumstances as a well-defined function (on a macroscopic scale, of course, the way we do), never knowing that there really is no past, only a future. This is clearly an analogy, not a defense, but it seems like the study of origins in terms of history is just as arbitrary. Wouldn't it be exciting to find out that those things we know for sure—for instance, like the fact that the first novel ever was written by a woman, or that there exist elephants—actually exist as data because they are incontrovertible properties of the makeup of any consciousness similar to ours? Okay, I feel a little better now.