Note 5 — An Essay on the Basque Language,

The more serious of these foes of negative conclusions, of these refiners of quintessences, assert that the ancestors of the Basques are incontestably the Iberians. In the first place I will remark that, supposing this proved, the Basques, or, if you will, the Iberians, would not be the less isolated; for how could the Iberian, any more than the Basque, be allied to the Keltic or to the Carthaginian? But this Iberian theory is not yet at all proved, and it will be easy to show it to be so in a few words. It reposes first of all on the following à priori—the Iberians have occupied all Spain and the south of Gaul, but the Escuara lives still at the foot of the Pyrénées; therefore the Escuara is a remnant of the language of the Iberians. The error of the syllogism is patent; the conclusion does not follow, and is wrongly deduced from the premises. As to the direct proofs, they are reduced to essays of interpretation, either of inscriptions called Iberian or Keltiberian, or of numismatic legends, or of proper, and especially of topographical names.5 The inscriptions and legends are written in characters evidently of Phœnician origin, but their interpretation is anything but certain. All the readings, all the translations into Basque, proposed by MM. Boudard, Phillips, and others, are disputed by the linguists who are now studying the Basque. The names collected from ancient authors form a more solid basis; but the explanations proposed by W. von Humboldt, and after him by many etymologists without method,6 are equally for the most part inadmissible. The Iberian theory is not proved, though it is perfectly possible.