Introduction

In the last years of his life, Georg von der Gabelentz dealt intensively with the question of a possible genetic relationship between Basque and Berber.

This resulted in two publications. The first is his lecture at the meeting of the Philosophisch-historische Classe der Koniglich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Philosophical-Historical Class of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences) on 22 June 1893, which was immediately published in the proceedings of the Academy (Gabelentz, 1893); the second is available in book form, published posthumously one year after his death by his nephew Albrecht von der Schulenburg under the title Die Verwandtschaft des Baskischen mit den Berbersprachen Nord-Africas (The genetic relationship between Basque and the North African Berber languages) (Gabelentz, 1894). These two writings were largely ignored at the time and have hardly received any attention in later Gabelentz scholarship, even though the arguments for the Basque-Berber relationship are also taken up in the revised second edition of Die Sprachwissenschaft (Gabelentz, 2016 [1901]),2 where Gabelentz expounds the implications that, in his opinion, necessarily result for historical linguistic theory.

The different publication dates for the Academy lecture and Basque-Berber book are somewhat deceptive in that there cannot have been much time between the composition of the two works, given that Gabelentz passed away only five months after delivering the lecture.