Indo-European and Basque, pt 1
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ก.พ. 2024
- In their Indo-European news update for February 2024, Prof. Tony Yates, Dr. Luke Gorton, and Jackson Crawford discuss a new book by Prof. Juliette Blevins that proposes a historical link between Basque and the Indo-European languages.
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The speculations (starting 1:00:20) that the cultures spreading agriculture through Europe some 8000 years ago was speaking a relative to Pre-Proto-Indo-European has the linguistically terrifying implication that all the substrate languages present in Europe before the migration of the Indo-Europeans in the 4th millenium BCE might have had a Pre-Proto-Indo-European root as well. The existance of remnants from those substrate languages in modern European languages that was often proposed early on has been mostly discredited these days as more and more of the suggested words were traced to a PIE root. Now if the substrate languages themselves have PPIE roots, the mixing with substrate languages could become a big mess. Who knows what words that seem harder to reconstruct than others go back to such a meddle with substrates. It seems utterly impossible to reconstruct anything along those lines.
I DEMAND, sorry, I politely request that you, Tony and Luke have Prof. Blevins on the show in the near future and have a 3 hour long discussion. Pretty pretty pleeeease!
I'm the 2nd person who watched all the way through by the way.
I am the third person (didn't really watch, but listened all the way).
Fourth!
5th
6th
Fr
About Basque genetics, they are pretty much like Iron Age Iberians (no Roman, Moorish or Germanic genetic influence). Their paternal lineages are more or less Bell Beaker derived but their maternal haplogroups have some paleo-European lineages. They have more WHG ancestry than most West Europeans, which why some scholars like Peter Nimitz make the assumption that Basque language could be even a Mesolithic remnant.
I'm basque, I'm bilingual native speaker (my other native language it's spanish).
I'm very grateful that I've been educated in both languages that are soooo different from each other, that gave me more tools to learn a lot of different languages from everywhere in the world.
Besides, spanish is one of the most spoken languages in the world. And basque has a beautiful mystery on their own roots, and it's kinda isolated so we have an individual culture, very different from the other places in spain (other places have their own culture as well, it's a very rich country in terms of cultures), and we don't care if we never find the roots of our language (if that happens it'd be awesome though), we know that it's something beautiful we must preserve 🥰
I've watched all the video and your conversation was very very interesting. I hope you would make one about the Ainu language and their culture.
En lo esencial la cultura en España es bastante homogénea, si hablamos de hechos que realmente marcan la diferencia respecto del resto de Europa, la concepción de la familia, las relaciones personales y laborales, son absolutamente homogéneas en España y muy diferentes del resto de Europa , incluido otros paises de la órbita mediterránea y atlantica. Tu te vas a Madrid, Zaragoza o incluso al sur del Ebro a currar, y prácticamente no tendrias que ajustar tu comportamiento en lo mas minimo , prueba a hacerlo en Holanda, Reino Unido, Alemania o incluso Italia ... te cagas
I don't speak basque, but it is indeed a beautiful mystery
@@dTristras Estuve viviendo en Sevilla y es muy diferente. Eso de que la cultura es homogénea... Será en algunas características, pero en otras no en broma. Deberías indagar más acerca del tema, te lo recomiendo. De hecho lo que me gusta es eso que vas a otro lugar dentro de españa y es diferente, la gente las costumbres... Es lo bonito. También estuve viviendo en Tenerife y también tienen costumbres, cultura y demás que son significativamente diferentes. No sé, te recomiendo recorrer el país 👍🏻
Y sí he estado en Reino Unido y también hay diferencias obviamente, y tienen diferentes idiomas igual que en españa, y eso es muy bonito también.
@@dTristraspor cierto Madrid y Barcelona no las cuento como tú dices porque hay mucha gente de muchos países diferentes y aún más culturas diferentes. Yo te invito a que vayas a Leiza, Gernika, Bermeo, Azpeitia, Zuberoa, Lapurdi... Y te encontrarás cosas y comportamiento que no encontrarás en otros sitios 🤷🏻♀️
@@maddiebarker4643❤❤❤❤
Here and commenting to represent the 2 people who watched this video all the way through. Fascinating discussion, gentlemen.
Punching my ticket as well!
Wahoo!!!! I am one of the two! I really enjoy these conversations!
I think it would be great if you could bring her in to further this discussion.
i'm the other one
Ok one of you must be an imposter 🧐
@@ADHDlanguages @aerobolt256 @davidlericain @weepingscorpion8739 Well, I think it's clear Jackson needs to increase his estimates.
Me two!!!
5th of 2!
Going up to 3k viewers now. Finishing the video over my breakfast.
On one hand, linking Basque to IE would be exciting as one more step towards finding the ur-language. On the other, I always found it cool for Basque to be the last remnant of the earlier languages of Europe.
Yeah I agree. I wonder if the basques themselves will be resistant to this idea, as it could result in them losing their "last natives of Europe" status with people starting to view them instead as the product of an early offshoot of steppe migrants instead.
There are no words in any language that I know to deacribe how deeply fascinating this has been.
Every time someone analyzes things about humanity's deep past I can vividly imagine the people doing the thing, speaking the language, etc. For example recently I learned about a cave in the caucaus used for manufacturing fabric/clothes. It was a neolothic clothing store! I can see in my head the family living there, making clothes for a living, and then a couple comes into the cave and they trade skins and food for clothes.
Our world is do deeply complex and beautiful.
Scrumptrelescent
@@benjamindille8445 correccious
@@benjamindille8445 Indeed.
Whoo! Indo-european convo is back baby!
Getting the popcorn.
BTW, the discussion about pre-PIE being ergative lead me to read a paper on the subject. The paper detailed how a split-ergative system lead to the later grammatical gender of PIE. This BLEW MY MIND! I had always wondered how the hell a language develops grammatical gender and here is one theory, and I never would have guessed.
This possibly explains why Basque is ergative AND doesn't have grammatical gender, because it's one or the other, not both.
Maybe a decent analogy would be seeing the relationship between birds and dinosaurs. At first you might say "Birds can't be related to dinosaurs because dinosaurs have four legs AND they can't fly."
But when you realize that the solutions to these two differences are one in the same it all makes sense. The front legs evolved into wings, which allow flight. Anyway....
I don't know how common B -> W is, but it seems to have happened in Swahili which has "wa" for Noun Class II prefix, where Lingala, Luganda and Zulu have "ba", "ba", and "aba" respectively. And B and V have merged phonologically in some Spanish varieties.
That particular /b/ is actually an implosive in many Bantu languages, e.g. Zulu, but a bilabial fricative [β] as in Spanish in others, e.g. Luganda. It’s an easy transition from either to [w]. There is similar variation in Austronesian languages, e.g. batu or watu ‘stone’, depending on the language.
In Occitan, where Provençal consistently has [b], Lengadocian tends to have the voiced fricative [β] while many Gascon dialects have [w] (between vowels).
And you have it as one of the consonant mutations in Old Irish and its descendents, where under lenition, /b/ becomes /β/ (though this has shifted more towards /w~v/ under influence from English recently).
I’m another one of the two
‘Two’ who watched to the end! Fascinating discussion, and I love your examples and questions that were positive to the discussion. Thanks so much.
Lynn in Naples FL
A funny thing is the book title would be short-normal by 18th century standards.
It's the time period i most enjoy reading primary sources in, and man some of those titles are spectacular
I have watched this more than once by now… and I know no linguistics…. I hope you bring Dr Blevins on.
Just re-watched this so I can go re-watch the recent video with Dr Blevins and hopefully understand a bit more than the first time around 🙃 I am a language professional but linguistics were never my forte so still hard to understand also for me, yet this is so fascinating.
I am "one of the two" watching right to the end - thank you for making such technical stuff broadly comprehensible to lay people like me, so that I can appreciate the excitement over Prof Blevins' work.
Great discussion! Sometimes hard to follow Tony Yates train of thought as he rarely finishes a sentence and I do so want to understand what he’s saying. I wondered also if you could do a brief summary at the end to tie up the wide ranging points covered - just for us very interested amateurs. Love these videos though and greatly appreciate the open access
Another one of the two. Super interesting that she mentions a Basque dragon slaying myth since that is the core motif that emerged in Watkins's comparative reconstruction of PIE poetics in How to Kill a Dragon.
I would love to see Jackson interview the author.
Thanks to Jackson and guests for the thoughtful book review! Of course there are more than two of us interested enough to watch to the end. I read Blevins’ book after Tony mentioned it in an interview a few months ago, and ever since I’ve been dying for this exact follow-up discussion. If you get in touch with the author, you can let her know she already has fans in your audience!
Awesome conversation! Thanks for letting us participate as audience!
D + H for Dh series bears a huge statistical problem, it implies that *h is by far the most common consonant in the proto-language. *baha- is cognate with *bheh2- simply equates h with h2.
Evidently I am "one of the two" that Jackson says will watch all the way through 😉
So, there are definitely more than two people watching this to the end. I really enjoyed it and would be interested how it develops.
1:30:50 - Oh hi! Can confirm; watched all the way through. Thank you all so much for this fascinating conversation!
samers
Another one of the two viewers that made it to the end. As a Spaniard myself, I wonder how do you separate the Spanish (and previously, Celtic) more “recent” influences in contemporary Euskera (calling contemporary anything written in Euskera in the last 1,000 years) from any PEI influences or substrates in Proto Basque (Protoeuskera?)
I imagine it’s probably very difficult, because as far as I know, there isn’t much written in basque, historically. However, we have pretty thorough reconstructions of the ibero-romantic languages going way back, so if you find IE influence that can’t be explained well by Romance language contact, I would say that’s evidence. I’m not sure how good our records/reconstructions of ibero-Celtic are though to be able to actually rule out influence from there. I haven’t read the book, but I think you would probably just have to look at core vocabulary type of words that look very different from the other western IE languages that we have, I don’t think there’s a good way to rule this stuff out though, I think we’ll be asking this question forever unless we find a lot of very old basque writing
I recommend "The History of Basque" (1997) from Larry Trask. He explains it very well, how certain words must come from Latin, due to the form of the word that was taken over by basque. They use also some words from Celtic languages, that have no relation with Spanish.
If the breathy voiced stops *bʰ, *dʰ, *gʰ, *gʷʰ come from sequences of CV+h, how does that affect our interpretation of PIE root constraints against forms like **deg, **dʰek, **tegʰ? Would that necessarily have to be a subsequent development within post-Basque PIE, where the phonations of certain consonants changed to create the pattern? It seems like the *h sound would have to be distributed in a very particular way for that result to naturally arise just from vowel deletion.
Like Jackson mentioned, we need to assume that Basque preserved these intervocalic /h/ sounds for a very very long time for this correspondence. Intervocalic /h/ is such a weak sound that gets deleted so readily cross-linguistically, I have my doubts about how realistic that is. Do we have any other examples of languages preserving intervocalic /h/ for a really long time?
I didn't watch it in one take, but here I am at the end!
Watched/listened it all the way through, thank you for all your work and for these great collaborations! The three of you are amazing I was very excited to see this terrific trio in the same video! I have bought and read your translation of the Poetic Edda, I will certainly purchase your other books when I can. Yates seems like such a charismatic guy always fun to listen to your discussions and I really enjoyed your collaborations with Luke on the evolution of the Alphabet particularly. Wishing you all well and grateful for taking your time to provide people with your wealth of knowledge and perspective!
Why wasn't Ancient Iberian not mentioned more, at least in the number system appears to totally parallel to Basque.
I have seen it again the last week. Hi from Sweden.
Here for the whole thing; fascinating ideas!
I watched this all the way through! I love this type of content!
Great discussion by the 3 of you. Thank you!
Interesting conversation, thanks!
Love these type of conversations! Please keep doing more of these.
I enjoyed the discussion! Looking forward to a possible part 2!
I watched it all the way through and thoroughly enjoyed it!
Great video!!! I'm one of the two that couldn't turn away until the end. Great analysis of her work, illuminating the takeaway arguments and the relevence/weight you give and why. It is great seeing how you approach these works as much as the takeaways.
Thanks for great content!!!
This was a treat, and yes I watched it all the way to the end
Fascinating topic. I've been following for a while now and this was one of the best discussions. I hope you can get Blevins on your program sometime! I'm ordering her book and can't wait to read it myself!
Fun to hear you guys reference José Ignacio Hualde's commentary on the book; he was one of my linguistics professors in my undergraduate education! Awesome guy.
One of my favorite podcasts/interviews you've done yet! So exciting. It probably doesn't have any strong implications for some of the peculiarities that seem to link a few features of Goidelic to Basque due to the time depth, but still fascinating.
Really interesting! Eskerrik asko!
I am sure more than two of us watched the video the whole way through. It's an interesting topic!
One of the two. Hi. Fascinating conversation - especially as my family is Basque.
One of the two people here, fascinating topic and very interesting discussion!
All very much over my head, but found it absolutely fascinating. Enjoyed all 93 minutes of the conversation!
Another one of the two. Very interested to hear your thoughts on other proposed macro-families and what methods are used to assess their plausibility.
Dear Jackson and Luke, I've watched this entire video! And I'm half-tempted to buy the first book I'd've bought since undergrad..
Are any of the linguists investigating Basque native Basque speakers? I know that might not be relevant, but it seems like it might be an advantage.
Yes, there have been several including Joseba Lakarra and Koldo Mitxelena aka Luís Michelena, as well as people like José Ignacio Hualde and Arantzazu Elordieta (who sat across from me in a shared office in Leiden in 2001), who concentrate on synchronic linguistics rather than historical linguistics per se. Then there’s the late Larry Trask who made an enormous contribution to Basque historical linguistics in English (unlike others who unsurprisingly wrote mostly in Spanish) but was a US-born British linguist.
I'm one of the two who watched it through! I'm only an amateur enjoyer of linguistics, but I'd definitely be interested in a discussion with her. Curious to see if this is going somewhere in the future!
this is an episode out of a dream! I would love to see a follow-up with a Basque expert, or even Blevins herself :)
edit: I also watched this all the way through.
Hey! I watched to the bitter end!
this was marvelous
Nice discussion. The suggestion that Basque represents a pre-IE outgroup correspondant with the Anatolian farmers was especially enticing. I do want to point out though that as far as I can determine ON 'gríss' has no relation with English 'grease'.
Great discussion. You'd have to round up your count to at least ten people who watched to the end, or listened. I hope you all can get Prof. Blevins on to discuss this even more.
Very interesting video! Thanks for sharing this knowledge, I'm bilingual in American English and Western Basque.
Watched the whole thing, very interesting subject matter.
watched all the way, so interesting
Dont worry, some of us really do make it to the end. And two doesnt seem to be the cap. Anyway, would be real interesting if the pie Basque connection turned out to be real
It would be most unfortunate.
in my conlang i wanted to make a series of voiced aspirated stops like PIE and i thought the quickest way to do that was [b/d/g][vowel][fricative], remove the vowel then the fricative leaving aspiration; i had no idea that that could be where PIE got its voiced aspirated stops from! i love these hour long conversation vids btw :)
The question is really not so much how did PIE get voiced aspirates, but how did it get voiced aspirates without unvoiced aspirates? Hence the appeal of Cao Bang.
@@thenationaldistributist8739 what's Cao Bang? im assuming you dont mean the place in vietnam?
@@noxxanimo54Not so much the place, but the language that's spoken there, which is a relative of Thai and Zhuang. It's of great interest because it appears that historically it developed voiced aspirates independently (through a separate process) of voiceless aspirates. Thus it provides a model for Proto-Indo-European could have developed voiced aspirates only. In Cao Bang, it was a chain shift where plain voiced stops because breathy/aspirated and ejectives became plain voiced.
proud to be one of the two people who watched it all the way through
Danke!
Thanks Dr Crawford !
Very interesting, we've often wondered about the Basque connections.
⭐⭐
Very fascinating discussions!
In addition to Basque & Etruscan, some have tried to connect Hurro-Urartian w/ PIE; I would like to hear your opinions on the credibility, or otherwise, of this theory.
The Kartvelian languages are also said to exhibit ablaut gradation that's similar to PIE, based on some stuff floating around.
There's enough similarity between vastly geographically separated language families, too, that I really think there's a good chance for the even larger linguistic hypotheses of Eurasiatic & Nostratic, etc., being valid, on some level (but this is probably unprovable, based on how far back in time this goes).
I was deeply sceptical of any link before listening to this but now it appears to me there could well be one.
Why can't people just accent language isolates? Maybe as a lifelong loner, I just don't see why you'd want to put things in a group unnecessarily.
Well, it took me a month to pull this off my Watch Later list, but I watched it all the way through. I'd have continued watching if it was longer.
If this connection between Basque and Indo-European is somehow figured out, say some team gets down and seriously tackles this problem, I wonder if this could have some implication for a possible Uralic Indo-european connection. If the connection is there to Basque and we get to figure out some more details of what proto-Indo-European looked like that we didn't know before it might be easier to consider certain possible links to Uralic and maybe rule out some stuff too. I hope this gets some further research for sure.
My personal hunch, based on no evidence at all, is that complex spoken language had a single origin very early in the history of the human race, and that that happened before the great migrations out of Africa. And that therefore, all languages are related. But it's irrelevant as so much time has passed that a shared origin is just that, and that all the changes through the tens of thousands of years since have completely randomized everything to the point where there are no similarities greater than what chance alone would produce.
It would be fantastic to see a collaboration between Dr. Crawford and Dr. Sledge of the Esoterica channel, perhaps a deepdive on the Galdrabók. Greetings from Denmark.
+++
Very interesring but sometimes over my top but JC videos here have been great so far. Best regards from Malmö/Sweden 20 km from Uppåkra.
The Basque second person singular vocative clitics are the most fascinating thing about Basque that I've found.
Damn, I wish I could understand languages half as well as you! I had to google clitic.
This is the allocutive agreement yes? I've read about this. Fascinating as it's pretty rare anywhere in the world.
@@plixypl0x Yep it's amazing.
So I made it all the way through. I didn't follow half of it, but I very much enjoyed it!
1:30:50
Hi, watched it all the way through from Sweden 👋🏻
I speak Spanish pretty well, but I’ve never personally been to the Basque Country
Hi, it's me, I'm one of the two.
I was going to say that I'm surprised that she didn't go into the ergativity connection more. I think the harder argument to swallow for me is that Basque would've retained ergativity for that long; unless it were supposed that the ergativity it currently has is a re-development of some kind. Based on the very little that I know about Blevins' work however, that would be an interesting syntactic correspondence to some of her ideas about phonology, which I understand to be about intermittent re-occurence of sound changes within a family.
Yeah it's the ergative nature of Basque that really has me question the thesis. It was the ergative that had some try to connect it to Kartvelian back a few decades ago and that got a little traction based largely on that but it's now mostly discounted. It's not a feature easily gained nor lost; certainly not to the level that it's employed in Basque. A couple of scholars tried to concoct a scenario years ago where PIE was ergative but it really didn't work well and certainly didn't fit with the actual I-E historical linguistics.
I’m one of the two who watched this all the way through! :)
One of the two, here. This was wild. I'd love to read the book myself
Full episode watcher logging in.
It will be interesting to see, whether this idea gets for developed and attains more traction over the coming years and decades. By the way I did watch till the end.
Curious George watched all the way through but don’t ask questions to know what I learned.😂. Thanks.
I just came across another theory by a linguist, who specializes in Tsimshian, of a link between PIE & the Tsimshianic languages (he theorizes that there was language contact between the two cultures, before the Tsimshianic speakers crossed the Bering Strait; so, he says there's a significant PIE element in the vocabulary of Tsimshian, while the grammar & syntax are still largely Penutian).
He wrote a book on it, which claims to lay down some phonological correspondences.
@ around 40 minutes, could the grammatical innovation in Basque, if Basque is a sort of para-Indo-European language be from contact with one the extremely sparsely attested, pre-Romance, seemingly non-Indo-European languages of Iberia like Iberian or Tartessian (which might be an offshoot of Iberian from what I recall)? I do not know my Vasconic stuff well but I was under the impression that Iberian has enough cognates with Basque to suggest pretty close contact, but not anything systematic in terms of implying a genealogical link between the two.
The corpus of Iberian is about as much text as is on the ingredient list of Sriracha written in 3 (I think) different scripts with weird and varied conventions so we will probably never know...
I listened through the entire thing while working in my office
i did watch it all the way through (while playing minecraft), and it was worth it. I would love to hear a followup where you get the basque-indo-european-statistics genius online and to hear her tell her story of this thing! Otherwise, good job guys. Very interesting talk.
Yet another of the two -- an armchair linguist at best, but with a deep interest in historical linguistics especially. I had the good fortune a couple decades ago to share some correspondence with Robert Trask. I wish we could have had his take on this! Thank you for bringing this book to my attention and for giving your insights. I'll definitely be acquiring a copy.
Very cool!
At least 3 people have now watched all the way through!
Unrelated, but i noticed the picture of a Stegosaurus in your background. You have good taste.
When I was younger, I always assumed there was a distant (extremely) distant influence/relation of IE and Basque.
Made it all the way through, very interesting! A question I have is: is there no credence to the theories of connection between the languages brought into Europe by the EEF (Early European Farmers) and the languages of the Caucasus, in particular the Northwest and Northeast Caucasian families. I'm blanking on it now but I remember reading something about complex verb and sentence construction in the aforementioned Caucasian language families and how they might connect to the agricultural substratum words in like Slavic, Hellenic, Germanic and stuff like that. As well as the fact that many many of the Caucasian languages have an ergative-absolutive alignment!
Also I see no reason why Proto-Basque couldn't instead be the product of creolization, especially with the waves of WSH (Western Steppe Herder) migrating into Iberia, and how the modern Basque population shows large-scale introgression from said WSH on the male side. I feel like there could be a fruitful comparison of Proto-Basque and Celtiberian. And, if I might reach a bit more, possibly a comparison of Proto-Basque and Proto-Berber is in order?
I watched it all the way through. Sadly, I lack the expertise to contribute.
What is intriguing to me about Basque culture is that it has been surrounded by numerous super powers from ancient Greek & Roman empires, Vandal, Visigoth, Frank, Almohad, Spanish, etc cultures yet its linguistics has not been "contaminated"; in the sense that it has retained its unique characteristics instead of adopting Indo European norms.
If you visit the place you will understand. Some valleys are very isolated
What's strange is that Indo-European penetrated into the Alps and all the way into the Highlands of Scotland and left no linguistic pockets.
I really enjoy listening to y'all. I've always had an interest in history, but it sounds like Basque goes back far beyond history.
One possible indication that Basque is pre-Indo-European is that the words for various cutting tools in Basque can be traced back to the Basque word for stone. A more advanced culture wouldn't associate metal objects, such as knives, with rocks. This might indicate that the Basque language goes back to the Cromagnon era. I am no expert, though.
This could only indicate that Basque's ancestors predate metallurgy, which we could already infer. Polished stone tools, while not exclusive to Neolithic contexts, are one of the hallmarks of early agricultural societies around the world. In the ANE, stone tools including knives and farming implements are found throughout the Pre- and Post-Pottery Neolithic up to the invention of copper smelting. So an association between tool-words and stone doesn't necessarily suggest a Paleolithic origin, it could just as easily suggest a pre-metallurgical Neolithic origin. In the context of an "Indo-European-Euskaran" hypothesis, an ultimate origin among stone-using Anatolian agriculturalists is more likely than among Paleolithic European hunter-gatherers.
Watched it all the way through
I dunno, at this point i'm maybe 250th of the two people who watched all the way through. Interesting discussion, as others said, maybe get the author on the show? Ah, i see in my feed there are others, i've nothing better to do today than binge on IE discussions.Thank you.
Hey I watched all the way through, get Juliette on your show please!!! Brilliant work but it was kind of odd seeing three guys talking about it without her getting any input ;)
I too am one of the two - I think this is one of my favourite TH-cam videos ever.
This has been a great discussion. Really enjoyed it. I would really be interested in the analysis of nautical terms as it relates across the IE languages. Could the basque been mariners in ancient times also?
I'd love to see what basque especialists have to say on this hypothesis and blevins' reconstructions of proto basque, the indo european side seems solid but it would be nice to have some opinions from basque experts on the euskarian side of the proposal.
38:00 I'm not a linguist, and Luke Gordon is, so this is not a criticism, only a question. I've heard this idea before that isolated languages change slower. Is this a thing? I know that it's common knowledge that changes come from outside the language, but my introductory-level exposure to linguistics gives me the feeling that most changes are internal. Take Middle English for instance. Huge change from an inflected to an isolating language, right when Norman French had become the prestige dialect, and yet I've heard linguists say that those changes were internal and had already started before the Norman invasion. Icelandic is hella conservative, of course, but Italian seems pretty conservative too, and I don't usually think of Italy as an isolated part of the world :-)
Italian originated in one tiny part of Italy-the area around Firenze (Florence) in the present-day region of Toscana. Before there was modern transportation this area was in fact quite geographically isolated.
Italian (the continuum of varieties from Tuscan in the northwest southward through Sicilian) isn’t especially conservative compared to Ibero-Romance, Sardinian, and Balkan Romance; it’s the Gallo-Romance languages including French and other “oïl” varieties, Occitan, Catalan, Arpitan/Francoprovençal, Rhaeto-Romance and the Gallo-Italic languages of th Po Valley that are especially innovating in several ways compared to the more southern and eastern branches.
Italian can seem more Latin-like with its plurals in -i and -e, but these are actually historical developments from earlier endings of a final vowel followed by -s that weakened/voiced to -z, then to -j (y), which then fronted and coalesced with the preceding vowel.