"We saw a great multitude on the beach, completely nude..."
"...su distancia al Continente era menor; que la primera que abordaron tenia de circuito 150 millas, siendo pedregosa, con arboles y abundante en cabras y otros animales; que los hombres y las mujeres iban desnudos y eran groseros en su trato y costumbres..." - Nicolas de Recco, 1341
Most linguists link Guanche with the Berber tongues of the north African mainland. This is in dispute, but I tend to agree. Inscriptions on the island (which were not made by the Guanches who were living on the islands at the time of "re-discovery") are said to be Numidian in origin. The Numidians were a Berber-speaking northern African people who existed during the time of the Roman empire (Roman artifacts have been discovered on the islands).
Could some Numidians or other northern Africans have settled on the Canaries and reverted to a pastoral, goat-herding lifestyle? Hanno the Navigator of Carthage is said to have visited the islands, and declared them to be uninhabited, in spite of the large, empty stone buildings. If that's true, it seems there was a founding population with a distinctly higher level of technology, and the Numidians or other Berber-speaking peoples settled (or were brought as prisoners or slaves) there in the latter days of the Roman Empire. As stated in my earlier post, native Canary Islanders couldn't even manage to sail between islands in the Canaries, much less back and forth to the mainland.
I have attempted to compile a list of visitors, scholars and clerics who took notes on the islands' inabitants and their language. Most of the vocabularies consist of proper names and place names, so they are not as helpful as they could be. These chroniclers' accounts of the islanders' cultural and religious practices tend to be subjective, incomplete and contradictory as well. Nonetheless, they are what we have to go by. The scribes we have to thank for the few surviving tidbits (and the dates of their chronicles / lives) include:
Nicolas de Recco - 1341
Bontier & Le Verrier (two of De Bethencourt's chaplains) - 1402
Abreu Galindo - 1632
Jose de Viera - (b. 1731, d. 1813)
George Glas - 1761
Alexander von Humboldt - 1799
Bory de Saint-Vincent - 1803
Webb & Berthelot - 1839
Guanche numbers (1-10):
Gran Canaria
nait smetti amelotti acodetti simusetti sesetti satti tamatti alda-marava marava
Tenerife
ben lini amiat arba cansa sumus sat set acot marago
These certainly seem to exhibit an affinity with Berber numbers. Not all peoples count in the same way, however; some tongues have a different set of numbers for numerals themselves, counting people as opposed to objects, etc.
Touareg (not the Volkswagen, but the tribe)
iyen essin kerad okkoz semmus sedis essa ettam tezza merawa
Tamazight
yun sin ra erba hamsa setta seb`a tamanya tsa`a `era
More on this soon. I'm not finished with this article, and I'll probably put those numbers in a table for easier comparison as well as include other Afro-Asiatic languages (Semitic, Ethopian, etc). "Arba" is a common word for "four" throughout this language family.