Complex Numbers

Basque in Its Glory

I mentioned the Basque language a couple of weeks ago, here: "Can I Have Two Words?" . As sometimes (rarely, I hope) happens, I made a mistake there. I said, "Basque is, weirdly, unrelated to other Indo-European languages," which gives the impression that the language is itself of the Indo-European family... which it is (probably) not, and I knew that at the time; I just phrased it badly. I meant to point out that it's unrelated to other languages in Europe.

Editing previous blog entries isn't something I do.

The reason I'm issuing that correction at this time has to do with today's random article.

    The unsolved mystery of Europe’s oldest language  
For linguists, the uniqueness of the Basque language represents an unsolved mystery. For its native speakers, long oppressed, it is a source of pride.

Unless you grew up in Spain, chances are you first learned about Basque Country through Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, which follows a group of Lost Generationers traveling across Western Europe after the First World War.

Oddly enough, no. I didn't read that until college. It was through an in-depth study, in high school, of this Picasso painting,   which merits a mention in the article's second paragraph.

In Basque Country, politics is narrowly intertwined with language. This language, called Euskara, sounds nothing like Spanish (gracias = eskerrik asko), nor does it resemble French.

What I did not know was the name Euskara. So, another mistake in that previous blog entry, by calling the language "Basque."

In fact, Euskara is so fundamentally different from its neighbors that linguists doubt it even originated from Indo-European, the language family that gave rise to Icelandic, Russian, Hindi, and virtually everything in between.

I have to take the linguists' word for it (pun absolutely intended).

Many researchers have taken a crack at the Basque problem over the years, each coming up with a different solution.

Given that region's history, with its historically oppressed minority, I don't think I'd have phrased it as "the Basque problem."

Each researcher coming up with "a different solution" reminds me of the field of economy: ask four economists a question, get six answers.

It has been suggested that Euskara is a predecessor to and a survivor of Iberian, a non-Indo-European tongue spoken on the Iberian Peninsula before the Romans arrived. Euskara has also been linked to a number of languages spoken in the Caucasus, as well to the Saharan Berbers, a pre-Arab ethnic group from northern Africa.

Given my limited knowledge of the spread of humans across Europe, all of those origins seem reasonable to me.

While the independent spirit of the Basques undoubtedly contributed to their isolation, the defining factor seems to have been the geography of Basque Country itself. Protected by the Bay of Biscay and Pyrenees mountains, the rugged terrain wards off outsiders as easily as it prevents insiders from leaving.

Geographic isolation is one of the forces driving species evolution; there's no reason to believe it wouldn't also affect language evolution, which tends to be much faster.

Centuries of persecution have taken their toll on Euskara and Basque culture at large.

In many ways, this reminds me of the historical arc of the Welsh language. But this sort of linguistic persecution is hardly unique to Europe; we've done it here, too. It seems to be one way those in power try to erase the identities of those they deem inferior.

Basque literature, previously endangered to the point that a single collector — one Edward Spencer Dodgson — is credited with preserving an entire society’s literary canon, is currently experiencing a renaissance.

Curious, I looked him up. It's quite ironic to me that the only Wikipedia entry on him is written in French.   I'm at the point where I can muddle through that, but not fluent enough to provide an English translation for Wikipedia.

"Né en 1857 en Angleterre, il s'intéresse à la langue basque à partir de 1886 et se consacre à cette étude jusqu'à sa mort."

Born in 1857 in England, he became interested in the Basque language in 1886 and devoted himself to that study until his death.

Or something like that. The double irony is that it was the English who tried to pull the same kind of shit with the Welsh.

In retrospect, Franco’s attempt to destroy Euskara helped ensure its survival.

And we've heard that one before, too. Perhaps the most famous iteration of those attempts, at least on this side of the pond, was when the US government tried to eradicate Native American languages, only to turn to the Diné (Navajo) for help when they needed to send coded messages.

The surprising thing is that they provided it, thus claiming the moral high ground once and for all.