The New Spaniards by John Hooper

Author:John Hooper [Hooper, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780141016092
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2006-10-26T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

The Basques

The most obvious difference between the Basques and their neighbours in France and Spain is their extraordinary language which the Basques themselves call euskera or euskara, depending on which dialect they speak. Although over the years it has absorbed individual words from both French and Spanish, the basic vocabulary and structure of the language bears absolutely no resemblance to either. One sixteenth-century Sicilian author was convinced that the Basques’ strange tongue enabled them to communicate with the monsters of the deep.

A phrase taken at random from a text-book, ‘The table is laid – you can bring in the food’, when translated into Basque is ‘Mahaia gertu dago. Ekar dezakezue bazkaria.’ The syntax is no less exotic. The definite article ‘the’ is not a separate word but a suffix. Nouns used with numerals remain in the singular. Auxiliary verbs vary according to the number of objects as well as the number of subjects, and what we would call prepositions are in Basque suffixes and prefixes, which alter according to whether the word to which they are attached represents something animate or inanimate. The author of the first Basque grammar could perhaps be forgiven for entitling his work The Impossible Overcome.

It seems always to have been assumed that Basque was a language of great antiquity. In the Middle Ages, when it was believed that the various languages of the world were the product of God’s intervention at the Tower of Babel, a number of scholars argued that it was the language that Noah’s grandson, Tubal, was said to have taken to Iberia and that in ancient times Basque must have been spoken throughout the peninsula. Long after the biblical explanation of the origin of languages had been called into question elsewhere in Europe this theory was stoutly defended within the Basque country itself, largely because of the immense authority there of the Church. Some Basque authors went as far as to claim that theirs had been the original language of Europe, or even the world. There is no doubt that Basque was once spoken over a much larger area than it is today – an area which almost certainly included the entire Pyrenees, since it is known to have been spoken in parts of Aragón and Catalonia during the Middle Ages. But it is unlikely to have been the language of all Iberia, much less that of Europe or the world.

Modern scholarship has, however, shown that it is an extremely old language. The touchstone of modern philology was the discovery towards the end of the eighteenth century that many European and Asian languages – subsequently given the name Indo-European – came from a common source. Throughout the nineteenth century, Basque resisted all attempts to find it a place in the Indo-European family and philologists have eventually had to reconcile themselves to the conclusion that Basque predates the migrations from the East which brought the Indo-European languages into Europe some 3,000 years ago. But there is also evidence that it may be much older even than that.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.