"The Basques reclaim their cultural identity, one word at a time."

The current issue of The Atlantic has an interesting article about the growing use of the Basque language.

In Basque language is called (in Basque) Euskera. It's unrelated to any other known language, living or dead.

As an inducement to get you to read the article I'll just point out one thing: it teaches you how to say wine, penis and vagina in Basque. A good working vocabulary, no?

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As an inducement to get you to read the article I'll just point out one thing: it teaches you how to say wine, penis and vagina in Basque. A good working vocabulary, no?

Well, sequential if nothing else.

Thousands of years old, Euskera has no links to any other known tongue, living or dead.

Sometimes people write (or say) things I cannot understand. What does the author mean by Basque is "[t]housands of years old"? All languages are equally old and new. Written texts in Basque go back about 500 years. Some glosses (Basue words glossing Latin ones) go back about a 1000 years. I find it hard to believe that the spoken Vasconic language of a 1000 years ago was mutually intelligible with that of today. Just as the Irish, French, English, and Russian languages of today and their ancestors are not. Present-day English, Middle English, and Old English are really three different but related languages.

On the other hand, Basque is what is called a language isolate, i.e., it has not been proven to being related to any other language. Other examples of isolates are Sumerian, Etruscan, and Hurrian. Language isolates attract kook linguists who try to relate isolates with other languages. I have seen and skimmed many such claims. The kooks making these claims are rarely trained linguistics and seldom know any of the languages that are being compared. They often simply pick up dictionaries and look for similar words where "consonants count for little and vowels even less".

That to one side, Basque (and any other language I have had the pleasure to look at it more than cursorily) is interesting and worthy of study. Definitely what the Spanish and French states have done in the past to stop people from speaking their language is atrocious. For more on Basque, from a linguist's POV, here are some information from a Basque scholar, the late Professor Larry trask (link).

The Wikipedia article on Basque has a sample sentence (moving beyond words):

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Consider the phrase:

Martinek egunkariak erosten dizkit.
"Martin buys the newspapers for me."

Martin-ek is the agent (transitive subject), so it is marked with the ergative case ending -k (with an epenthetic -e-). Egunkariak has an -ak ending which marks plural object (plural absolutive, direct object case). The verb is erosten dizkit, in which erosten is a kind of gerund ("buying") and the auxiliary dizkit means "he/she (does) them for me". This dizkit can be split like this:

• di- is used in the present tense when the verb has a subject (ergative), a direct object (absolutive), and an indirect object, and the object is he/she/it/them.
  
• -zki- means the absolutive (in this case the newspapers) is plural, if it were singular there would be no infix; and
  
• -t or '-da-' means "to me/for me" (indirect object).
  
• in this instance there is no suffix after -t. A zero suffix in this position indicates that the ergative (the subject) is third person singular (he/she/it).

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it teaches you how to say wine, penis and vagina in Basque.

This has been an amazing site. I learned how to say vagina in Basque today while I yesterday taught Kalleh a new word for it (for her) in an English limerick.

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Originally posted by shufitz:

... it teaches you how to say wine, penis and vagina in Basque.

It shows you how to spell them but, unless I'm missing something, not how to say them. I could come up with my own pronunciations from the spellings, but I'd undoubtedly be wrong.

I have to take that back. I was interpreting say narrowly to mean pronounce, but on reflection I realized it has a much broader meaning which can include nonverbal communication.

On the breast of a girl named Gail
Was tattooed the price of her tail.
And on her behind,
For the sake of the blind,
Was the same information ... in Braille.

It just seems strange to me that a language from that region would be unrelated to any other known language. I'd think just the proximity to other languages would have created some influences on it. I could understand it being unrelated to other languages were it a remote island, but it's a region in North-Central Spain and the adjoining region of South-Western France. There was no influence of Spanish and French on it?

I don't know whether you saw the report recently of the terrible accident that occurred when a team of Basque acrobats were staying at The Ritz, in Piccadilly.

One their first day they were so fascinated by the revolving door that they kept whizzing it around until, eventually, all five of them were in the door at the same time, whirling at Dervish speed. The doorman, having tired of this, stuck his umbrella into the door, stopping it dead and hurling the Basques into the road, where thay were all run over by a Routemaster 'bus.

And the moral of this tale? Don't put all your Basques in one exit.

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Originally posted by Kalleh:
It just seems strange to me that a language from that region would be unrelated to any other known language.

This LL post discusses the languages of early Europe. We have written evidence of many languages that seem to have been unrelated to each other. Of these, Basque is the only one that survived. (And we're assuming that Basque was spoken in the same area as it is today; the written records for Basque don't go back as early as they do for these other languages.) This sort of linguistic diversity, with lots of unrelated languages inhabiting the same area, is common in other parts of the world.