“ An old myth says that since there weren't any Basques going to hell, the devil decided to learn Basque, so he could talk to them, lead them to the wrong path and send them to hell. But he was to be disappointed, as after several years, the devil still couldn’t understand what the Basques were saying! Myths are just myths, but a study conducted by the British Foreign Office did conclude that Basque is the hardest language to learn in the world. As an isolated language, it has no syntactic parallels in English, Spanish or French and its grammar is exceedingly complex. ” (https://omniglot.com/language/articles/whylearnbasque.htm)
In Linguistics the notion that a language is more difficult/complex than another is not accepted. However, Basque grammar does have some less common characteristics such as the ergative case (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative–absolutive_alignmen...).
Basque native here, studied in the University of the Basque country (mentioned in the article) and most of my family teaches there, a few are linguists including my father.
Let me know if you are curious about anything, I am happy to answer.
I am obviously biased as a native speaker, but I am surprised it is considered the hardest language to learn. Yes sentences have an unusual order, and most pronouns and determinants are embedded as postfixes of other words, especially verbs. However, phonetically it is almost indistinguishable from Spanish at this point. The alphabet is latin and each letter directly corresponds to a single sound (except for silent h). Spelling is "as it sounds", very consistent and much simpler than other languages I have learned. The vocabulary includes large quantities of romance (from latin, mostly Spanish) loan words that will sound familiar to most Europeans. And the sentence structure and vocabulary are often (incorrectly) streered towards Spanish/French patterns in casual speech.
Hello, I'm a Chilean descendant of Basques. I've a question regarding basque culture and heritage (of which I unfortunately know too little). Have basque authorities contemplated the declining population with low TFR and how it will impact the continuation of customs and most importantly, the language?
I haven't heard much discussion connecting the declining population to the preservation of the culture. Generally, since the criminalization of the basque language during the dictatorship, most of the focus has been in encouraging the existing population to engage in the culture and the language.
This effort has been relatively successful. A significant majority of students do all their studies, including university, fully in basque (>75%, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language#/media/File:Ir...). There are many families that exclusively speak basque at home. And traditional basque public holidays and sports are prominent, popular, and frequent throughout the year.
There is a serious concern however, that Basque is becoming entrenched into a language only for education, bureaucracy and family life. It is much less popular in the streets and between friends, especially in the capitals of the provinces. This is partially affected by the significant reduction in funding for basque TV, films and dubbing, especially when it comes to cartoons for young children, as well as sketch comedy, which were so influential to my generation (funnily enough, basque dubbed anime was quite big!).
Nevertheless, the fertility-rate in the Basque country has actually been one of the lowest in Europe for the last few years. The conversation around it is more about the economy than culture. It is already seriously affecting primary schools, which are starting to compete a lot more and some are closing down. There are bigger problems in the public conscience lately (COVID, Ukraine, Energy Crisis...), and it will take at least another generation for the consequences of the low fertility rate to be felt, but there is an awareness of looming demographic trouble.
Belgian here, my wife is French Basque from Baiona. Her grandmother says she can't understand the Spanish Basques anymore. She says they created a new language or some hybrid form intended as a unified dialect or something. Has there been a spanification in recent years?
Labort dialect = easy-medium mode to understand Batua.
Also, if a Batua speaker it's used to speak the Western subdialect (Biscaian) and unadvertedly introduce "jargon" into Batua, it would be difficult because that dialect has lots of Latin/Castillians borrowings.
Spanish has similar issues too. Pick up a Chilean/Argentinian "chav" and partner it with a Murcian teen guy. If they mainly speak in their subdialects, either guys will have a hard time, even if both speak Spanish.
OFC if they keep a conversation on "semi-standard" Spanish they'll understand the 99%, 100% if both are speaking about academic terms or just a random serious article/news in a newspaper/web site.
Still, the RAE dictionary in Spain is huge, it covers ALL the manerism/idioms/jargon of Spanish all over the world, so any speaker from Mexico to the Patagonia or Iberia can easily query the online RAE dictionary for local terms such as molar, rentar, pasada, chévere, chido, tío (not in familiar terms), bacán and so on.
I wasn't aware that this is the perspective from the French side, but I can easily believe it.
There are a few factors.
Generally the Spanish basque provinces have a significantly larger population, larger economy and more autonomy than the French provinces. In France Basque is not an official language in the region and is only available with private schooling. France is also very Paris-centric and very little support is given to the fringes. In Spain we keep the vast majority of our taxes, have our own local parliament and president, as well as fully independent social security, healthcare, police and education, almost all in basque, public and private.
As a result, the vast majority of support for Basque has been focused on the Spanish regions, which might have increased the separation. There is indeed a Standard Basque defined during the 60s for education, media and governance. Not sure if she is referring to this, it did consider all seven major dialects, including the French ones, but it is quite biased to the dialect from the central province (Gipuzkoa) and is significantly different to dialects at the edges of the region, to the point where mutual comprehension is a legitimate challenge.
The French dialects also have, well, a strong French accent, including different vowels, I also struggle to understand them. Whereas the Spanish dialects have almost the exact same phonemes as Spanish. It would probably sound like Spanish to a non-speaker, even if the grammatical differences are vast.
It is also possible that she is referring to the fact that many people in the Spanish provinces just don't speak Basque very well. This is actually because of a positive achievement: most students study in basque now. The thing is that often their parents don't speak it, they tend to become friends with others with Spanish speaking families, and they end up just using Basque for school. And in school they learn to understand the language and write it well, but struggle to speak it, often with a heavy dose of Spanish elements and sentence patterns.
None of this is all that new though, unless by "recent years" she means the last 30, which is not unreasonable.
I don't have a strong opinion on the matter, evidence is very sparse. There is a strong consensus that Basque is not Indo-European. It is also seems likely that the Basque language (or an ancestor) was used in the surrounding area before the large Indo-European migration from the east, Basque doesn't seem to have been brought by a different migration from somewhere else, at least not after pre-history.
The Vasconic Substrate Hypothesis suggests that Basque was a major language in Europe from prehistory or at least the neolithic, and that it influenced most modern European languages. That's rather a stretch, modern western European languages are mostly a mix between Indo-European variants and Latin, to a larger or smaller degree. Claiming another pre-indo-european layer under all that, I mean, sure, maybe, but it is diluted to an extent that makes it rather irrelevant.
The evidence for that is very weak, it depends on how literally you interpret the theory. I think it is arrogant to suggest that those ancient languages were basque, rather modern basque has some distant roots in those pre-indo-european languages. In my opinion, the more correct way of expressing it would be that this proto-basque was part of a large family of related languages spoken in Europe during the neolithic. There is no proper evidence that proto-basque was widespread, it's just that it is the only preserved remnant from that linguistic era at large.
This is mostly a theoretical exercise, extrapolating back patterns observed in Latin loanwords changed after being absorbed and differences between modern dialects.
Brief parenthesis: There are still significant differences in the language within a couple hundred km, to the point where it can be very hard to understand each other. An effort was made during the 60s to define a Standard Basque (Euskara Batua: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Basque) for education, bureaucracy and law. It is comparable to the unification of Mandarin Chinese at a smaller scale.
Back to the topic of older basque. You have to consider that there's a clear record of the basque living under roman rule, and the region has been under larger powers (but also relatively isolated and autonomous) for its entire history. The intermixing with romance languages started all the way back with original Latin, and the discovery discussed in the article also shows heavy influence from pre-roman iberian languages in the use of their alphabet, even if the languages probably had different roots (iberian is indo-european, basque not).
Nevertheless, the language in this discovery is not really considered basque but more of an ancestor. There is a large gap in the written record, very little has been found between early Roman times and the first writings in modern Basque well into the Middle Ages, at which point heavier intermixing with the rest of Europe started during the 1500s with the pioneering of large-scale whaling and a thriving ship-building economy. It's not really clear when modern basque started, and it has been heavily influenced by other languages pretty much since the neolithic.
I'm not sure actually, I am from Donostia and I did study in Batua and speak it with some minimal Gipuzkoan variations, but Batua is most like my regional dialect anyway, since it is the central one.
But I have friends from inner Gipuzkoa with a very strong accent, and it's pretty hard to understand people from Zuberoa (one of the French provinces) and particularly certain towns and small cities (not always rural) from inner Bizkaia (where Bilbo is).
Not sure how much they stick to Batua in school, but at least it seems like their family and environment has a bigger influence. Of course they understand Batua, and probably always write with Batua spelling, but tend to stick to their regional dialect when speaking.
And no, it is definitely not limited to the older generation.
Durangaldea (Eastern Biscaian part for HN readers) would be hell for you I guess.
On diffs on writting in "Standard" and speaking, Andalusia can be hardcore mode too, specially Cadiz. A Uni student can have a vastly different register on writting for terms at class compared to the day to day speaking.
> In Linguistics the notion that a language is more difficult/complex than another is not accepted.
Hmm. In computer science, can we say that one language is more complex than another based on the size of the BNF needed to describe the language?
Even in linguistics, can't you say that one language has 8 cases, and another only has 4? Wouldn't that make the one with 8 more complex, in at least some sense?
Linguist here. In one sense yes, but there are many other senses, also maybe in one language the cases are regular but in the other they aren't. There is complexity from phonetics/phonology to pragmatics, and all languages distribute it differently. Basque cases for example are very regular, like Turkish or Hungarian, but Russian or Icelandic cases are less regular. So it's actually easier to pick up Basque at least the morphology than it is to pick up Russian or Icelandic.
In terms of ease of learning, extralinguistic factors are generally more indicative. For example, availability of intensive courses, quality of those courses, availability of materials/cultural output, willingness of speakers to interact with learners (either for reasons of inability of communication otherwise or for reasons of ideology), similarity of culture or cultural concepts between the learner's culture and the one of the language they are learning. All of these have as much or more impact on ease of learning than any index of grammatical complexity. (Edit: Basque has excellent courses run through AEK and Basque speakers are usually very motivated to talk Basque, so if you want to learn a language I would highly recommend it, oh and there is a mass of culture like music and films).
No, anything describable in BNF is at most as high on the Chomsky-Schutzenberg hierarchy as context-free grammars, regardless of size. BNF is also not a normal form, so you can't really compare rules written in BNF to one another that way. There is Chomsky Normal Form, which you could use to compare sizes. But natural languages have been shown to be non-context-free, so they aren't describable in CNF.
You might be thinking of the notion of MDL (minimum description length), which is an information-theoretic notion of complexity which boils down to the question "how long is the program that generates this data". To use minimum description length, however, you need to have a fixed programming language. So if you have a Python program that generates all of English and all of Japanese, then you could compare the complexity of those two languages.
However, this measure of complexity can't be stated absent the assumption that these languages are generated using Python -- that is, the fact that language A is more complex than language B in Python does not entail that language A is more complex than language B in the mind (using the "mind's programming language").
And herein lies the big question for a lot of linguists: what's the programming language that the mind uses to generate language?
Computer "languages" are a metaphor, they aren't languages in a linguistic sense, they aren't even writing systems per se. They are more closely related to things like musical notation or circuit diagrams. You can't communicate arbitrary information with them without at least partially embedding another language.
Speaking as an historian here and not as a linguist:
In my experience, a language that has only four cases usually has a method for expressing all eight, they just won't be formalized in the same way. For example, English has no formalized second person plural, so you might use "y'all" or "everyone" as a kludge.
> In my experience, a language that has only four cases usually has a method for expressing all eight, they just won't be formalized in the same way.
You're getting close to something interesting. Cases are an example of expressing a linguistic distinction through the use of a particular kind of syntax.
It is also common for the same distinctions to be expressed by other means that people generally agree are also syntactic. An English finite passive verb has to be expressed periphrastically, using a dedicated auxiliary verb that exists for that purpose (be or get); the verb will be inflected into a form determined by the governing auxiliary verb, but no passive form exists that can stand as a finite verb.
But this is still essentially a use of syntax to deal with what are generally felt to be "grammatical" categories. What is discussed much less often is that languages may scrupulously observe a standard distinction between grammatical categories without having any syntactic apparatus to accommodate that distinction. The only term I know related to this is "lexical aspect", but the phenomenon exists beyond just aspect. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_aspect )
Two examples between Mandarin Chinese and English:
1. In Mandarin, verbs may be given a "resultative complement" expressing a result of the action. (This has many syntactic consequences.) A complement can be almost anything indicating a state, but there are some standard ones, and the complement that regularly indicates "success of the action" is 到. Thus, by a regular and productive construction of Mandarin grammar, we can observe the following verb pairs:
看 look 看到 see
找 search 找到 find
听 listen 听到 hear
Except of course these aren't pairs at all, if you're a Mandarin speaker; it'd be more natural to call them different verb forms. Seeing is just a particular way of looking, the successful way. By contrast, though English doesn't express this distinction in its grammar... you'd have a hard time claiming that English doesn't observe the distinction. The English verbs in that table are absolutely not interchangeable with their "partners". We have here a grammatical distinction that exists entirely within English's vocabulary.
2. If you study ancient European languages, you'll hear about the locative case, already long dead by the time of the ancient language that you're actually studying. It was used when a noun was conceived of as being a location rather than an object. (And in classical Latin, it survives in fossilized, unproductive form in a few common locational words like "home" and "the ground".)
English does not have a locative case, and also doesn't really observe any distinction between locations and other types of nouns. There are some restrictions, but they are easy to explain as being required by the semantics of locations rather than the grammar of English per se.
Mandarin also does not have a locative case, or any noun cases at all. But it nevertheless maintains a robust distinction between ordinary noun phrases and locational phrases. It is not possible to (grammatically) express in Mandarin that something is "on the table"; you have to say that it is "on the top of the table".
It is surprisingly difficult to talk about this distinction without imagining that locative case is involved. Certainly the background phenomenon is the same. Certainly this is deeply embedded within the syntax of Mandarin. But you would need to posit a "phrasal case"[1] which is entirely unexpressed in order to actually call it a "case".
[1] CGEL attempts to preserve the idea that the English clitic 's is a case marker by stating that it applies genitive case to an entire noun phrase. (This is a necessary analysis, since the clitic attaches to the last word of a noun phrase whether that word is a noun or not, but its meaning applies to the head of the noun phrase, which is not especially likely to also be the last word.) I don't like this; I think a better analysis would be to just give up on the idea of genitive case in English. But if you like the idea of phrasal case, locational phrases in Mandarin are certainly an area where you could look for some support.
more cases doesn't necessarily make a language more complex, cases are just one way to communicate a piece of information about a noun. it isn't necessarily more complex to have a separate locative case than to say "in/on/at X"!
There is actually a potential trace of an ergative system in Latin. A fundamental rule of Latin is that neuter nouns have the same endings in the nominative and accusative cases. For example, bellum is nominative and accusative singular, bella is nominative and accusative plural.
This can be explained as a continuation of an old rule that said that only living beings (marked by endings such as -us, -a; -i, -ae) could be "active" subjects.
A "thing" doesn't have agency; it can't "do" anything to something or someone else – in other words, it can't be the subject of a transitive verb. It can only be either the subject of an intransitive verb, or the object of a transitive verb – and thus in Latin takes the endings -um, -a in either event.
Bonus amat bonum: The good (man) loves what is good. (Meaning 1)
Bonus amat bonum: The good (man) loves the good (man). (Meaning 2)
Bonum est bonum: What is (a) good (thing) is good.
This is exactly the same pattern as in ergative grammar: the object of a transitive verb has the same case as a thing that is the subject of an intransitive verb.
> For example, bellum is nominative and accusative singular, bella is nominative and accusative plural.
That is true, but it's not really an example of Latin neuter nouns being subject to a fundamental rule specifying that the nominative case can never be distinct from the accusative case.
The rule exists, but the second declension forms are very standardized. You could equally use them to argue that Latin has a fundamental rule specifying that the ablative case and the dative case are always identical. (Though for that argument, the first declension would present a problem.)
Latin requires that neuter nominatives be identical with neuter accusatives even when the nominative form is unconstrained by its declension (only possible in the 3rd declension), and even when the nominative form is, by the standards of Latin, utterly bizarre. The neuter plural nominative of hic is haec (identical to the feminine singular, also an interesting [but not universal] pattern in Latin), and so is the neuter plural accusative. This is a word in the second declension, but it's a wildly illegal form for that declension.
And yes, as far as I'm aware, this treatment of neuters is an Indo-European universal rather than being anything specific to Latin.
A nitpick, but this is known as ‘neutral’ alignment, rather than ergative alignment. Ergativity is specifically when the transitive subject (‘ergative’ argument) is treated differently to the transitive object/intransitive subject, which are treated the same way (‘absolutive’ argument). By contrast, in the Latin case, all three arguments are treated the same way — hence, ‘neutral’ alignment.
Incidentally, English has a very similar pattern: most animate pronouns have nominative–accusative alignment, while nouns and inanimate pronoun have neutral alignment. It’s pretty common in Indo–European languages.
I was under the impression that the unification of nominative and accusative case for neuters in Indo-European languages was indeed felt to derive from an ergative-absolutive distinction in proto-Indo-European. The idea would be that neuters can't be agents and are therefore always absolutive.
I’ve definitely seen some speculation about PIE having been ergative at one point (or at least split intransitive), but I don’t know enough about it myself to have a strong opinion either way. I believe it isn’t widely-accepted though.
Descendants of Latin like French have lost the neuter gender and the relevant inflectional endings. So now nominative and accusative for what we would translate as "it" differ. But it's true that Germanic pronouns still confirm to the system as well (he/him vs. it/it).
(Actually, come to think of it, in German only the masculine differentiates between nominative and accusative.)
> In Linguistics the notion that a language is more difficult/complex than another is not accepted.
This is not quite true; it is widely accepted that certain languages are less complex than most others. A few languages can't be less complex without most languages being more complex.
Interestingly, among the examples of languages losing complexity due to real-world interactions are English and Mandarin Chinese, both of which endless people will be happy to tell you are uniquely difficult.
There's a theory in linguistics that languages tend to complexify if they're used by a small, insular group, but tend to simplify if they're used as a trade languages. Evidence for this theory can be found in languages like English and Swahili, which are grammatically simpler than their Germanic and Bantu cousin languages. You can also see in Caucasian languages that the languages spoken by higher altitude speakers (who were more protected from the various waves of conquest in the area) being more complex than the lower altitude speakers.
Maybe... Spanish and Portuguese ware used in trade a lot and they don't seem to have simplified much. On the other hand, like English Danish has simplified even further, but it was never a great trade language --it may have been a language of trade in the Baltic basin many centuries ago but not in the last half dozen centuries.
> Spanish and Portuguese ware used in trade a lot and they don't seem to have simplified much.
Latin is another standard example of a language losing complexity due to being learned by large numbers of adults. Greek still has a system of noun cases. Spanish and Portuguese don't.
the relative simplicity of English is pretty much modern, if you go back to the way it was spoken ~200 years ago, I think you'll find it a lot more complicated in terms of expressions and artistic complications, pretty close to French actually
One common pattern for this is the reason English has a comparatively simple grammar. English was learned in adulthood by a series of invaders (Vikings, Normans). Adults aren't very good at learning new languages so they tend to discard the harder parts. Indonesian (Bahasa) is easy to learn for similar reasons, while some of the indigenous tribal languages of Indonesia are among the most complex in the world.
essentially no grammar change is a "simplification". every language has the same complexity in it's grammar, it mostly depends where that complexity lies
you might just be confusing complexity with big words or large tables of grammatical affixes. over time, languages tend to either get more synthetic (closer to a 1=1 correspondence between words and morphemes) or agglutinative (many more morphemes per word), and it wraps around at the end - premium synthetic languages then start tacking words together, some start making other constructions, and suddenly you're on the agglutinative side!
Maybe... but some language requires more context for one to understand the utterance or sentence in order to give the statement the proper understanding. Why do some languages have a decrease in inflective grammatical cases (where English has now 3, whereas Hungarian retains 15 or more? And some languages are in the process of losing use of some cases; however, I'm unaware of languages gaining case complexity. Pidgins are simplified languages that allow communication between unintelligible languages. I would suggest they use simplified grammars.
Pidgins are almost a completely different thing. Since by their nature, every speaker of a pidgin is a fluent native speaker of at least one other language, the pidgin doesn't have to meet all of the communication needs of all of its speakers. Once they cross over into creoles eg have native speakers, they fall into the same structures as all other languages.
context is a part of language! pragmatics is essentially context as it relates to language, and pragmatics is a part of linguistics. languages gaining case complexity largely happens by affixation of prepositions - i can't think of any examples off the top of my head but you'll have to take my word on it occurring.
Yes, basque also has around 20,000 borrowings from spanish. Because it was reconstructed with political goals.
I tell you this as the son of someone who used to work in the basque country (I am spanish). A vulgar basque was spoken in the rural areas only. They were desperate at the end of the 70s to find teachers for it.
Nowadays there is a myth built on top of a language that, it is nice to not make things disappear, but it is basically a reconstruction. It is called "euskera batúa".
I can say with confidence that we can speak more correct latin or catalan than basque when thinking about real language heritage. Basque is just a reconstruction.
I mean, I can understand Basque medieval writings, and also the first word in the discovery the article highlights. Claiming that it didn't exist before the 70s is rather a stretch.
Yes there was a large effort during the 60s to recover the language and unify it in order to use it in education and governance, comparable to the unification of Mandarin Chinese. Not because the language wasn't there but because there were, and still are, significant differences between the dialects of each province, to the point where it can be very hard to understand each other.
And it had to be recovered because using the language was literally criminalized during the dictatorship, so yes, it had to go underground and was forgotten to an extent for a generation. But still, it was spoken in homes in both rural and urban areas. My father's family attended an illegal basque school during the dictatorship, as well as having to bribe officials to give basque names to their children.
It is definitely true that basque has many many loanwords from spanish and other romance languages. There is in fact significant evidence (including this latest discovery), that this intermixing dates all the way back to the Roman occupation with original Latin, before spanish existed, so it makes sense that there is significant shared vocabulary.
> Claiming that it didn't exist before the 70s is rather a stretch.
Hey, noone said this! Read back what I said. What I said is that the state of the language was bad. Because it was only spoken in villages not in urban area and for lack of standardization/normalization. So they did have to reconstruct a part of it.
> And it had to be recovered because using the language was literally criminalized during the dictatorship.
As far as I understand (know that my family if of valencian speakers, so do not think I am talking out of thin air) local languages were out of the education system but not forbidden or criminalized. Namely: it was not illegal to speak those. It is just that they were not used in the education or administration, which I admit it can have an impact.
> having to bribe officials to give basque names to their children.
Interesting, did not know about this, but yes, I do believe it.
You make it sound that at one point in time there was a true basque language. But isn't language an evolving matter? It is slightly different from one village to the next, changes continuously over time, words get a different feeling, mixes as family members marry someone from a different village, etc.
There are lots of actual reconstructions of nearly-lost languages, though. Language certainly evolves, but there are people, that you can name, that sat through committee meetings putting together and voting on some of these reconstructions; for example Modern Hebrew and Hindi (to name probably the largest ones.) Modern Greek also seems like a bit of a disaster of historical reconstruction committees arguing with farmer observation committees for ages. Even English got clumsily rebased onto Latin and Greek from the 16th century on as its spelling was being standardized by prescriptivists.
So regardless of whether there's a "true" Basque language, it certainly could have gone through a period of conscious, top-down reconstruction after some period when middle-class academics (and politicians, usually) who would be interested in either rediscovering or purifying the language, or just plain looking for a nationalist project to rally around couldn't find anyone left who spoke the language at all, spoke it purely enough for them, or even spoke it prettily enough for their image of what the language should be.
I don't know that this happened to Basque, but it happens all the time.
Also, current "Spanish Batua" in Spain it's the same as the Batua in Basque. No one uses it on the streets, specially in Andalucia, Murcia and Extremadura, and the 90% of the speakers around the world use the local language. It's mainly "properly" used... in academia.
Come on... what a comparison. Spanish has been very alive and spoken for centuries with a proper standard. Even the RAE (royal academy of spanish language) was founded in 1713, and this already set standards at the time.
Standard spanish is used all around in the sense that: people have known it for a long time. We understand it all. Of course there are localisms, but the same way Andalucia, Extremadura or Murcia speak a very strong dialect, in my area or Valladolid, Salamanca, Madrid or even Cataluña people speak a very standard one. In fact, the areas you said are the most "dialectizied". The rest of Spain is way more standard when speaking it.
Soy nativo. Prueba con los chilenos y argentinos. No, el periódico Clarín no vale. Habla con ellos, lee textos destinados a la gente con jerga más que localizada.
Soy español. No he leído un periódico argentino en mi vida, pero hablo valenciano/catalán además de español y conozco mi país bien. Tengo amigos vascos, he estado allí, conozco el entorno, la historia, los mitos. Lo he comprobado por mí mismo. Es un tema altamente politizado el de las lenguas.
Pero no me informo por canales políticos exclusivamente. Sé de lo que hablo, créeme.
Y yo conozco tanto vasco como castellano y entiendo perfectamente los euskalkis siendo hablante algo de vizcaino (ahora no tanto por donde vivo) como de batua.
Las diferencias entre euskalkis son como las que puede haber entre un murciano, un chileno, un cubano, un colombiano y un mexicano. El léxico puede variar enormemente, incluso las conjugaciones verbales auxiliares (dot/dut/det) pero el idioma es el mismo. En castellano pasa igual con dile/decile al otro lado del charco en el cono sur.
Sobre el uso político, para mí portugués y gallego podrían ser el mismo idioma perfectamente salvo diferencias morfológicas triviales, cosa que ya ocurre de forma clara en la conjugación verbal argentina, chilena y uruguaya.
No, what I said is that it was a minority language, even before the dictatorship that so few people spoke in comparison to spanish even in that area that there were things you could not even express in that language anymore.
You can believe it or not. That is not to say that it is not the local language of that area. But they make it look like it was the only, true one, when this has not been the case for centuries. The same valencian was the original in my area. But it was mixed with castilian (what you know as spanish is castilian) for centuries.
What happens nowadays is that they force and do not let people study in spanish in some areas. Spanish have the right to study in the language that they deem appropriate from the official ones in their area. And so that you see I am not inventing anything, because people will jump to me it is not true. It is in fact true that for years there have been people who cannot study in spanish at school in the public system, a few days ago we even had in Mallorca a resolution from judges that denied the right for a student to study in spanish!
My first gf when I was young had to come to my area because she was denied the right to study in spanish in public school. This is not a joke, it happens all the time for years. My area was still reasonable at that time (you could choose both) but it is happening the same again.
Here a student that cannot (has not the right, according to judges) study in spanish, when it is a guaranteed right. This shows the politization of the court system, bc it does not exist in the law, no matter their twisted argument, a denial of the right for a person to study in an official language in that community (county equivalent), yet it is happening: https://www.elmundo.es/baleares/2022/11/14/6372645121efa0721...
This is a topic where they typically say (the nationalists) that since spanish is everywhere they should be able to deny the right to study in spanish, bc they will learn it anyway. I am all for letting people to study in basque, catalan , valencian (which I can speak also) or what they choose.
I am, at the same time, totally against the public system forcing you to choose one of the languages they decide, more when this has been in fact illegal. So here you have a case where the minority takes the institutions and try to force everyone to do what they say. I am not a big fan of these policies in any direction.
> basque when thinking about real language heritage. Basque is just a reconstruction.
I can read Leizarraga's writtings from the 16-17th century by just using the Batua.
Batua it's just Basque built around Gipuzkoan-Navarrese-Labourtan.
Kinda like yours from Valladolid-Salamanca-Madrid in Castillian. I remind you that the 90% of the world DOESN'T speak like in the former Castilles, but like Andalucia and the Canary Islands.
No one speaks "Español Unificado". No one. Pick up any Galician, Asturian, Extremadura, Andalucian, Canarian or worse, any Spanish speaker from the US to the Patagonia. No one will speak like the Castillians, ever. Even if RTVE has millions of speakers. That's it.
The same thing happens in English with the RP. Everyone in Europe learns BBC English, but no one speaks like a BBC news anchor IRL, maybe the ex-Queen.
On a global scale, the so-called Spanish from the RAE, as if it was spoken from Perez-Reverte, it's the minorized one.
Also, just cross the pond. Even those created "Español neutro" for media, yet no one uses it daily.
Let's get serious: if everyone used their Spanish dialect in a hard way, the 80% of the Hispanic world wouldn't understand half of what were they saying.
This is true for every language in the world with any relevance. You said nothing here.
> Let's get serious: if everyone used their Spanish dialect in a hard way, the 80% of the Hispanic world wouldn't understand half of what were they saying.
I was not making that point. The point was that it was a more-or-less dead language except in a few areas. I am not saying recovering it is a bad idea either. But since that was the situation, then it needed to be reconstructed by taking many borrowings, whether you like it or not.
This is not the case for spanish or english or chinese, with all their dialects, that are spoken by a big amount of people. Of course, languages keep evolving and what is true today maybe will not tomorrow. But that is another story.
>, then it needed to be reconstructed by taking many borrowings, whether you like it or no
So what. RAE did the same, back in they day they were against anglicisms, italianisms and galicisms. They had to step back against cocktail, carnet, chófer, sonata, acuarela and lots of borrowed words.
There is an important omission in that Guardian article. They cite a Latin professor said to have helped decipher the artifact and then another scholar of Indo-European linguistics:
"Velaza’s colleague Joaquín Gorrochategui, a professor of Indo-European linguistics at the University of the Basque country, said the hand’s secrets would change the way scholars looked at the Vascones.'This piece upends how we’d thought about the Vascones and writing until now ... We were almost convinced that the ancient Vascones were illiterate and didn’t use writing except when it came to minting coins."
What they fail to tell their readers is that Basque is not an Indo-European language at all. It's a language isolate – while Latin, Welsh, German, Danish, Greek, Armenian, Persian, Hindi, Urdu etc. are all related to each other, Basque is the only remnant of the languages that were spoken in Western Europe before the Indo-Europeans took over.
His studies probably relate to contact between archaic Vasconic languages and Indo-European. It is considered fairly likely that languages related to that of the Vascones were spoken more broadly in Western Europe in antiquity, and that they likely had influence to some degree on the Germanic, Romance, and Celtic languages that superceded them.
My understanding is that most genetic studies seem to indicate the Basques likely migrated where they were around the same time as Indo-European/Yamnaya culture -- the copper age. Even looking at iron and bronze age remains, they are not appreciably different in genetic makeup than the surrounding populations.
Similar story for the Etruscans, in fact. High rate of R1b and associated haplotypes.
It seems likely to me that these populations were co-travelers with Indo-European speakers during the copper age. Following the same leads on metal and other resource deposits, and migrating along similar routes. I suspect if it was ever possible to find a "homeland" for these linguistic routes it would be along the Black Sea or Carpathians, next-door to the origins of the Yamnaya culture.
Maybe the Basques/Euskadia/Vascones are the descendants of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, an ancient agrarian population that the Indo-Europeans passed through and blended with (and maybe conquered) on their way west.
Basques have original language but not male line. It's R1b is IE steppe genes. The most probable source of Basque culture is from local native Iberian refugium. As well as Albanian/Illyrian in Balcan refugium. Basques are teared between claiming oldest native euroculture & negating IE conquest that drastically changed genetics & culture of Europe. What's understandable since their story seems unique & conflicted (adding rH- story) like Hungarian.
IIRC Basque (or a predecessor of it) had been spoken for hundreds of years in (what is now the Basque country) before the Roman's conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.
I think it's the oldest surviving language isolate in the world. Contrary to popular belief, Korean is actually no longer considered a language isolate.
If you think about it, all languages and all language isolates (there are many others besides Basque, like Ainu) are really the same age. At any rate, this applies if you assume that people developed language only once. Each language then represents an unbroken chain of transmission to the language of the earliest humans to develop speech, or one branch leading back to the original trunk. Isolates are merely branches that have no surviving twigs of recent provenance – recent enough, that is, to discern genetic relationships with the tools available today.
Language isolates of different ages could only really occur if there were several populations of humans developing speech independently of each other, and at different times.
Languages have different ages. Now obviously you can’t ever draw a clean, exact line between when one language becomes another, but there are also clearly distinct languages and those distinctions can be given upper and lower bounds in terms of dates.
Latin is clearly distinct from English, even though both languages share a common ancestor and English itself was heavily influenced by Latin, both directly and indirectly. Yet it is still useful to make the distinction between them as separate languages and what we call Latin is clearly older than what we call English.
I don’t think it’s at all useful to say Latin and English are the really the same age, even if it’s technically true per your definition.
It's a bit like saying all species are the same age because we all share a common ancestor and there's no exact date when you can say one species became another.
Latin is of course clearly older than (Modern) English, because it was spoken 2,000 years ago, whereas English is spoken today. But Mediaeval Latin was spoken at the same time as Old English; while Latin turned into Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian etc., Old English turned into Modern English.
Arguably, these are just quirks of nomenclature. It's just an accident of history that Old English and Modern English are both called "English", because the difference between Old English and Modern English is just as great (if not greater) as the difference between Latin and Spanish.
The verbal paradigm in Spanish for example retains far more similarities to Latin verb conjugation than is the case with Old and Modern English.
Latin is "older" than English because Latin has been fossilized for over a thousand years due to having no native speakers. A better example would be French and English. Neither is "older" than the other since both are spoken and learned anew every day.
Of course languages known to us only from a certain time period are associated with that time period. They're a snapshot of that linguistic tradition. Living language traditions don't really permit comparisons of age, because they exist in the present.
> if there were several populations of humans developing speech independently of each other, and at different times
We already know of instances of societal-cultural upheaval or even trauma, so severe, that the language undergoes unrecognizable transformation in the form of pidgins. A group of young people from scattered tribes after some disaster, who speak no common language, and who are barely lingual and "re-invent language" for the next generation, seems quite possible over the last several tens of thousands of years, perhaps in multiple times and places.
The similarity of grammar, in unrelated creoles, descended from such pidgin languages, is one of those great tantalizing mysteries in linguistics, and in my view, one that suggests we might just be wired to make a language if we didn't already have one, as do things like the apparent spontaneous emergence of sign languages in deaf communities. The spanner in the workers for that theory is that, of course, those hypothesized people who didn't speak related languages still grew up in lingual communities and were exposed to the idea of language from birth (even the deaf ones, really). Perhaps such events are just a remixing of what already was culturally common, and common to all humans. Indeed, perhaps no community where the link of language transmission has been completely broken, could even survive.
> is one of those great tantalizing mysteries in linguistics, and in my view, one that suggests we might just be wired to make a language if we didn't already have one
Isn't this Chomsky's thesis about humans having an ingrained "grammar" (or proto-grammar, or grammar machinery) from birth?
> "... the five words written in 40 characters identified as Vasconic, suggest otherwise. The first – and only word – to be identified so far is sorioneku, a forerunner of the modern Basque word zorioneko, meaning good luck or good omen."
How did they know some set of characters meant sorioneku? Is this not the first time they have even seen these characters?
So it definitely descends from the Phoenician alphabet which is also what the Greek and then Latin alphabets descended from. The Etruscan alphabet, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Hebrew are all related in there as well.
It doesn't seem too far removed from other alphabets in that area. I'm honestly more surprised that they're saying they've only got the first word figured out.
It is variant of the northwestern Iberian alphabet, a derivative of the Phoenician alphabet as you mentioned, and Iberian writing has been decoded for a while now (not the language itself). Iberian used to be written in one of three ways, northwestern and southeastern variants of the Phoenician derivative, and Greek alphabet sometimes.
I'm a native Basque speaker and the first word is obvious and makes all sense (still used these days to wish "happy birthday"), parts of the others have some resemblance to modern words, but it's far from obvious. Not surprising in 2000 years of the evolution of a minority, mostly-non-written language, with a ton of external influence.
(The variation of the alphabet brings over letter T from greek, which does not exist in Iberian as seemingly they didn't use the sound, while Basque uses the T sound.)
> I'm honestly more surprised that they're saying they've only got the first word figured out.
They have figured out the rest of the words, as per the last image in the announcement tweet [1]. It's just that they don't make sense in modern Basque (source being me being a native Basque speaker).
That makes more sense than them not being able to parse out the sounds of subsequent letters after working out the first word.
There's been so much work done on reconstructing what the proto-Indo-European roots of modern words might have been. I'd imagine they've had less luck with Basque since it doesn't have the wealth of contemporary languages to compare it to.
You can visually see the progression of letters in a wonderful "Evolution of the Alphabet" chart from UsefulCharts.[0] Really brings home the relationships that may not be evident without seeing the intermediates.
I spent some time looking into this from a post about this artifact yesterday. I had the same response to think abut runes when I looked at it as well.
For anyone curious, the characters are evidently from one of several Paleohispanic scripts. The origins of those scripts might be Phoenician and/or Greek, some are read from left to right and some from right to left.
The alphabet is shared with other Iberian languages, with a couple of unique runes. It is most likely written phonetically but the underlying language is very different.
Nowadays Basque is similarly written phonetically in latin alphabet, and in terms of phonemes, it has almost the same sounds and vowels as Spanish.
The writing in this finding uses the iberian alphabet with some minor modifications. The iberian language has different indo-european roots, so it seems that indeed Vascones didn't have their own writing system, as was common for many languages of this era and later in history.
It is also what evidence suggested (until now), pretty much no basque writings have been found until well into the middle ages, besides a few words in headstones and coins. Although we know the language was there because the Romans referred to it. Scholars probably assumed that some writing was taking place, but there is very little proof of it, so better to stick to what we know.
It is intriguing that it looks like this object was a welcome message hung on a door, kind of like a welcome doormat. The object was found on top of a door, it has clear signs that it was nailed in an upright position with a wooden nail, and the first word is almost exactly the same modern basque word that is used to mean "welcome", "congratulations" or "happy". If this theory is correct, it suggests a significantly higher level of literacy than would be expected in a small town from this era. Why would you put up a welcome sign if guests wouldn't understand it?
“ An old myth says that since there weren't any Basques going to hell, the devil decided to learn Basque, so he could talk to them, lead them to the wrong path and send them to hell. But he was to be disappointed, as after several years, the devil still couldn’t understand what the Basques were saying! Myths are just myths, but a study conducted by the British Foreign Office did conclude that Basque is the hardest language to learn in the world. As an isolated language, it has no syntactic parallels in English, Spanish or French and its grammar is exceedingly complex. ” (https://omniglot.com/language/articles/whylearnbasque.htm)
In Linguistics the notion that a language is more difficult/complex than another is not accepted. However, Basque grammar does have some less common characteristics such as the ergative case (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative–absolutive_alignmen...).
Here’s an interesting study on how Basque speaker brains process the language (https://phys.org/news/2006-05-basque-grammar-brain.amp), biggest takeaway is the confirmation of SOV processing order.