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.
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.