Basque Is A Wild Language

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SOURCES & FURTHER READING

[Yoghurtmale]

Fun fact, the city Boise Idaho where i used to live has the largest Basque population outside of Spain. There’s a Basque Quarter near downtown and plenty of Basque restaurants and flags.

[Quantum-yzfc]

My parents had a basque children's book that they "read" to me when I was a kid. Turns out they just made up a new story each time based on the pictures.

[ZaKRo-bxlp]

The fun thing about Basque is that it's making a come back. There are more basque speakers today than there were 50 years ago as recent reforms have standardized the language to make it easier for young people to learn it. In the past, it wasn't a single unified language, but a collection of dialects not unlike other minority languages.

[peabody]

Basque isn't just difficult because it's not related to French or Spanish (or any Indo-European language), but because of its grammar: nouns don't have gender, but the second person has masculine/feminine distinctions (for informal speech); it uses auxiliary verbs which mark one or two or three arguments, and few verbs conjugate synthetically; its noun case system is as detailed as Hungarian (an unrelated language with 25+ cases); it has a feature called "ergativity" which means that it marks the subject of direct object verbs differently from the subject of indirect object or no object verbs.

At least if you can pronounce Castillian Spanish or Aranés or Catalan, you can do okay pronouncing Basque as their sounds are similar.

But it's truly a wonderful and intriguing language, and I'm glad it's survived and is starting to be resurgent.

[thegoat]

I speak Basque and it is my native language. The fun thing about basque and a reason why it is so hard to learn is that cities that are even 5km apart have different words for the same things. And before Basque was unified (relatively lately) basque were around 7 versions of the same language in a very small space. This is part of the reason I have labeled it the freestyle language.

[ramonsaiz]

The fact we are able to speak our language in any place of the world and be sure of nobody understanding it is priceless!

[GenericUsername]

Make Basque-Icelandic pidgin great again!

[jonathanf.]

Fun fact: Basque is so old that the names of several tools derive from the word for STONE/ROCK. Think about that for a moment.

[mikeg]

Basque languages use to be much more widely spoken. In Roman times a large area of South-Western France was Basque. The Romans called the people Vascones from which we get the name Basque and also the name of the region Gascony.

[JurassicLion]

I love to use Basque and Finnish as examples of language isolates & how to explain language families. Basque has influences on Spanish too like the surname Salazar.

[Jan_Koopman]

It would've been amazing if the story about the Devil learning Basque had been featured in "Lucifer": Lucifer explivitly states that he speaks every language (bc obviously, bc he's the Devil), so it would've been amazing if he'd said: "Well, except for Basque, that is."

[Eriorguez]

The funny thing about Euskera, is that Castillian is throughly influenced by it. So, the ancient language not only managed to not be overran by Latin, but also managed to shape the most widely spoken modern descendant of Latin.

[novedad]

One thing to note is that Basque used to be more widespread thousands of years ago. There's a lot of place names and documents that prove the presence of Basque in La Rioja and the Aragonese Pyrenees in the middle ages, and the name Val d'Aran, the occitan speaking, Northwestern region of Catalonia, is thought to come from the basque word Aran, meaning valley.

Even more interesting, the Gascon dialect of occitan, spoken in the region south of the Garonne river (except from the places where Basque is still spoken), is the most divergent of all, and us thought to be so due to a previous Basque substrate, since many of their characteristics are explained from a basque influence and shared with other neighbors of basque, most proto basque lithic engravings have been found there, and the romans noted that the ppls inhabiting the region where different from their Celtic neighbours

[Egemony]

I tried learning Basque once. The thing I found the most challenging was this unique gimmick that is language possesses, which is the copular verb at the end of the sentence. Although copular verb exist in various Indian languages as well, the Basque copular verb is a lot more dense. A tiny word alone can carry the tense, the subject, the object, and yet, there's no simple formula for learning it. A sentence like "eman nion" means I have given it to him, where "eman" literally means to give, and "nion" denotes all the rest. I asked my Basque friends for help, and they have given me what they call the "Almighty chart" where all verb inflections are stored in a gargantuan chart 😂

[isaacbruner]

The word for right in Spanish "derecha" comes from Latin, but the word for left "izquierda" comes from Basque. I remember reading that the original Latin-derived word for left might have fallen out of use due to taboos about left-handedness.

[Zestieee]

I've heard someone say: "The mystery about Basque is not its origins, but its survival."

[HayTatsuko]

I've long used "Lurra" as the name for the alternate-Earth that forms the background for some of my characters. It's the Basque word for "Earth." I chose it because it sounded a bit like "Terra" without actually being that. Was neat finding out why the language is such an outlier!

[Ggdivhjkjl]

France officially doesn't recognise Euskara, or any other indigenous language except French. It's the only country in Europe which refuses to recognise any minority language.

[cairneoleander]

I am still floored by how many people never put together that the surname Vasquez is OBVIOUSLY coming from Basquez

[arnulfo]

If middle aged Americans get angry when they hear Hispanics speaking Spanish imagine how angry they would get at hearing Basque?