Hello everyone. I’ve been lurking here forever, and finally decided that it was time to register. Here’s a question that’s been bugging me for some time now:
Last week, I decided to search for video of people speaking Basque. Just wanted to know what it sounded like. One thing that really struck me is that in every video I could find, the accents sounded a hell of a lot like Spanish. Several possibilities come to mind:
I only managed to find clips of those who learned Basque as a second language.
Basque pronunciation has been heavily influenced by Spanish over the centuries.
Spanish pronunciation has been heavily influenced by Basque over the centuries.
It’s all a mindbogglingly huge coincidence.
Anyone happen to know what’s going on? Incidentally, if you google this, you will find someone on a certain white power idiocy site (with a weather related name) asking the same questions. I assure you that that’s not me.
2+3, plus are you sure you know what someone speaking Spanish sounds like? Someone from Donosti speaking Basque sounds remarkably like someone from Donosti speaking Spanish, but not so much like someone from Cadiz speaking Spanish.
The oldest known writings in Spanish are notes in the margin of a medieval book, in the monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla (you may also find it referenced as the Monasterio de Yuso, it’s got two parts and the “yuso” denotes the half at the bottom of the mountain). That same book contains the first known writings in Basque. The monastery is in what’s now the province of La Rioja, right next door to Euskadi and Navarra. Basque is a lot older than Spanish, but there has been an influence of Basque on Spanish since the Romans moved here and started teaching my foreparents Latin.
There are also people who sound quite French when speaking Basque, because their own most-used (not necessarily first-learned) language is French.
I have to nit pick that a bit. We overanalyze the languages in the Indo-European family, dividing them into Old, Middle, Modern, etc. but tend to treat non-Indo-European languages as if they never change. If you go back 2,000 years (when your ancestors were learning Latin), the “Basque” spoken then would almost certainly be unintelligible to modern Basque speakers.
A Basque-centric linguist might just refer to Spanish as a modern dialect of Latin.
This is what I was thinking. Basque is spoken in France as well as Spain, so it might be useful to compare Basque speakers on the French side of the border with their cousins on the Spanish side.
I got a book catalog in the mail yesterday from one of those remainder houses. One of the books on sale was a Basque grammar originally priced at $100 on sale for $14.95. I was tempted to buy it just because I thought it would cool on my bookshelf.
I have also remarked on how similar the prosody of spoken Basque sounds to Spanish. At risk of slight exaggeration, the only difference between the sound of the two languages, for me, is that I don’t understand a word of Basque. My experience is from the area of Amorebieta-Etxano and Gernika in Bizkaia.
Nava, I don’t think the similarity would be apparent to you - or to a native speaker of Basque.
I guess I wasn’t clear, but what I said (and Drake got it) is not that “Basque never sounds like Spanish”, but that “Basque and Spanish which are spoken in the same area do sound similar, but when you compare one of them with the other spoken in a different area, they do sound different.” You get the same thing with Catalan, the French dialects sounds a lot more like French than any of the dialects spoken in Spain.
In other words, people from Spain who speak Basque sound a lot like the actors in “Tasio” or “Vaya semanita”, but not very much like the people in “El hijo de la novia” (mind you, the difference with people in a hongkongese movie will be bigger still); people from St Jean Pied-de-Port who speak Basque have intonations which are a clear influence from French, and the same people have intonations when speaking French which are a clear influence from Basque. I’ve had coworkers who were either bilingual from kindergarten or had Basque as their first language and I could tell what language they were thinking in (which is not the same as the language they were speaking in, this could be English, Spanish or Basque) because the rythm and intonations changed.
Yes, your meaning was clear, and I’m sorry for expressing myself in a way that seemed to diminish the value of your perspective as a native speaker. Your observations and insights are better informed than mine and I have no doubt they are correct.
My perspective is different. Because I learned Spanish as a foreign language, I have far less awareness of regional accents within Spain than a native speaker would have. I might recognise that your Cadiz speaker is from Andalusia, for example, but in general spoken Spanish just “sounds like Spanish”. The sound of the regional accent is very much secondary to that.
For native speakers, on the other hand, their own language doesn’t “sound like” anything, anymore than fish know what water tastes like. So the differences and variations (regional and otherwise) become the main thing they hear.
So, my observation, for what it’s worth, is that Basque spoken in Bizkaia, in public and on the radio, sounds (to this non-native speaker’s ear) remarkably, astonishingly, like Spanish, both in terms of prosody and, to a slightly lesser extent, phonology.
I found an easy simplistic way to see how similar Basque is to Spanish, I use the same method with other languages.
Copy paste random Spanish, through them into Google translator.
Example:
pocas palabras bastan
Google Spanish-English Translation: ShortEnough
Google Basque-English Translation: Few Words Enough
Google Galician-English Translation:
Potion Enough Words
Google Catalan-English Translation: Few Words Bastan
Google Portuguese-English Translation:
TIMES fairly short palabras
Google Italian-English Translation:
Pocas palabras Bastan
Google French-English Translation:
pocas palabras Bastan
So to me Basque is the closest thing to Spanish, if Spanish was simply an Italian dialect you will atleast catch a word or two!
The similarity, means that when a Basque speakers is taught Latin he learns Spanish
Also DNA studies show that Basques & Spanish people are the same people. Basques have a bit more North African admixture & are isolated on a village level or maybe in their own mindset, which is what matters most. :smack:
Since it’s been awakened and yes I know I already answered… but again in more point-by-point detail:
I only managed to find clips of those who learned Basque as a second language.
Not necessarily, but there is almost no people (if any) who only speak one dialect of Basque.
Basque pronunciation has been heavily influenced by Spanish over the centuries.
In the Spanish Basque country, yes. In the French Basque country, Basque has been heavily influenced by French. In Costa Rica, by Tico Spanish, and in Montana by American English.
Spanish pronunciation has been heavily influenced by Basque over the centuries.
For those of us who are from the Spanish Basque country, not only pronunciation but also vocabulary and grammar. My Spanish dialect includes more words of Basque origin than the dialects of other Hispanics. Mind you, some words which are very general in use are of Basque origin, for example maquila and its derivatives maquilar or maquiladora, all of which derive from the Basque word makila: lean-to, supporting object, walking cane, crutch.
It’s all a mindbogglingly huge coincidence.
No, but it’s self-selection at work. There’s a lot more people who will be motivated and have the forum to put up videos of people speaking Basque in the Spanish Basque country than in Montana or in Gascoigne (where AFAIK there isn’t a regional Basque-language TV station).
And neohumanid, I have no idea what is it your experiment is trying to prove: that translate.google has that particular pair stored? BFD, now try something which isn’t an idiom!
It proves that Basque is closer to Spanish, than to its immediate Iberian Latin languages, let alone other out of Iberia Latin languages.
Similar situations are present in:
Sinhalla (Indo-Aryan language) in practice is really very close to the Vedda language (Sri Lankan Isolate) than to any Indo-Aryan language
Amhara (Semitic language) in practice similar to the Agaw language (Central Cushitic) than to any other Semitic language
Classifying languages is just useful to tracing the imperial influence…direction of the powerful population that imposed their language, saying Spanish is closer to Sinhala (because both are Indo-European) than to Basque is :smack:
Or even saying Spanish is closer to Romanian (both are Latin) than to Basque is
So more power to Basque for being stubborn folks regardless of how recent their origin is, maybe Spanish speakers should change their language classification into Basque with Latin influence.
You aren’t even listing what the other-languages versions are, and do you even know how google translate works? It stores full sentences or expressions whenever possible: if there is, say, a EU wikipedia “list of Spanish idioms” including pocas palabras bastan, and someone corrected the translation to Basque while using translate, then translate has the exact translation stored. OTOH, if nobody provided an exact translation for the expression, then translate works word-by-word and the result you get in Basque may actually not be idiomatic at all.
If I understand the method correctly, neohumanid is taking the phrase pocas palabras bastan and translating it into English. Problem is, s/he is assuming that pocas palabras bastan is Basque for “a few words are sufficient”. Which, as anyone who actually speaks Basque knows, it isn’t. Throwing the English phrase into Google translate (and God, how dirty I feel doing it), we get the following in Basque:
Hitz gutxitan, nahikoa dira
Nothing even close to resembling Latinate vocabulary or structure. Ergo, bang goes that hypothesis.
Basque is a language with no known connection to any other existing language. Catalan (what you are calling "Catalonian’) is just another Romance language derived from Latin, in the same was French, Spanish and Italian are.
My high school Spanish teacher mentioned that since he was fluent in French too, he had very little trouble following well-spoken Italian (i.e. news announcers). Most words were either similar to one or the other.
OTOH, I worked with a fellow in northern Canada many many years ago who spent his winters in south Mexico. (Smoking… ah those were the days - before the trouble down there). He spoke spanish moderately well, and listening to northern Cree on the CBC he initially thought it was spanish. It was more about the vowel-consonant mix and the cadence, I guess. He very quickly realized he undrstood nothing. So languages can “sound” similar to a nonspeaker without haveing any direct relation.
