In light of todays massacre, just how old is the Basque culture? Where did their language come from (the name ETA in Basque looks nothing like either Spanish or French)?
The Basques have been there for a long, long time, long before Romance languages were spoken on the Iberian peninsula. Some info on the language:
It’s not at all related to any Romance languages, although there was a wacky Soviet-era linguistic theory that it was aprt of a larger Ibero-Caucasian language group which included certain languages of the North Caucasus. That theory has since been largely debunked.
Some Basque history links:
http://www.buber.net/Basque/History/shorthist.html
http://www.angelfire.com/nt/dragon9/BASQUES.html
I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the historical stuff, but hopefully someone with more of a cluewil pop by shortly.
In fact, it’s not known to be related to any language, although there are some whackjob theories about links to Finnish, Ogham etc.
Well, you’ve asked the million dollar question, haven’t you? There is no definitive answer to the age or origin of the language and culture. Over the years, folks have said it was the language of the Garden of Eden, or in Atlantis, both hard to prove, IMHO. Later theories linked it to Greek, Irish, Berber and pretty much everything else. The latest–and I think most provable–is that it was probably the first language spoken by whichever of our ancestors spoke the first language. (It has been several years since I last looked at my mini-thesis from grad school and I can’t remember if it is Cro Magnum, Neanderthal or Homo Sapiens. Whichever was first capable of speech.)
This is based on: physical evidence that they were able to speak (though that doesn’t mean they did); cave paintings in that area of the world that showed they were a storytelling society; the different Rh- factor of even modern-day Basques that correlate closely to early man; and a lot of the words in the language that seem to be ‘pure Basque’ were words describing the times (Stone Age? Bronze Age?).
Keep in mind this is all theory and I am sure that some other folks will post after me with different views. Or can fill in the gaps that I don’t remember.
Interesting note: Basques were known worldwide for their shepherding skills and came to the US to tend to the sheep in the Nevada area. This is why U of Nevada at Reno has a huge center for Basque studies (or did 10 years ago, anyway.)
The Basque language is not known to be related to any other European language, or any Indo-European language, or, indeed, any other language at all. It is theorised that the Basques’ precursors were in Europe before the Indo-Europeans (Aryans) or the Uralic peoples arrived.
Wikipedia has an extensive article on the Basques here.
As mentioned above their origins are a bit of a mystery.
There is an interesting theory that Ancient Basque was once widespread in Europe, based on names of geographical features. It is certainly not the case that Basque is the language of the first cavemen thousands of years ago. The Basque language changes like every other, so that Basque writings from four hundred years ago are hard to read now.
The Basque term for themselves is Euskara, which, with a little imagination, becomes vasco or basque.
Basque isn’t related to any other known language. But we know that there were many non-indo-european languages in Europe before the Celts and Romans arrived and conquered them and assimilated the survivors. Pictish and Etruscan were non-indo-european IIRC. This isn’t surprising, since there are many areas of the world were vastly different languages coexist very close to each other…New Guinea, or Australia for example. But in Europe a wave of related invaders replaced the diversity of languages with one language family, except for a few survivors such as Basque. But note that this doesn’t mean that the actual people were killed or replaced, rather that the conqured people adopted the language of the invaders.
No offense, but this is not a plausible, or even meaningful theory.
It may be the case that all languages evolved from the same source, back when the human population lived in one small area. However, this would have been far too long ago for modern languages to show evidence of it. Even if this is the case, though, Basque is no more a “Stone Age” language than any other - it hasn’t changed any less over the intervening time than English, or Chinese, or Yoruba, or Quechua, or Amharic.
The Basque language is very much unlike other European languages. It is one of the few non-Indo-European languages in Europe (Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian are the only others that come to mind - and those are related to each other.) It’s an ergative language, which is a hard-to-explain linguistic feature that is not shared with any other European language, nor indeed with most languages worldwide. (Despite its reputation, however, it’s not impossible to learn Basque, nor is the language somehow inherently strange or alien to other languages. On a linguistic basis, it’s not terribly out of the ordinary at all.)
The Basques, with their (seemingly) bizarre language and separate culture have, then, been the object of a strange romanticism on the part of other Europeans for a long time. They seem to be a culture that has survived Celtic, Roman, Germanic, and Arab invasions when every other culture of a similar age in the area has been assimilated. However, that doesn’t mean that they are somehow lost in time - there’s nothing “primitive” about their culture or language and old Basque texts are incomprehensible to modern Basques in the same way that Old English texts are unreadable to a modern English speaker. Their language has evolved just as much as every other language in the world. It simply happens to have evolved differently than the other languages of the region.
See Seven Daughters of Eve for more information on the age of the Basques culture (and DNA.)
Also see Mark Kurlansky’s Basque History of the World. Fascinating stuff. Apparently the Basques were fishing for cod off the coast of North America and bringing salt cod back to Europe for some time before Columbus without ever telling anyone where they were getting it.
I in no way said that the language was primitive; I was saying that one of the theories–all of which I researched in depth for my MA in Linguistics–was that it may be the oldest language. All languages evolve over time and Basque culture and language is as modern as any other. But why couldn’t it still be first on the timeline of languages? If you read my response, I never said that I thought the language was primitive or lost in time. I simply said it could be the oldest language. Huge difference.
You “simply” said that it could be the oldest language, but this is not a meaningful statement. In what sense is any language “older” than any other? If you don’t mean it’s more primitive, what then do you mean? Think of it this way: suppose you and I were born on an island where everyone is descended from settlers who arrived in the 10th century. Whose family is older, yours or mine?
We know next to nothing about the language that was “first on the timeline of languages”, but we do know that due to language change, it does not resemble any language in existence today.
BTW Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, in his heroic effort to link genetics and linguistics, quotes research that shows that Basques are more closely related to the speakers of Burushashki, an isolate spoken in Pakistan, than to other Pakistanis.
Not related to any language??? Well, this chap quite convincingly shows that Yiddish, of all things is not only related to the Basque language–but is partially derived from it!
Have fun!