Archives - Foreign Language: Page 29
Author: thelanguageguy (Mon Aug 08, 2005 11:43 am)
Title: Want a challenge? Try Basque!
Recently, I had the chance to look a little further into a language that has puzzled scholars and students alike for many years. The ancient language of the Basque people, known as Euskara, has existed for many thousands of years and appears to be the last remaining pre-Indo-European language. With approximately 1 million people speaking the language today, Euskara has rebounded from near extinction in therecent past. The land of the Basque people is about 100 miles by 30 miles in the northeast of Spain and southwest of France in the Pyrenees mountains near the Bay of Biscay. Still, only the northern half of this area hosts native speakers of Basque, and they are further split into several dialects populations of the language. Scholars believe that Basque may be related to the ancient tongue, Aquitanian. This, however, is the only well attested relationship of Euskara to any other language. Over the years, the language has died out to the popular alternatives, Spanish, Catalan, and Gascon. The situation was not helped by the persecution of the Basque people by Spanish dictators who forbade the use of the language. Still, the language continued to be written and secretly used as it has survived with native speakers up until the present day. Let me repeat that this language is like no other seen around the globe! Just for a breif overview, I'll give a few details of the language. Nouns are not inflected in Euskara, but the complete noun phrase is. Verb stems show suffixes but never prefixes. Gender distinctions and noun classes do not exist. The inflection of the noun phrase extends to 15 distinct cases which show extensive agreement. Although a subject-object-verb word order is common, it is not always used.
Anyone want to give it a try?!?!