Basque and Armenian share a baffling litany of words and grammatical elements
bbc.com
bbc.com
What I found out is pretty much that every bit of information has to be taken with a grain of salt, because there is a very strong amount of urban legends, fringe historians supporting outlandish theories with just a bit of anecdotal evidence like the , and bad pseudohistory. There's always claims of mountains of evidence of which just one or two (usually already debunked) examples are provided.
It is somewhat comparable to the pseudo history that's sometimes seen in the African American comunity in the US (like the black egyptian hipothesis, the idea that Jesus was black, etc). The issue is a mix of lack of well funded investigation, distrust of mainstream authorities by the people affected and local pride (that causes good sounding stories to be spread without much research).
"...we find that among other famous nations our own, the Scots, has been graced with widespread renown.
They journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes, but nowhere could they be subdued by any race, however barbarous.
Thence they came, twelve hundred years after the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea, to their home in the west where they still live today."
[1] http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/989
[2] In Spanish and I am barely conversational so it’s very likely that I missed some important details.
So I'd say that instead of Irish people coming from Spain and Portugal, it would be fairer to say both are Celtic and leave it at that :-)
Hey, maybe the Voynich Manuscript is written in Basque!
How are you able to ascertain Jesus' complexion?
"What Did Jesus REALLY Look Like?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPRnrfTHeL4
"How Jesus Became Widely Accepted as Being White": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfJCyDmTwyg
"There Is No White Jesus": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APMu32sC2nM (This one is the best!)
I'm detecting bias . . .
No, it's more than that.
And in case it's even needed to say so, I don't believe in egyptians or the historical jesus being white - I don't think anyone does outside of American media.
As for my personal bias, I have no dog in this fight. I'm in the very edge of what could be considered white, being from a country with more than half a millenia of Arabic influence, and the concept of race doesn't exist here with the clear divisions and strong connotations existent in America (not that racism doesn't exist of course).
Who is considered white has a social (non-racial) element, e.g. middle eastern and balkan immigrants weren't considered "white" by Americans early on, where white meant "looking like English/German/Nordic people" in their minds.
They became "white" (in the degree that they did) only after they were more integrated into US middle class.
That said, Jesus certainly wasn't WASP-white, but he also certainly (to the degree that he existed) was of mediterranean complexion and thus non-black (in the same sense that Jews, Greeks, Lebanese, Souther Italians, Egyptians, and so on were not and are not black).
In what way does the American media "believe" Jesus is white?
A curious feature of Euskara is linked to the geography of most of the Basque Country: lots of mountains and lots of smallish towns. This helped develop subtle differences between towns just a few kilometers apart, to the point of most native speakers being able to accurately pinpoint another native speaker's hometown. These differences grow bigger the farther apart the speakers' origins are. I am aware this happens in practically all the languages but to have it occur in distances of a few kilometres instead of hundreds is quite incredible. I wonder if millennia ago proto-euskara was spoken all the way from the current Basque Country to Armenia, those subtle dialectal differences would have been huge, to the point of being unable to understand each other.
Sadly, Euskera is less and less heard in big cities where most of the inhabitants or their ancestors come from other parts of Spain and saw no need to bother with the local language. This also happened in a time where nothing but spanish (Castilian) was allowed in Spain under Franco. The recent permanent ceasefire of E.T.A. has been crucial in making our little country attractive for tourism and commerce again.
I am confident in our collective willingness to extend the usage of Euskara and with the plethora of activities and projects undertaken for this goal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilometroak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korrika
https://www.hellabasque.org/euskaraldia/
edit: added some links
My mother being spanish and my father basque, I grew up with both of them at home. My mother's mother was genuinely worried with my then toddler's brain being unable to cope with both languages at the same time, as I am told I did not begin speaking until almost my third birthday. At that point I started speaking both indistinctly. Nevertheless, my heart beats in Euskara, because this is where I grew up. When it comes to thinking, I believe my brain does not directly parse thoughts into language unless preparing to express them verbally or writing.
The struggle comes when talking to a group of people with part of them not being proficient in basque; even if they understand it perfectly, the tendency is to switch to spanish out of politeness with those who do not speak it fluently; nowadays only the senior denizens of the most rural and small villages may find harder to express themselves in spanish than in basque. The recent Euskaraldia* event, where you could choose among 3 pins to wear during 11 days expressing that you could either talk Euskara, understand Euskara, or just did not mind not understanding it but having it spoken around you, has helped a lot when it comes to these everyday situations.
When it comes to preferring a mother tongue more than the other, spanish seems to be doing fine in the languages ranking, as opposed to Euskara; the cool part of that being my SO and myself enjoy using "that funny language" especially when abroad so no one understands us. Very occasionally we meet a fellow basque or someone who recognizes the language and at least a nice chat ensues. Additionally most people here will open their homes to every foreigner who shows the tiniest bit of interest in our language or culture.
As a finishing fact, there is actually no adjective for basque (citizenship) in the basque language, there is just "euskaldun" (euskara + "-dun" suffix), meaning possessor/holder of basque language.
Do any of toponym similarites in https://allinnet.info/antiquities/armenia-and-the-basques-sp... look anything plausible to you? On one hand it would be cool if languages were related, on the other hand considering how often someone in Armenia claims that X is related to Armenia, that it is hard to take the claims seriously.
Having looked at the words in the article, the link between both languages seems to be quite thin. Some of the words may make sense, especially if you take the root Ur. When it comes to Ar-Aram and other words the connection IMO weakens. But that's my point of view as a native speaker without formal studies in philology, take it with a grain of salt.
well that's hardly dispositive, lots of similar languages use completely different scripts, and dissimilar languages borrow scripts from each other all the time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Iberia_(antiquity)
Iberian peninsula in the west, and a Kingdom of Iberia in the east? Yet another very strange coincidence, it seems.
There's a relatively small number of words that are common to human life around the world and of course there's going to be some coincidences. From the BBC article:
>linguists identified almost 600-shared parallel words between the two languages... the Armenian and Basque languages have a number of almost identical words relating to agriculture
600 seems a little high to be completely random coincidence and the article refers to a paper describing grammatical similarities, which makes stronger and stranger case than shared words alone.
Again, not a linguist, but loanwords from languages at the same time period make sense to me.
That said, it's very common for people to notice superficial word coincidences in modern languages and think it implies a relationship. To demonstrate an actual relationship you need to go back to early versions of the two languages, come up with clear sound change rules for how words in one correspond to words in the other (languages change pronunciation over time and words shift in ways that are regular to the language; it's highly unlikely for words to stay identical across two related languages; instead you tend to have a set of sound change rules that tell you how to transform words from one language to get what the corresponding word in the other language is mostly like).