Hand of Irulegi: ancient artefact could help trace origins of Basque language

I haven't heard much discussion connecting the declining population to the preservation of the culture. Generally, since the criminalization of the basque language during the dictatorship, most of the focus has been in encouraging the existing population to engage in the culture and the language.

This effort has been relatively successful. A significant majority of students do all their studies, including university, fully in basque (>75%, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language#/media/File:Ir...). There are many families that exclusively speak basque at home. And traditional basque public holidays and sports are prominent, popular, and frequent throughout the year.

There is a serious concern however, that Basque is becoming entrenched into a language only for education, bureaucracy and family life. It is much less popular in the streets and between friends, especially in the capitals of the provinces. This is partially affected by the significant reduction in funding for basque TV, films and dubbing, especially when it comes to cartoons for young children, as well as sketch comedy, which were so influential to my generation (funnily enough, basque dubbed anime was quite big!).

Nevertheless, the fertility-rate in the Basque country has actually been one of the lowest in Europe for the last few years. The conversation around it is more about the economy than culture. It is already seriously affecting primary schools, which are starting to compete a lot more and some are closing down. There are bigger problems in the public conscience lately (COVID, Ukraine, Energy Crisis...), and it will take at least another generation for the consequences of the low fertility rate to be felt, but there is an awareness of looming demographic trouble.

It depends.

Ziberuan dialect = hard mode.

Labort dialect = easy-medium mode to understand Batua.

Also, if a Batua speaker it's used to speak the Western subdialect (Biscaian) and unadvertedly introduce "jargon" into Batua, it would be difficult because that dialect has lots of Latin/Castillians borrowings.

Spanish has similar issues too. Pick up a Chilean/Argentinian "chav" and partner it with a Murcian teen guy. If they mainly speak in their subdialects, either guys will have a hard time, even if both speak Spanish.

OFC if they keep a conversation on "semi-standard" Spanish they'll understand the 99%, 100% if both are speaking about academic terms or just a random serious article/news in a newspaper/web site.

Still, the RAE dictionary in Spain is huge, it covers ALL the manerism/idioms/jargon of Spanish all over the world, so any speaker from Mexico to the Patagonia or Iberia can easily query the online RAE dictionary for local terms such as molar, rentar, pasada, chévere, chido, tío (not in familiar terms), bacán and so on.

I wasn't aware that this is the perspective from the French side, but I can easily believe it.

There are a few factors.

Generally the Spanish basque provinces have a significantly larger population, larger economy and more autonomy than the French provinces. In France Basque is not an official language in the region and is only available with private schooling. France is also very Paris-centric and very little support is given to the fringes. In Spain we keep the vast majority of our taxes, have our own local parliament and president, as well as fully independent social security, healthcare, police and education, almost all in basque, public and private.

As a result, the vast majority of support for Basque has been focused on the Spanish regions, which might have increased the separation. There is indeed a Standard Basque defined during the 60s for education, media and governance. Not sure if she is referring to this, it did consider all seven major dialects, including the French ones, but it is quite biased to the dialect from the central province (Gipuzkoa) and is significantly different to dialects at the edges of the region, to the point where mutual comprehension is a legitimate challenge.

The French dialects also have, well, a strong French accent, including different vowels, I also struggle to understand them. Whereas the Spanish dialects have almost the exact same phonemes as Spanish. It would probably sound like Spanish to a non-speaker, even if the grammatical differences are vast.

It is also possible that she is referring to the fact that many people in the Spanish provinces just don't speak Basque very well. This is actually because of a positive achievement: most students study in basque now. The thing is that often their parents don't speak it, they tend to become friends with others with Spanish speaking families, and they end up just using Basque for school. And in school they learn to understand the language and write it well, but struggle to speak it, often with a heavy dose of Spanish elements and sentence patterns.

None of this is all that new though, unless by "recent years" she means the last 30, which is not unreasonable.

I don't have a strong opinion on the matter, evidence is very sparse. There is a strong consensus that Basque is not Indo-European. It is also seems likely that the Basque language (or an ancestor) was used in the surrounding area before the large Indo-European migration from the east, Basque doesn't seem to have been brought by a different migration from somewhere else, at least not after pre-history.

The Vasconic Substrate Hypothesis suggests that Basque was a major language in Europe from prehistory or at least the neolithic, and that it influenced most modern European languages. That's rather a stretch, modern western European languages are mostly a mix between Indo-European variants and Latin, to a larger or smaller degree. Claiming another pre-indo-european layer under all that, I mean, sure, maybe, but it is diluted to an extent that makes it rather irrelevant.

The evidence for that is very weak, it depends on how literally you interpret the theory. I think it is arrogant to suggest that those ancient languages were basque, rather modern basque has some distant roots in those pre-indo-european languages. In my opinion, the more correct way of expressing it would be that this proto-basque was part of a large family of related languages spoken in Europe during the neolithic. There is no proper evidence that proto-basque was widespread, it's just that it is the only preserved remnant from that linguistic era at large.

There is some research into proto-basque (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Basque_language), although I wouldn't characterize it as purer.

This is mostly a theoretical exercise, extrapolating back patterns observed in Latin loanwords changed after being absorbed and differences between modern dialects.

Brief parenthesis: There are still significant differences in the language within a couple hundred km, to the point where it can be very hard to understand each other. An effort was made during the 60s to define a Standard Basque (Euskara Batua: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Basque) for education, bureaucracy and law. It is comparable to the unification of Mandarin Chinese at a smaller scale.

Back to the topic of older basque. You have to consider that there's a clear record of the basque living under roman rule, and the region has been under larger powers (but also relatively isolated and autonomous) for its entire history. The intermixing with romance languages started all the way back with original Latin, and the discovery discussed in the article also shows heavy influence from pre-roman iberian languages in the use of their alphabet, even if the languages probably had different roots (iberian is indo-european, basque not).

Nevertheless, the language in this discovery is not really considered basque but more of an ancestor. There is a large gap in the written record, very little has been found between early Roman times and the first writings in modern Basque well into the Middle Ages, at which point heavier intermixing with the rest of Europe started during the 1500s with the pioneering of large-scale whaling and a thriving ship-building economy. It's not really clear when modern basque started, and it has been heavily influenced by other languages pretty much since the neolithic.

In terms of ease of learning, extralinguistic factors are generally more indicative. For example, availability of intensive courses, quality of those courses, availability of materials/cultural output, willingness of speakers to interact with learners (either for reasons of inability of communication otherwise or for reasons of ideology), similarity of culture or cultural concepts between the learner's culture and the one of the language they are learning. All of these have as much or more impact on ease of learning than any index of grammatical complexity. (Edit: Basque has excellent courses run through AEK and Basque speakers are usually very motivated to talk Basque, so if you want to learn a language I would highly recommend it, oh and there is a mass of culture like music and films).

> English has no formalized second person plural, so you might use "y'all" or "everyone" as a kludge.

It used to!

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-problem-with-you/i...

> In my experience, a language that has only four cases usually has a method for expressing all eight, they just won't be formalized in the same way.

You're getting close to something interesting. Cases are an example of expressing a linguistic distinction through the use of a particular kind of syntax.

It is also common for the same distinctions to be expressed by other means that people generally agree are also syntactic. An English finite passive verb has to be expressed periphrastically, using a dedicated auxiliary verb that exists for that purpose (be or get); the verb will be inflected into a form determined by the governing auxiliary verb, but no passive form exists that can stand as a finite verb.

But this is still essentially a use of syntax to deal with what are generally felt to be "grammatical" categories. What is discussed much less often is that languages may scrupulously observe a standard distinction between grammatical categories without having any syntactic apparatus to accommodate that distinction. The only term I know related to this is "lexical aspect", but the phenomenon exists beyond just aspect. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_aspect )

Two examples between Mandarin Chinese and English:

1. In Mandarin, verbs may be given a "resultative complement" expressing a result of the action. (This has many syntactic consequences.) A complement can be almost anything indicating a state, but there are some standard ones, and the complement that regularly indicates "success of the action" is 到. Thus, by a regular and productive construction of Mandarin grammar, we can observe the following verb pairs:

    看 look   看到 see
    找 search 找到 find
    听 listen 听到 hear

Except of course these aren't pairs at all, if you're a Mandarin speaker; it'd be more natural to call them different verb forms. Seeing is just a particular way of looking, the successful way. By contrast, though English doesn't express this distinction in its grammar... you'd have a hard time claiming that English doesn't observe the distinction. The English verbs in that table are absolutely not interchangeable with their "partners". We have here a grammatical distinction that exists entirely within English's vocabulary.

2. If you study ancient European languages, you'll hear about the locative case, already long dead by the time of the ancient language that you're actually studying. It was used when a noun was conceived of as being a location rather than an object. (And in classical Latin, it survives in fossilized, unproductive form in a few common locational words like "home" and "the ground".)

English does not have a locative case, and also doesn't really observe any distinction between locations and other types of nouns. There are some restrictions, but they are easy to explain as being required by the semantics of locations rather than the grammar of English per se.

Mandarin also does not have a locative case, or any noun cases at all. But it nevertheless maintains a robust distinction between ordinary noun phrases and locational phrases. It is not possible to (grammatically) express in Mandarin that something is "on the table"; you have to say that it is "on the top of the table".

It is surprisingly difficult to talk about this distinction without imagining that locative case is involved. Certainly the background phenomenon is the same. Certainly this is deeply embedded within the syntax of Mandarin. But you would need to posit a "phrasal case"[1] which is entirely unexpressed in order to actually call it a "case".

[1] CGEL attempts to preserve the idea that the English clitic 's is a case marker by stating that it applies genitive case to an entire noun phrase. (This is a necessary analysis, since the clitic attaches to the last word of a noun phrase whether that word is a noun or not, but its meaning applies to the head of the noun phrase, which is not especially likely to also be the last word.) I don't like this; I think a better analysis would be to just give up on the idea of genitive case in English. But if you like the idea of phrasal case, locational phrases in Mandarin are certainly an area where you could look for some support.

I was under the impression that the unification of nominative and accusative case for neuters in Indo-European languages was indeed felt to derive from an ergative-absolutive distinction in proto-Indo-European. The idea would be that neuters can't be agents and are therefore always absolutive.

Descendants of Latin like French have lost the neuter gender and the relevant inflectional endings. So now nominative and accusative for what we would translate as "it" differ. But it's true that Germanic pronouns still confirm to the system as well (he/him vs. it/it).

(Actually, come to think of it, in German only the masculine differentiates between nominative and accusative.)

It might be false, but it is in fact widely accepted. Where are you getting your information from?

See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33629425

Maybe... Spanish and Portuguese ware used in trade a lot and they don't seem to have simplified much. On the other hand, like English Danish has simplified even further, but it was never a great trade language --it may have been a language of trade in the Baltic basin many centuries ago but not in the last half dozen centuries.

the relative simplicity of English is pretty much modern, if you go back to the way it was spoken ~200 years ago, I think you'll find it a lot more complicated in terms of expressions and artistic complications, pretty close to French actually

Maybe... but some language requires more context for one to understand the utterance or sentence in order to give the statement the proper understanding. Why do some languages have a decrease in inflective grammatical cases (where English has now 3, whereas Hungarian retains 15 or more? And some languages are in the process of losing use of some cases; however, I'm unaware of languages gaining case complexity. Pidgins are simplified languages that allow communication between unintelligible languages. I would suggest they use simplified grammars.

> Claiming that it didn't exist before the 70s is rather a stretch.

Hey, noone said this! Read back what I said. What I said is that the state of the language was bad. Because it was only spoken in villages not in urban area and for lack of standardization/normalization. So they did have to reconstruct a part of it.

> And it had to be recovered because using the language was literally criminalized during the dictatorship.

As far as I understand (know that my family if of valencian speakers, so do not think I am talking out of thin air) local languages were out of the education system but not forbidden or criminalized. Namely: it was not illegal to speak those. It is just that they were not used in the education or administration, which I admit it can have an impact.

> having to bribe officials to give basque names to their children.

Interesting, did not know about this, but yes, I do believe it.

There are lots of actual reconstructions of nearly-lost languages, though. Language certainly evolves, but there are people, that you can name, that sat through committee meetings putting together and voting on some of these reconstructions; for example Modern Hebrew and Hindi (to name probably the largest ones.) Modern Greek also seems like a bit of a disaster of historical reconstruction committees arguing with farmer observation committees for ages. Even English got clumsily rebased onto Latin and Greek from the 16th century on as its spelling was being standardized by prescriptivists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_language_question

So regardless of whether there's a "true" Basque language, it certainly could have gone through a period of conscious, top-down reconstruction after some period when middle-class academics (and politicians, usually) who would be interested in either rediscovering or purifying the language, or just plain looking for a nationalist project to rally around couldn't find anyone left who spoke the language at all, spoke it purely enough for them, or even spoke it prettily enough for their image of what the language should be.

I don't know that this happened to Basque, but it happens all the time.

No, what I said is that it was a minority language, even before the dictatorship that so few people spoke in comparison to spanish even in that area that there were things you could not even express in that language anymore.

You can believe it or not. That is not to say that it is not the local language of that area. But they make it look like it was the only, true one, when this has not been the case for centuries. The same valencian was the original in my area. But it was mixed with castilian (what you know as spanish is castilian) for centuries.

What happens nowadays is that they force and do not let people study in spanish in some areas. Spanish have the right to study in the language that they deem appropriate from the official ones in their area. And so that you see I am not inventing anything, because people will jump to me it is not true. It is in fact true that for years there have been people who cannot study in spanish at school in the public system, a few days ago we even had in Mallorca a resolution from judges that denied the right for a student to study in spanish!

Here, catalans denying 25% of teaching in spanish ignoring even court resolutions: https://elpais.com/espana/catalunya/2022-05-31/la-generalita...

My first gf when I was young had to come to my area because she was denied the right to study in spanish in public school. This is not a joke, it happens all the time for years. My area was still reasonable at that time (you could choose both) but it is happening the same again.

Here a student that cannot (has not the right, according to judges) study in spanish, when it is a guaranteed right. This shows the politization of the court system, bc it does not exist in the law, no matter their twisted argument, a denial of the right for a person to study in an official language in that community (county equivalent), yet it is happening: https://www.elmundo.es/baleares/2022/11/14/6372645121efa0721...

Here basques trying to kick out spanish from the education system: https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/espana/2022/09/18/gobi...

This is a topic where they typically say (the nationalists) that since spanish is everywhere they should be able to deny the right to study in spanish, bc they will learn it anyway. I am all for letting people to study in basque, catalan , valencian (which I can speak also) or what they choose.

I am, at the same time, totally against the public system forcing you to choose one of the languages they decide, more when this has been in fact illegal. So here you have a case where the minority takes the institutions and try to force everyone to do what they say. I am not a big fan of these policies in any direction.

This is continuosly used with political goals.

> No one speaks "Español Unificado"

This is true for every language in the world with any relevance. You said nothing here.

> Let's get serious: if everyone used their Spanish dialect in a hard way, the 80% of the Hispanic world wouldn't understand half of what were they saying.

I was not making that point. The point was that it was a more-or-less dead language except in a few areas. I am not saying recovering it is a bad idea either. But since that was the situation, then it needed to be reconstructed by taking many borrowings, whether you like it or not.

This is not the case for spanish or english or chinese, with all their dialects, that are spoken by a big amount of people. Of course, languages keep evolving and what is true today maybe will not tomorrow. But that is another story.

Languages have different ages. Now obviously you can’t ever draw a clean, exact line between when one language becomes another, but there are also clearly distinct languages and those distinctions can be given upper and lower bounds in terms of dates.

Latin is clearly distinct from English, even though both languages share a common ancestor and English itself was heavily influenced by Latin, both directly and indirectly. Yet it is still useful to make the distinction between them as separate languages and what we call Latin is clearly older than what we call English.

I don’t think it’s at all useful to say Latin and English are the really the same age, even if it’s technically true per your definition.

It's a bit like saying all species are the same age because we all share a common ancestor and there's no exact date when you can say one species became another.

> if there were several populations of humans developing speech independently of each other, and at different times

We already know of instances of societal-cultural upheaval or even trauma, so severe, that the language undergoes unrecognizable transformation in the form of pidgins. A group of young people from scattered tribes after some disaster, who speak no common language, and who are barely lingual and "re-invent language" for the next generation, seems quite possible over the last several tens of thousands of years, perhaps in multiple times and places.

The similarity of grammar, in unrelated creoles, descended from such pidgin languages, is one of those great tantalizing mysteries in linguistics, and in my view, one that suggests we might just be wired to make a language if we didn't already have one, as do things like the apparent spontaneous emergence of sign languages in deaf communities. The spanner in the workers for that theory is that, of course, those hypothesized people who didn't speak related languages still grew up in lingual communities and were exposed to the idea of language from birth (even the deaf ones, really). Perhaps such events are just a remixing of what already was culturally common, and common to all humans. Indeed, perhaps no community where the link of language transmission has been completely broken, could even survive.

Yes! There are no primitive languages; all continuously spoken languages are modern by definition.

I wonder though how do reconstructed/revived languages such as modern Hebrew fit into this picture.

Language isolate doesn’t mean that they all belong to the same family and are the same age.

Ah, so! thankyou. It's all fascinating :-)

Oh, I see! So upstream quote meant they understood the first word, and transliterated the rest without understanding. Got it. Excellent, thank you.

That makes more sense than them not being able to parse out the sounds of subsequent letters after working out the first word.

There's been so much work done on reconstructing what the proto-Indo-European roots of modern words might have been. I'd imagine they've had less luck with Basque since it doesn't have the wealth of contemporary languages to compare it to.

I spent some time looking into this from a post about this artifact yesterday. I had the same response to think abut runes when I looked at it as well. For anyone curious, the characters are evidently from one of several Paleohispanic scripts. The origins of those scripts might be Phoenician and/or Greek, some are read from left to right and some from right to left.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleohispanic_scripts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleohispanic_languages