2023-09-27 04:37:54
After the euphoria and propaganda of the first multilingual debate in the history of Congress, the harsh reality ends up imposing itself on many political groups that do not want their speeches to dissolve into indifference. In order for their interventions to reach the maximum number of possible voters, both the PNV and Bildu have stated that in the future they will not only use Basque, but rather a bilingual formula depending on the day and the circumstances in order to place their messages in the national media. And, as is obvious, Basque has never been the best speaker either inside or outside the Basque Country…
The unknown origin of the Basque language
The origins of the Basque language are shrouded in large amounts of myths, controversy and legends that no philologist can ever resolve. Basque is spoken in the regions of Navarra and the Basque Country, in northern Spain, and southwestern France, so more than 700,000 people, 35% of the region’s population currently knows it. Behind us is a 20th century that saw his resurrection and also his tomb. «Basque culture, what is called ‘culture’, has been done in Spanish or French. In Spanish he wrote his letters and the exercises of Íñigo de Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, and in French he thought and wrote. the Abbé de Saint-Cyran, founder of Port Royal, stronghold of Jansenism. (…) In Basque you cannot think universally. And the Basque people, when they rise to universality, do so in Spanish or French,” said Miguel de Unamuno about what he considers the inevitable end of Basque.
Different theories about its origin
The mystery of this language arises from the supposed difficulty of linking it with others beyond the fact that it took numerous loans from Spanish or Latin and of finding its historical roots. The main hypotheses about its origin evoke Etruscan, Berber and other ancient non-Indo-European languages of Europe, but until now it has been impossible to find similarities between Basque and Hungarian, Finnish, the languages of Lapland and the Baltic countries or the Caucasian languages. Only some casual words shared, mostly obsolete words…
Another theory, even outlined by the German scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt and defended by Unamuno, maintains that the antecedent of Basque would be none other than Iberian. However, since in 1922 the historian Manuel Gomez Moreno began to decipher his writing and texts were read in that language, no similarities have been found that would allow this thesis to be demonstrated.
Fernando El Catolico swears the privileges of Vizcaya in Guernica. ABC
Nationalist fantasy has traditionally defended that the lack of ties is explained by the fact that It is a unique language, a legendary island before all Spanish languages, which has been spoken for millennia and survived the ice ages within the Peninsula. This would be attested to by symbols found in prehistoric caves in the Basque Country and other representations of dubious origin. However, this obsession with advancing the origin of the language further and further back has given rise to all types of fraud and manipulation. In the summer of 2006, the discovery of numerous inscriptions in Basque was reported during excavation campaigns at an archaeological site of a Roman city located in the outskirts of Vitoria between the 1st and 6th centuries.
The experts did not take long to conclude that the graffiti in Basque were ‘totally false’. The same doubts that currently hang over the recent discovery by the Aranzadi Science Society in Navarra of the oldest inscriptions in the Basque language. Specifically, a 2,100-year-old piece with a word similar to “zorioneko” (lucky) would advance the origin of the language by several centuries.
Sabino Arana, father of Basque nationalism, always put the concept of the Basque race ahead of that of the language, among other reasons because he never spoke Basque fluently, both because of his condition as a Bilbao bourgeois in a Spanish-speaking environment and because of the situation of the language itself. then, where there was no unified standard. He only wrote 16% of all his work in this language, but he carried out numerous philological studies, collected numerous popular words, created numerous neologisms in that language and claimed its political use: «It is not worth considering Basque merely as a beautiful language, worthy of be cultivated in literature: it is the buckler of our race, and also a buttress of the religiosity and morality of our people.
“It is not worth considering the Basque merely as a beautiful language, worthy of being cultivated in literature: it is the broth of our race”
In this sense, the former Carlist defended that only the Basques should speak it: «The Catalans would like not only them, but also all the other Spaniards established in their region to speak Catalan; For us, it would be ruin if the residents of our territory spoke Basque”, since “Basque is not one of many Spanish languages, such as Galician, Catalan, Spanish, etc.: linguistically and internally considered, there are much more difference between Basque and any of the Spanish languages, that between these and the language spoken by the natives of Asiatic India; politically considering it, there is in law between the Basque language and the Spanish as much difference as that which exists today between French and the latter, because Basque is the language of a people that has never been dominated by Spain, of a nation that has never been Spanish, while the Spanish languages belong to regions that, it is true that in an abnormal political situation, have been governed independently of each other, but have never ceased to be Spanish kingdoms or counties.
The characteristic of being nationalist
Given his purity, Arana defended that one had to be not only Basque, but also a nationalist, to speak Basque in its own right: «If a regional Bizkaya and Euskelduna (or with Euskera) were morally possible, but with the Maketa race, its realization would be the most odious thing in the world, the most lowly aberration of a people, the most iniquitous political evolution and the most stupendous falsehood. of history. For us it would be ruinous if the maketos residing in our territory spoke Basque. Because? Because purity of race is like the language, one of the foundations of the Biscayan motto, and while the language, as long as there is a good grammar and a good dictionary, can be restored even if no one speaks it, the race, on the other hand, cannot be resurrected once. once lost.
Basque dialects
The difficult thing then was to speak of a single Basque language given the complexity of dialects that populate the history of this region. According to the philologist Koldo Mitxelena, Basque dialects were produced in the 6th century due to political reasons that fragmented society and made it difficult for neighboring peoples to understand each other. In front of this Basque Tower of Babel, Euskara Batua was created, a unified Basque language whose foundations were laid in the 1968 congress of the Royal Academy of the Basque Language. A meeting held in the Arantzazu sanctuary that has given rise to the variety that has been used in administration, teaching and the media since the 1980s.
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