Saturday, March 28, 2020

Beste hizkuntza bat (A different language)

I sometimes run Google Translate to see what various words and phrases are in Basque. It may be the closest I ever come to learning the language, unless I devote a lot of time. Really I'm just taking time to appreciate the difference. Different grammar, different sounds, mostly different words. Although there are cognates, especially with Romance languages. For instance "green" translates to "berdea", which sounds similar to Spanish "verde", which is itself related to French "vert."

It's sometimes theorized as the language―or at least a language―of the Cro-Magnons. This would be basically impossible to prove or disprove, since that period would have left no writing. But it does seem to be very old, predating the spread of Indo-European languages into Western Europe. Possibly even going back to the last ice age.

2 comments:

susan said...

I know that Franco attempted to wipe out the Barque language and that there has been a separatist Basque movement in Spain. What I didn't know is just how old the language is thought to be. It's fascinating to consider that the Pyranees where the language is mostly spoken is also the where the most important Palaeolithic sites happen to be and where most of the cave art in Europe has been found.

Google Translate is pretty good, particularly when looking to identify languages and for individual words and phrases. What it doesn't seem to be so good at is translating longer documents. A while back I was sent a children's story (for possible illustration) that was in German and since GT made a total mess I looked for another and found DeepL Translator. It only works for 10-12 languages but does a satisfactory job with them.

Keep up the excellent investigations.

Ben said...

It's true to form for someone like Franco to have tried to stamp out Basque language and culture. There's this racist and xenophobic instinct to purify one's own culture, weed out those who are allegedly sullying it. But it's almost always too late, and the sullying is really enriching. What would Germany have been without Jews, or America without blacks?

Google is definitely just a tool for testing out what a language looks and sounds like. For a real understanding of the language you need books, you need experts, etc.

Those cave paintings in themselves have caused a lot of debate and speculation about what they mean, how they were intended. Wild to think of vocal communication being invented at the same time, and lasting all these millennia.