The Basque Language is one which is particularly attractive to
specialists. Its place in the general series of idioms has at last
been well defined--it is an agglutinative and incorporating language,
with some tendency to polysynthetism. It consequently finds a place in
the second great morphological linguistic group, between the Finnic
and the North American family of languages. I shall now attempt a
very short sketch of its general features; but I must ask permission,
first, briefly to state some of the most essential principles of the
science of language.
It is acknowledged that the science of language--that is to say,
the science of the characteristic phenomenon of the human species,
is a purely natural science. It has nothing in common with philology,
which is mainly a historical study. Whether it be called linguistique,
glottology, phonology, or even, by a too common abuse, comparative
philology, the science of language follows the same method as the other
natural sciences, and advances by observation and experience. The
direct subject-matter of this science is those vocal organisms
which express, by sensible sounds, thought and its divers modes of
existence. These organisms are the spontaneous and unconscious product
of organs which, as natural phenomena, fall under the general law of
perpetual variation, acted on by their surroundings, climate, &c.; but
as incapable of being modified by the external or internal exercise of
human volition as any other of the organized beings which surround us.
But as the object of language is to express thought in all its
niceties, both the fact that gives rise to it, and the modifications
of it caused by time and space, so it is seen that different idioms
have adopted different methods of expressing, in the best and readiest
manner, the idea, the conception or intuition, with its variable
forms, in order to translate with precision its signification, and
its relations. From this point of view language has been divided into
three great groups: the first, that of isolating languages, wherein
the monosyllabic roots all retain their meaning, and wherein the
relations are only expressed conventionally, i.e., were not originally
expressed at all; the second, that of agglutinative languages,
in which the relations are expressed by roots once significative,
but now reduced to a secondary and subordinate office; lastly,
the third, that of inflectional languages, in which the change of
relations is expressed by a modification in the root itself, and
even in the radical vowel. It is clear that the idioms of the second
group were once isolating, and that inflectional idioms have passed
through both the former states. We conclude from this that language
is essentially progressive and variable in the sense of a constant
improvement in the expression of relations. And yet, in the study of
existing languages we find, on the contrary, that they are often in
this respect inferior to their ancestors.
This contradiction, however, is only an apparent one. Thus, as
Schleicher has demonstrated, languages are born, grow up, become
stationary, decline and die; in a word, live after the same fashion
as do organized beings. There are in every language two principal
periods--that of formal development, during which the idiom passes
from the first (monosyllabic) stage to the second (agglutinative)
by reducing certain roots to a secondary and dependent office, then
from the second to the third (inflectional) by a new effort to express
simultaneously signification and relation; and that of formal decay,
during which the original meaning of the relative affixes is more and
more forgotten, they get worn out, change by degrees, and often end
by perishing altogether. Formal decay begins when a language becomes
historical, and it often gives rise to remarkable cases of regressive
metamorphosis. One remark which we must make on this subject is that
the known agglutinative languages have not spontaneously arrived at
historical life--that is to say, have not commenced their decay,
except under the influence of a foreign idiom either isolating or
inflectional. Nevertheless, during their decay, languages can adopt
fresh forms, but these are merely composed of words already in use; man
in the historical period has no longer bare roots at his service. [177]
These linguistic elements are, moreover, subject to the terrible law
of the struggle for existence, and of vital competition. Many of them
have perished and have left no trace; others are preserved to us merely
in some scanty records. The Basque, pressed hard by Latin and its
derived languages, has lost ground, especially in Spain. Beyond its
actual limits, there are in Navarre many villages, the names of which
are Basque, but in which Spanish only is spoken; and all along the
frontiers of the actual region of the Basque in the Spanish provinces
this idiom is spoken only by a minority of the inhabitants. It is,
moreover, undergoing modification everywhere; the children often
replace the old expressive native terms by a vocabulary drawn from
the Romance tongues. In those places which are most in contact with
strangers, and in which the movement of modern life is most keenly
felt--at St. Sebastian and at St. Jean de Luz, for instance--the
language has become exceedingly debased and incorrect. Everything
presages the speedy extinction of the Escuara or Euscara, which is the
name given to the Basque by those who speak it. The word, apparently,
means merely "manner of speaking." All people have, in a greater
or less degree, the pretension which caused the Greeks to treat all
foreigners as barbarians--that is, as not properly-speaking men.
Prince L. L. Bonaparte reckons the actual number of the Basques,
not including emigrants established in Mexico, at Monte Video, and at
Buenos Ayres, at 800,000, of whom 660,000 are in Spain, and 140,000
in France.
The phonetic laws of the Escuara are simple; the sounds most
frequently employed are the sibilants, nasals, and hard gutturals;
the soft consonants are often suppressed between two vowels. The
mixed sounds, between palatals and gutturals, characteristic of the
second large group of languages, are also frequently met with. One of
the predominant features is the complete absence of reduplication of
consonants, the aversion to groups of consonants, and the care taken
to complete the sound of final mute consonants by an epenthetic
vowel. It is probable that originally the words were composed of
a series of syllables formed regularly of a single consonant and a
vowel. We must mention, besides, the double form of the nominatives,
one of which is used only as the subject of an active verb; the other
serves equally for the subject of the intransitive, and the object of
the active verb. This is absolutely the same distinction remarked by
M. Fried. Müller in the Australian languages between the subjective
and the predicative nominative.
Formal derivation is accomplished by means of suffixing the elements
of relations; pronominal signs are nevertheless not only suffixed,
but also prefixed to verbs. Except in this respect, nouns and verbs
are not treated in two distinct manners; they are both equally
susceptible of receiving suffixes which mark the relations of time
and space, and many of which have preserved in their integrity both
their proper signification and their primitive sonorous form. The
article is the remote demonstrative pronoun. The pronouns "we" and
"ye" are not the plurals of "I" and "thou," but have the appearance
of special individualities. There are no possessive derivative terms;
"my house," for example, is expressed by "the house of me," and has
no analogy with "I eat," or any other verbal expression. There are
no genders, although some suffixes are specially replaced by others
in the names of animate beings; and in the verb there are special
forms to indicate if a man or woman is being spoken to. There is no
dual. The sign of the plural is interposed between the article and
the suffixes. In the singular alone can there be an indefinite or
indeterminate declension without the article.
The conjugation is exceedingly complicated. The Basque verb includes
in a single verbal expression the relations of space; of one person to
another--(1) subjective (the idea of neutrality, of action limited to
its author), (2) objective (the idea of action on a direct object),
and (3) attributive (the idea of an action done to bear on an object
viewed indirectly, the idea of indirect action); the relations of time;
the relations of state, corresponding to as many distinct moods; the
variations of action, expressed by different voices; the distinctions
of subject or object, marked by numerous personal forms; the conditions
of time and state which are expressed by conjunctions in modern
languages--to each of these relations is appropriated an affix, often
considerably abbreviated and condensed, but almost always recognisable.
The primitive Basque verb--that is to say, in its full development--did
not differ from that of other languages of the globe. It comprised
only two moods, the indicative, and the conjunctive, which was derived
from the indicative by a suffix; and three tenses, the present, the
imperfect, and a kind of aorist indicating eventual possibility. There
was only one secondary voice, the causative, formed by a special
affix. To these forms it joined the signs of the direct and indirect
object, which is the essential characteristic of incorporating idioms.
During its historic life, during its period of formal decay, the
verb has experienced in Basque modifications which are not found
to a similar extent elsewhere. The primitive conjugation, or, so to
say, the simple and direct one of verbal nouns, has little by little
fallen into disuse, and has been replaced by a singular combination
of verbal nouns, of adjectives, and of some auxiliary verbs. Thus
it is that the Escuara, in all its dialects, has developed eleven
moods and ninety-one tenses (each of which has three persons in
each number), variable according to the sex or rank of the person
addressed; it receives besides a certain number of terminations,
which perform the office of our conjunctions. Moreover, from the
totality of these auxiliaries two parallel series have been formed,
which, joined alternatively to nouns of action, produce the active
and middle voices, or rather the transitive and intransitive. The
auxiliaries of the periphrastic conjugation are almost the only verbs
that have been preserved belonging to the simple primitive system.
With regard to syntax, the Basque resembles all agglutinative
languages. The sentence is always simple. The phrases are generally
short; relative pronouns are unknown. The complexity of the verb, which
unites many ideas in a single word, contributes to this simplicity
of the sentence, in which the subject and the attribute, with their
respective complements, tend to form but one expression. This object
is attained by the invariability of the adjectives, and especially
by composition.
The adjective is placed after the noun it qualifies, whilst the
genitive, on the contrary, precedes the governing noun.
Composition is of such common use in Basque, that it has caused
several juxta-posed words to be contracted and reduced, so as to
be partially confounded one with the other. This phenomenon is
familiar to languages of the New World; it is this which properly
constitutes polysynthetism, and which we must carefully distinguish
from incorporation. This last word should be reserved to designate
more particularly the phenomena of objective or attributive conjugation
common to idioms of the second form.
The Basque vocabulary appears to be very poor. Although it is still
imperfectly known (for the old books, and the names of places,
as well as certain little studied dialectic variations, must have
retained some words generally forgotten), we are yet able to assert
that pure Basque terms do not express abstract ideas. Except in
words borrowed from the Gascon, French, Spanish, and Latin, we find
no trace of any advanced civilization, and we can discover but very
few expressions which imply collectivity or generalization--e.g.,
there is no word which has the wide signification of our word "tree,"
of our "animal." "God" is simply, by anthropomorphism, "the Master on
High." One and the same word translates our ideas of "will, desire,
fancy, thought." Borrowed words are more numerous, from the fact that
the influence of Aryan dialects has been felt through many ages;
it is probably owing to their contact with the Indo-European races
that the Basques, or those who used to speak the Basque, have any
historical existence.
Thus, in order to study this singular idiom, it is necessary to
understand thoroughly the history of the intervention of Latin in
the Pyrenean region. No assistance is to be obtained from written
documents, for there is not (and there cannot have been) any primitive
Basque literature. The oldest book was published in 1545. [178] The
second is the Protestant version of the New Testament, printed at La
Rochelle by order of Jeanne d'Albret, in 1571. [179]
Another difficulty arises from the extreme variability of the
language. There are, perhaps, not two villages where it is spoken
absolutely in the same manner. This is natural enough among an
unlettered people, and one which can only rise to the level of the
surrounding civilization by forgetting its ancient language. These
different varieties are easily grouped into secondary dialects. Prince
L. L. Bonaparte recognises twenty-five of them, but they are reduced
without difficulty to eight great dialects. A closer inspection
further reduces these eight divisions to three; that is to say,
the differences between the eight principal dialects are unequal,
and admit of partial resemblances.
The eight dialects are: (1) The Labourdine, (2) The Souletine,
(3) The Eastern Lower-Navarrese, (4) The Western Lower-Navarrese,
(5) The Northern Upper-Navarrese, (6) The Southern Upper-Navarrese,
(7) The Guipuzcoan, (8) The Biscayan. The Souletine and the two
Lower-Navarrese dialects form the first group, which may be called the
Oriental division. The Biscayan alone forms the Western, and the four
others form the Central group. These names are taken from territorial
divisions. La Soule was formerly a province feudatory to Navarre, and
now embraces, within the French department of the Basses-Pyrénées,
the cantons of Mauléon and Tardets, as well as some parishes of the
canton of St. Palais, in the arrondissement of Mauléon. The Labourd,
a viscounty, vassal of the Duchy of Aquitaine, corresponded to
the cantons of Bayonne (excepting the city itself and three other
parishes), of St. Jean de Luz, of Ustaritz, of Espelette, and part
of Hasparren, in the arrondissement of Bayonne. The remaining part of
the two French arrondissements which we have just named composes Lower
Navarre, which is again subdivided into the districts of Cize, Mixe,
Arberoue, Ostabaret, and the valleys of Osses and Baigorry. This was
originally the sixth merindad of Navarre, a kingdom which extended
into Spain as far as the Ebro, from Garde and Cortés on the one side
to Vera and Viana on the other. Basque is still spoken along the
French frontier and in several valleys forming the upper part of the
territory. Guipuzcoa contains the cantons (partidos) of St. Sebastian,
Tolosa, Azpeitia, and Vergara. Biscay comprises all the territory
between Ondarroa and the river of Sommorostro, between La Carranza
and the Peña de Gorbea.
The dialects do not correspond exactly to the territorial subdivisions
whose names they bear. Thus the Western Lower-Navarrese is spoken in a
part of the ancient Labourd; the Biscayan in Guipuzcoa. Lastly, on the
Spanish maps, there is another Basque province, Alava; but Basque is
scarcely spoken there, excepting in a narrow strip along the northern
frontier. The dialect of these Alavese districts is included in the
Biscayan. To resume, the Biscayan dialect is now spoken in Alava,
Biscay, and the western third part of Guipuzcoa, in Vergara, and in
Las Salinas; the Guipuzcoan in almost all the rest of Guipuzcoa;
the Northern Upper-Navarrese in some villages of Guipuzcoa on the
French frontier, in Fontarabie, Irun, and in the northern part of
Navarre; the Southern Upper-Navarrese in the rest of Basque Navarre;
the Labourdine in the south-western part of the arrondissement of
Bayonne; the Western Lower-Navarrese in the north-eastern part of the
same arrondissement; the Souletine is spoken in the two cantons of
Mauléon and Tardets, and at Esquiule in the arrondissement of Oloron;
the Eastern Lower-Navarrese extends into the arrondissement of Bayonne
as far as St. Pierre d'Irube, by Meharrin, Ayherre, Briscous, Urcuit.
Of these arrondissements, of these provinces, none is entirely Basque
in a linguistic point of view, except Guipuzcoa. Navarre is only half
so, Alava only a tenth part. A little less than a fourth part has
to be subtracted from Biscay, and certain Gascon villages from the
arrondissements of Mauléon and Bayonne in France. Neither Bayonne,
nor Pampeluna, nor Bilbao are Basque. [180] And, moreover, skirting
the districts where the Basque is the native idiom of the majority of
the inhabitants, on many points there is an intermediate zone in which
Basque is known only by a minority of the population; nevertheless,
this zone must be included in the geographical area of the idiom,
since the persons who speak Basque in it know it as their native
language, and have never learnt it. This zone is most extensive in
Navarre, but exists also in Alava and in Biscay. In France there is
no analogous mixed zone; and, as M. P. Broca remarks ("Sur l'Origine
et la Repartition de la Langue Basque," Paris, 1875, p. 39), "the
demarcation is brusque, and may be indicated by a single line." The
Basques, moreover, in this respect, present some curious points for
study. "In the valley of Roncal the men speak Spanish together; with
the women they speak Basque, as do the women to each other. A similar
state of things is to be observed at Ochagavia in Salazar. But this
custom is not observed in the Roncalese villages of Uztarroz and
Isaba, where the men among themselves speak indifferently Basque or
Spanish." (Prince L. L. Bonaparte, "Etudes sur les Dialects d'Aezcoa,"
&c., p. 3).
The preceding description justifies the opinion advanced at the
beginning of this notice. The Basque is an agglutinative idiom,
and must be placed, in a morphological point of view, between the
Finnic family, which is simply incorporating, and the North American
incorporating and polysynthetic families. But we must not conclude
thence that the Escuara is a near relation either of the Finnic or
of the Magyar, of the Algonquin or of the Irokese. The relationship
of two or more languages cannot, in fact, be concluded merely from
a resemblance of their external physiognomy. To prove a community
of origin, it is indispensable that (if compared at the same
stage of development) their principal grammatical elements should
not only be analogous in their functions, but should also have a
certain phonetic resemblance, in order to render the hypothesis of
their original identity admissible. It is better to abstain from
asserting that such languages are derived from the same source, if
the significant roots--which, after all, constitute the proper basis,
the true originality of a language--should be found to be totally
different. At present, no language has been discovered which presents
any root-likeness to the Basque, analogous to that which exists
between the Sanscrit, Greek, and Gothic, or between Arabic and Hebrew.
Nevertheless, there are in the world minds so devoted to the worship of
their own fixed ideas, so smitten with their own metaphysical dreams,
so full of faith in the necessity of the unity of language, that
they have acquired the habit of torturing the radical elements of a
language, and of making them flexible and variable to an inconceivable
degree. They pass their lives in seeking etymologies, such as those
which Schleicher calls "Etymologizerungen ins blanc hinein," and in
discovering phonetic miracles--worthy children of those students of
the last centuries who, in the general ignorance of the science of
language, traced up all languages to Hebrew. The adventurous spirits
to whom I allude have invented a theory of languages in which the
vocabulary is incessantly renewed, and have formed the great "Turanian"
family, in which everything which is neither Aryan, nor Semitic,
nor Chinese, must be perforce included. In this olla podrida, where
the Japanese elbows the Esquimaux, and the Australian shakes hands
with the Turkish, where the Tamul fraternizes with the Hungarian,
a place is carefully reserved for the Basque. Many amateurs, more
daring still, have wedded the Escuara, or at least those who speak it,
to the soi-disant Khamitic tribes of Egypt; others have united them
to the ancient Phoenicians; others have seen in them the descendants
of the Alans; others again, thanks to the Atlantides, make them a
colony of Americans. It is not long since it was seriously affirmed,
and in perfect good faith, that the Basques and the Kelts, the Welsh
or Bretons, understood each other, and could converse at length,
each using his native tongue. I refer these last to the poet Rulhière:
"La contrariété tient souvent au langage:
On peut s'entendre moins parlant un même son,
Que si l'un parlait Basque et l'autre Bas-Breton."
The more serious of these foes of negative conclusions, of these
refiners of quintessences, assert that the ancestors of the Basques
are incontestably the Iberians. In the first place I will remark that,
supposing this proved, the Basques, or, if you will, the Iberians,
would not be the less isolated; for how could the Iberian, any more
than the Basque, be allied to the Keltic or to the Carthaginian? But
this Iberian theory is not yet at all proved, and it will be easy
to show it to be so in a few words. It reposes first of all on the
following à priori--the Iberians have occupied all Spain and the south
of Gaul, but the Escuara lives still at the foot of the Pyrénées;
therefore the Escuara is a remnant of the language of the Iberians. The
error of the syllogism is patent; the conclusion does not follow,
and is wrongly deduced from the premises. As to the direct proofs,
they are reduced to essays of interpretation, either of inscriptions
called Iberian or Keltiberian, or of numismatic legends, or of proper,
and especially of topographical names. [181] The inscriptions and
legends are written in characters evidently of Phoenician origin,
but their interpretation is anything but certain. All the readings,
all the translations into Basque, proposed by MM. Boudard, Phillips,
and others, are disputed by the linguists who are now studying the
Basque. The names collected from ancient authors form a more solid
basis; but the explanations proposed by W. von Humboldt, and after
him by many etymologists without method, [182] are equally for the
most part inadmissible. The Iberian theory is not proved, though it
is perfectly possible.
The Basques do not present, in an anthropological point of view, as far
as we know at present, any original and well-defined characteristic
other than their language. [183] Nothing in their manners or customs
is peculiar to them. It is in vain that some writers have tried to
discover the strange custom of the "couvade" among them, a custom still
observed, it is said, by the natives of South America and in the plains
of Tartary. It consists in the husband, when his wife is confined,
going to bed with the new-born infant, and there he "couve," "broods
over it," so to say. No modern or contemporaneous writer has found
this custom among the Basques; and as to historical testimony, it is
reduced to a passage of Strabo--which nothing proves to be applicable
to the ancestors of the present Basques--and to certain allusions in
writers of the last two centuries. These allusions always refer to
the Béarnais, the dialect whence the word "couvade" is borrowed.
Prince L. L. Bonaparte has discovered that in the Basque dialect of
Roncal the moon is called "Goicoa;" Jaungoicoa is the word for "God"
in Basque, and would mean "the Lord Moon," or rather "our Lord the
Moon." He cites, with reference to this, "the worship of the moon by
the ancient Basques." The only evidence in favour of this worship is
a passage of Strabo (Lib. iii., iv. 16), where it is said that the
Keltiberians, and their neighbours to the north, honour a certain
anonymous God by dances before their doors at night during the full
moon. But it must be proved that the Keltiberians and their neighbours
to the north were Basques.
Another passage of Strabo has furnished arguments to the "Iberists." He
says (Lib. iii., iv. 18) that among the Cantabrians the daughters
inherited, to the detriment of their brothers. M. Eugène Cordier
has endeavoured, after Laferrière ("Histoire du Droit Français"),
to establish that this arrangement is the origin of the right
of primogeniture without distinction of sex, and which is found
more or less in all the "coutumes" of the Western Pyrénées. He has
developed this theory in an interesting essay, "Sur l'Organisation
de la Famille chez les Basques" (Paris, 1869). But an able lawyer of
Bayonne, M. Jules Balasque, has shown in Vol. II. of his remarkable
"Etudes Historiques sur la Ville de Bayonne" (Bayonne, 1862-75) that
there is nothing peculiar to the Basques in this fact; and we can
only recognise in it, as in the opposite custom of "juveignerie" in
certain northern "coutumes," an application of a principle essentially
Keltic or Gallic for the preservation of the patrimony.
In conclusion, I beg my readers to excuse the brevity of the preceding
notes; but, pressed for time, and overwhelmed with a multitude of
occupations, it has not been possible for me to do more. If I am
still subject to the reproach which Boileau addresses to those who,
in striving to be concise, become obscure, I have at least endeavoured
to conform to the precept of the Tamul poet, Tiruvalluva--"To call
him a man who lavishes useless words, is to call a man empty straw"
(I. Book, xx. chap., 6th stanza).
Bayonne, August 28, 1876.