Basque Legends; With an Essay on the Basque Language

by Wentworth Webster

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.