Basque Language. Essay

857 words - 4 pages

Basque is the ancestral language of the Basque people of Basque Country. The Basque Language is one of the languages that is more famously known for being a non Indo-European Language in Europe. Basque has, “no known linguistic relatives and is spoken by about 720,000 people mainly in the north of Spain and the south west of France”[5]. Also known has Basque Country. Because Basque has no known linguistic relatives it is considered a language isolate. Today there are numerous dialects of Basque depending of the geographical region where its being spoken. “A standardized form of the Basque language, called Euskara Batua, was developed by the Basque Language Academy in the late 1960s”[1]. Basque has many distinctive linguistic features that makes Basque different from many Indo-European languages like German and French.
A very interning and distinctive morphological feature of Basque would be the reduplication of words. “Reduplication in linguistics is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change”[8]. We can see the use of reduplication in the word, “Brista-brista” [8]. Which means to be walking very fast. We can also see the use of reduplication in the word, “dar-dar”, which is to tremble[8]. Reduplication in Basque can be full or partial reduplication. “Full reduplication involves a reduplication of the entire word while partial reduplication involves a reduplication of only part of the word”[8] Reduplication is used in many words in Basque reduplication can be but more than anything it is used in words that represent sounds and motion. In Basque this is a particularly and unique feature because it is not seen in Indo-European languages like German and French.
Another distinctive feature that distinguishes Basque from German and French would be lexical terms. Because German has borrowed many lexical terms from French they have many similarities between words. For example in Basque to say ballon you say“puxika” while in German and in French its called “ballon” like in English. Another example would be with the word majesty which in Basque its “dotorezia” while in German its “majestät” and in French “majesté. German and French have very clear similarities in their lexicon while Basque does not.
Basque is distinct from German and French because, “Basque it has a SOV word order( subject+object+verb)”[6] and not a SVO order (subject+ verb+ Object) like in German and French. In most Indo-European languages the word order is SVO the normal...

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