The Basque Country, this little piece of earth with the spectacular mountain gorges of the Pyrenees up to the always storm-tossed Bay of Biscay, has made history again and again. Even the Romans bit their teeth at what they called the vaskons. And Roland, according to legend, nephew of Charlemagne, had fought bravely in 778 in the fight against the Moors ruling over large parts of Spain, but against the Basques – whose name is derived from the Roman name of the Old Basques as vascones – he despaired. He died while trying to cross the Pyrenees at Roncesvalles.
The Basques also delivered their highest personal struggle to the fascist leader Franco, who hated them for it. The famous painting of the same name by Pablo Picasso reminds of the war and destruction in the Spanish Civil War in Guernica – also a Basque city. The struggle of the ETA, which was founded in fascist Spain (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna = Freedom for the Basque Country) ultimately led to hopeless individual terrorist actions and in 2018 to their dissolution. The struggle for autonomy and the division of the Basque Country into a Spanish and a French half determine its history, whereby it was often about the uniqueness of the national language. Even in the Franco era, a Basque contemporary witness reports in a newspaper article from her youth, she was with the words “Speak Christian!” and a blow with a ruler on the finger if she spoke Basque.
The Basque genome differs from that of its neighbors
Fortunately, today there is a Basque university that teaches in Basque, which is also important because this language is unique. EuskaraAs it is called, it is the oldest and only surviving isolated language in all of Europe. It is neither of Indo-European origin such as Latin, German or Spanish, nor Uralic such as Finnish or Hungarian, nor Semitic such as Arabic or Hebrew. Basque also differs completely from the other European languages with its complicated verbal system including a polypersonal inflection, ten unique diphthongs in the alphabet and a vigesimal system, a system of twenty for the numbers, which has apparently seeped into French with, for example, “quatre-vingt-dix” for 90.
Basque’s extensive original vocabulary has stood the test of time. Even if the first printed Basque text did not appear until 1545, Basque proper names and names of gods in inscriptions and on tombstones from Roman times suggest that Old Basque is much older and already existed than the Indo-European languages dominated in Europe about 3000 years ago began. The Munich linguist Theo Vennemann examined the names of bodies of water in Europe and found that they often matched Basque roots from the Saale to the Arno. The names also remained when an Indo-European invasion from Asia swept away the “vasconic” indigenous population that had existed until then and – according to Vennemann’s thesis – had ruled the continent until then.
So do today’s 750,000 native Basque speakers represent the last remnant of the first Europeans? This is supported by the fact that the genome of the Basques differs significantly from that of their neighbors, but that “Basque” sequences are definitely detectable in the genome of the other Europeans. The Basque population also has a very high proportion of the archaic blood group 0 and the rhesus factor negative. This would also confirm a land seizure by Indo-European peoples. 50,000-year-old Neanderthal bones in a Basque rock cave in Axlor near Dima in the province of Bizkaia, not far from Bilbao, and other cave finds in the Basque Country from this period point another way.
Does the Basque have African roots?
It is now known that the Neanderthals could also speak and thus could have formed different languages. So it is entirely possible that Basque has African roots, as some researchers claim with regard to certain relationships to Berber and Songhai languages. Russian scientists also spoke of strange connections to the likewise non-Indo-European languages of the Caucasus. According to Wilhelm von Humboldt, co-founder of comparative linguistics, an Iberian original language that has never been deciphered is said to have influenced Basque. Such theses are, however, “rich in unprovable imagination”, as Michael Meier-Brügger classifies them in his standard work on Indo-European linguistics.
A bit of imagination, however, was the opinion of Bertolt Brecht when he composed his “Bilbao Song” in 1929 and conjured up a full world of the fun-loving Basques: “Bill’s ballroom in Bilbao was the most beautiful on the whole continent. There was a crash for a dollar there and bliss, and what the world calls its own. ” Any archeology of languages and their origin, however, reaches its limits anyway if it deals with the prehistoric times of man. But isn’t it a nice idea that the first Europeans were Basques who, at least in their small remaining area, such as the Asterix village, have defied the Romans to this day against the Indo-European invasion? Or to put it in the finest Basque: Basque is as old as the mountains – “Euskara mendia bezain zaharra da“.