8/5/2023 0 Comments Spanglish biscuit bookJoannes Leizarraga, Testamentu berria (1571) To take an example more or less at random, in the first few lines of Joannes Leizarraga’s dedication to the Queen of Navarre, Jeanne of Albret, of his Basque translation of the New Testament, published in 1571, we find the loanwards in (3). At this time and in this period, there is a steady production of books in Basque, mostly of a religious nature, but some with literary aspirations.ġ1The first authors to write in Basque do not show any repugnance towards words of Latin and Romance origin. I must add the adjective « printed » to literature for reasons that we will consider below. During the 16th and 17th centuries all printed literature in Basque was produced in the northeastern part of the Basque-speaking area, in what is now France. Basque literary language before the rise of purismġ0The first book printed in Basque is a book of poems published in 1545 by Bernard Etxepare, a Catholic priest. I will finish with some thoughts on how that conflict has been solved or whether, in fact, it is a solvable conflict. In particular, as we will see, at a certain time in history, the Basque language became so imbued with an identitary function that the efforts to make it pure and distinct from its neighbors seriously endangered not only its poetic elaboration but also its basic function as a tool for communication. Because of these other functions that are assigned to language, language mixing is often avoided.ĩIn this paper I want to focus on the attitudes towards language mixing that we find in the development of the Basque literary language and the conflicts that arise between the identity-symbolic function that is assigned to this language and the communicative and poetic or artistic goals of writers. Under normal circumstances, language performs several other functions, some of which may, in fact, interfere with straightforward communication. Under these circumstances simplification of structure and language mixing was very useful.ĨBut these are special circumstances. This code had to fulfill only one goal : to make straightforward communication possible between people who did not share knowledge of another language. Perhaps it comes from a Low German kein bit niet ‘not a bit’ (for comparison, Bakker 1987 : 11 proposes Dutch kan-me-niet ‘I cannot’ as its source).ħThis document offers us evidence that the Basque fishermen of the 17th century had developed a pidgin or simplified trade language to communicate with other people they had to interact with in their travels in the North Atlantic. The word cavinit glossed as ‘nothing’ is somewhat mysterious. The verbs presenta, trucka, travala are of Romance origin, although they can also be used in Basque, but lack all inflection that may allow their ascription to a specific language. The words attora ‘shirt’, biskusa eta sagarduna ‘biscuit and cider’, gissuna ‘man’ and ser ‘what’ are Basque. The pronouns for mi and for ju are, of course, English. I add English translations instead of the Icelandic of the original :įor mi presenta for ju biskusa eta sagarduna ‘I will give you cake and cider’Ĭavinit trucka for mi ‘I don’t buy anything’ĦThese sentences are not in Basque, although apparently the Icelandic author of the manuscript thought so. Here are some examples of the sentences in the Basque-Icelandic glossaries. These documents were first edited and studied by the Dutch linguist Nicholas Deen in 1937 and have been the object of several other studies since then (Hualde 1984, Bakker 1987, Oregi 1987, Bilbao 1991, Miglio 2008). One of the glossaries, however, also contains several sentences, also translated into Icelandic. These glossaries contain lists of mostly words in Basque (but sometimes in other languages) with their translations in Icelandic. Nevertheless, even if Jón the Learned and Martin could communicate in Latin, that would not have been an option for most Basque sailors and Icelandic farmers.ĥIt so happens that we have some direct information on the language used in communication by the Basques in Iceland in the form of two glossaries written in Iceland at the time. In a couple of places in the poem he portrays the Basque Martin speaking in Latin (I add below a Spanish translation provided in Huxley 1987) : 1įrom Fjölmódur by Jón Guðmundsson the LearnedģĤIn the poem, Jón the Learned also tells us that Martin was singing psalms in Latin as the Icelanders, intent on killing him, approached. Part of the answer is given by Jón Guðmundsson. A critical edition of Jón Guðmundsson lærdi’s (.)ĢLeaving other aspects of this sad but interesting story aside, one question that arises is how the Basque whalers and the Icelanders communicated. 1 -The events are also recounted in Hermmansson (1924).
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