Is Basque really weird?

[Dewrad]

As someone who's never worked with Western European languages at all,

I am intrigued as to how you have managed this. Please, do explain.

(Pretentious, ni?)

[WeepingElf]

As has been abundantly pointed out in this thread, Basque seems weird only under the narrow perspective of somebody who only knows the major languages of Western Europe, which are similar to each other because they (1) belong to a single family about 5,000 years deep and (2) form a Sprachbund.

The main "exotic" features of Basque - ergativity and agglutination - also occur in many languages of the Caucasus which, like Basque, may be residues of the linguistic landscape of Neolithic Europe before the spread of Indo-European, so these features may have been common in Europe back then.

[Zaarin]

The main "exotic" features of Basque - ergativity and agglutination - also occur in many languages of the Caucasus which, like Basque, may be residues of the linguistic landscape of Neolithic Europe before the spread of Indo-European, so these features may have been common in Europe back then.

Relevant to the Indo-Pacific thread: These features are also common in the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest; Na-Dene-Macro-Siouan-Basque-Caucasian language family confirmed. :p

[WeepingElf]

The main "exotic" features of Basque - ergativity and agglutination - also occur in many languages of the Caucasus which, like Basque, may be residues of the linguistic landscape of Neolithic Europe before the spread of Indo-European, so these features may have been common in Europe back then.

Relevant to the Indo-Pacific thread: These features are also common in the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest; Na-Dene-Macro-Siouan-Basque-Caucasian language family confirmed. :p

I don't claim that Basque and the Caucasian languages were related; that would be the "Vasco-Caucasian" family Octaviano is into and has named his blog for. The possibility exists, though, but is probably unprovable given the enormous time depth required. Rather, I am thinking of an old large language area (Sprachbund) of which these features were characteristic, kind of like how polysynthesis is a typical feature of indigenous languages of North America, which means neither that all those languages are related nor that every single language in that region has it.

But as you say, both ergativity and agglutination aren't all that rare, so this probably doesn't mean much.

[Salmoneus]

Well, thoroughgoing ergativity IS rare. As are the other things I mentioned in my post. Basque is only NOT weird if you adopt the principle that only the weirdest language in the world is weird and everything else is normal. Is it the weirdest language in the world? Obviously not. But is it a massive outlier? Sure.


The idea of a Caucasian-Western-European sprachbund before IE seems incredibly implausible to me. Western Europe and the Caucasus are a very, very long way from one another. There was no cultural continuity between the two areas. There was no recent mass migration from one area to the other or from any third area to both. The most recent conceivable commonality would have been thousand and thousands of years prior, and the Caucasus isn't exactly an area where we'd expect such linguistic conservativism anyay, even if they had at some stage been a link.

No, any non-coincidental evidence linking Basque and Caucasian languages should surely be interpreted as evidence for the recent migration of Basque from somewhere near the Caucasus. That would be much more plausible than such a truly immense sprachbund spreading over mountains and plains and forests and steppes across totally unrelated people practicing unrelated cultures with limited contact.

[gach]

The listener agreement is a neat thing, but I fail to see what's so special especially about the following two points

It has topic-based word order.

It has twelve cases.

By these standards you could also consider the Finnic languages among others as weird. The Top ... Foc V basic word order given at Wikipedia seems downright standard to me. It's what you encounter over and over again when you read grammars of the so called "free word order" languages.

[Salmoneus]

The listener agreement is a neat thing, but I fail to see what's so special especially about the following two points

It has topic-based word order.

It has twelve cases.

By these standards you could also consider the Finnic languages among others as weird. The Top ... Foc V basic word order given at Wikipedia seems downright standard to me. It's what you encounter over and over again when you read grammars of the so called "free word order" languages.

Well, just taking the 12 cases thing... WALS has less than 10% of languages having 10 or more cases, so yeah, in and of itself that's pretty weird. Particularly when you consider that WALS only has 7 languages with 10 or more cases outside of the hotspots (Finno-Ugric and other Siberian languages, the Caucasus, and Australia).

Or ergative marking on verbs. WALS has a bit over 5% of languages have that.

Ergative marking on verbs AND 10 or more cases? Out of around 250 languages, WALS has only 2 that meet both those criteria.

That's just two of the criteria and we're already down to less than 1% of languages.

Similarly, only around 10% have case syncretism only in core cases (Basque is one of only three in the whole of Eurasia, on WALS). It's one of only three in Eurasia, outside the Caucasus, to be equally prefixing and suffixing (though in total around 20% of languages are like that due to it being much more common in the Americas). Again, only around 10% place obliques before objects, and its even rarer in Eurasia.

Etc etc. When you have a language that stacks up otherwise uncorrelated 1-in-10 and 1-in-20 oddities, then yeah, you can call it weird.

[gach]

That sort of argumentation has the weakness that by stacking (i.e. multiplying) more and more frequencies of linguistic features, you can always get the percentage of other languages sharing them to be as small as you wish. You can, for example, come up with a larger and larger list of features shared by 90% of the world languages and eventually you'll find that no other language shares them all. More formally put, for whatever shared frequency f (where 0<f<1), f^N → 0 as the number of compared features N → ∞.

Rather, you should consider the "weirdness" of each of the features separately and then perhaps start counting how many key features have a crosslinguistic frequency below some threshold. A frequency of 10% really is still pretty high. Would you for example keep a habit of serial fare dodging if on average you'd get caught on every tenth go? I'd personally put the weirdness threshold somewhere securely below 1%, otherwise it's hard to find a the feature surprising.

Be also extra careful with features like "equally prefixing and suffixing". What do you actually want to mean by this, the ratio of distinct prefix and suffix morphemes described in the grammar or perhaps the frequencies of prefixes and suffixes actually in a corpus? And what should we mean by "equally"? In any case it's certainly practically impossible for a language to be exactly as prefixing and suffixing so "equally" has to mean some range of values which you then need to go and specify.

Furthermore, you need to decide which features are central enough to be included for considering the weirdness of a language. Every language has its share of very rare features but not all of them are equally interesting. Deciding which features to include, and maybe how to weigh them, wouldn't be a straightforward task at all and an actual exact "language weirdness index" would probably be of little practical use and easy to disagree with.

When it comes to Basque, it has its selection of interesting rare features but also other features that are only rare in its own linguistic setting. Its weirdness, or how surprising its grammar appears to us, is thus more due to it being a relict nestled in the middle of newcomers that are very unlike it.

[WeepingElf]

That sort of argumentation has the weakness that by stacking (i.e. multiplying) more and more frequencies of linguistic features, you can always get the percentage of other languages sharing them to be as small as you wish.

Indeed. All such exercises show is that every language is unique - no two languages are entirely alike. It says nothing about "weirdness" - a concept that isn't well-defined anyway.