Is Basque really weird?

[Ryusenshi]

I often hear about Basque being a "weird language". But is it really weird? I don't know much about Basque, but some of you certainly do.

I mean, the weirdest fact about Basque is that it exists at all: a language isolate in a place where you really wouldn't expect one. But apart from that, what's weird about it? Its phonology seems straightforward. It's very consistently Erg-Abs which is unusual, but not particularly "weird". It's not completely insular, as it has a large number of Romance loans (as could be expected). I'm sure it has a number of grammatical idiosyncrasies, but all languages do.

So, is there anything really weird about Basque other that its mere existence?

[Vijay]

I don't think there's anything unusually weird about it. Even its existence doesn't strike me as weird; it makes sense that there is a language still spoken somewhere in Europe whose history presumably predates Indo-European settlement. I think people just think of it as weird because if they know about its existence at all, they're most likely native speakers of a European language, and of course it's very different from most European languages considering that the overwhelming majority of them are Indo-European.

[Salmoneus]

I don't know much about Basque. But going by memory and looking at Wikipedia....



It's an ergative-absolutive language. It has a tiny number of verbs - wikipedia says around 15, but iirc only about three are commonly used? And most of those are irregular, which complicates the effects of a big array of both prefixes and suffixes (by wikipedia: "nau", "has me" (present), but "banindu" (hypothetical)). In addition to the ordinary marking for tense, argument agreement is also fused with tense (d-, third person present, but l-, third person hypothetical). Thus "balitu" (would have them), but "zuen" (had them). Plurality marking on verbs is irregular, varying with the verb, often including stem alternations and at least five different possible affixes. ["nau", "has me", but "zaituzte", "has you (pl)", seemingly?]

It has polypersonal agreement. So, "dut" (I have it), but "nindunan" ("you (female) had me"). Oh yeah, and in some parts of the agreement system it distinguished male and female second persons, even though it doesn't distinguish gender in the third person. Oh, and that polypersonal agreement moves around between suffixes and prefixes - the subject is marked with a suffix, unless the verb is non-present and the direct object is in the third person, in which case a new set of prefixes is used instead - so, "nindunan" (you (female) had me), but "huen" (you had it).

And it's more polypersonal than that because it also has its verbs agree with indirect objects too, even for intransitives and things that might seem like non-ditransitives. ["didazu", you have it to me, but "dizkit", it has them to me].

Oh, and it's more polypersonal than that because sometimes the verbs agree with the listener. With a politeness contrast. And a gender contrast. "nintzateke" - "I would be (O august listener)", but "nindukek" - "I would be (O friendly male listener)". "dute" - "they have it, O august one", but "gintiztenan" - "they had us, girl".

It has topic-based word order.

It has twelve cases.



So... yes, it's weird. It may not be "spoken by space aliens" weird, and sure, I'm sure everything it does you can find in some other language from the depths of the Amazon. But that doesn't mean it's not weird to do all these weird things in one language. Let alone to do it while surrounded by languages that form a completely different sprachbund.

[And frankly it's not like having three coronal affricates is exactly 'normal', now is it?]

[Frislander]

It has a tiny number of verbs - wikipedia says around 15, but iirc only about three are commonly used?

Half true: those are the number of inflecting verbs: the others all are restricted to participle forms which have to appear in an auxilliary construction with one of the inflecting verbs.

Oh, and it's more polypersonal than that because sometimes the verbs agree with the listener. With a politeness contrast. And a gender contrast. "nintzateke" - "I would be (O august listener)", but "nindukek" - "I would be (O friendly male listener)". "dute" - "they have it, O august one", but "gintiztenan" - "they had us, girl".

The only other language I've seen that has it is Mandan.

It has twelve cases.

And those cases have weird semantics, like there are two genitive cases, but they aren't for alienable and inalienable possession.

[And frankly it's not like having three coronal affricates is exactly 'normal', now is it?]

And when the sibilants make a laminal/apical distinction which basically no other language makes in the same way.

And then there's surdéclinaison. Oh boy, if anything warrants Basque's qualification as a weird language it is that.

[Chuma]

A while back, I asked the board about a feature of my conlang, where double fricatives become affricates (so <ss> -> /ts/, for example). I wondered if it was too weird, and I was told that Basque does it too. I don't know if that makes it less weird.

[Nooj]

...damn. All this talk about Basque is making me hot and bothered. I should have lived in the Basque Country instead of Madrid.

[Zaarin]

I have a sudden strong desire to learn Basque, just so I can make cooler conlangs. :p

A while back, I asked the board about a feature of my conlang, where double fricatives become affricates (so <ss> -> /ts/, for example). I wondered if it was too weird, and I was told that Basque does it too. I don't know if that makes it less weird.

Celtic and Greek (and I believe Italic) did it, too, so you're good.

[Vijay]

How many people on this forum speak any Basque?

[Astraios]

most of those are irregular

They actually aren’t very irregular at all: only the plural marker is really variable, and everything else is quite regularly agglutinated. Cf. your first pair nau ~ banindu, which are pretty simply glossed:

n-

1Sg.Abs-

a-

Pres.Non3-

u

Aux.Tr

“has me”

ba=

if

n-

1Sg.Abs-

ind-

NPres.Non3-

u

Aux.Tr

“should … have me”

, and:

nakar

n-

1Sg.Abs-

a-

Pres.Non3-

karr

bring

“brings me”

banindekar

ba=

if

n-

1Sg.Abs-

inde-

NPres.Non3-

karr

bring

“should … bring me”

In addition to the ordinary marking for tense, argument agreement is also fused with tense (d-, third person present, but l-, third person hypothetical). Thus "balitu" (should … have them), but "zituen" (had them).

Corrected. Also, I dispute that fused argument/tense-marking is weird: it exists in plenty of other European languages. What’s unusual about it specifically in Basque (and English!) is that it only occurs in the third person. Redundant tense marking, though, in that the past-marked personal prefix z- (3Abs.Past-) cooccurs with the regular past-tense suffix -en (-Past), isn’t so odd.

Plurality marking on verbs is irregular, varying with the verb, often including stem alternations and at least five different possible affixes. ["nau", "has me", but "zaituzte", "has you (pl)", seemingly?]

True, but also only applicable to the few synthetic verbs, and the verbs themselves are still conjugated regularly except for the position and form of the plural affix. Compare:

zaituzte

z-

2Pol.Abs-

a-

Pres.Non3-

it-

PlAbs-

u

Aux.Tr

(-z)

-Epen

=te

2Plur

“has you (pl.)”

zakartzate

z-

2Pol.Abs-

a-

Pres.Non3-

karr

bring

-tza

-PlAbs

=te

2Plur

“brings you (pl.)”

And when the sibilants make a laminal/apical distinction which basically no other language makes in the same way.

German and Spanish both had the same distinction at one point.

And then there's surdéclinaison. Oh boy, if anything warrants Basque's qualification as a weird language it is that.

Surdéclinaison is not weird. It happens quite a few otherwise pretty ordinary agglutinating languages.

[alice]

I have a sudden strong desire to learn Basque, just so I can make cooler conlangs. :p

Well, you can certainly derive languages from it with interesting and unusual grapheme-oriented principles...

[Yng]

Yes, surdeclinaison is very common. Turkish can do basically the same thing with genitive and locative phrases (bahçe-miz-de-ki-ler-e 'to the ones in our garden' < garden-1pl-in-NOM-PL-DAT; Hasan-'ın-ki-ler-e 'to Hasan's (ones)' < Hasan-GEN-NOM-PL-DAT).

Most of the weird features of Basque are really strange only by Western European standards - you certainly don't have to go to the Amazon to find examples of them. But that they all occur in the same language in the middle of Western Europe is pretty odd.

[finlay]

And then there's surdéclinaison. Oh boy, if anything warrants Basque's qualification as a weird language it is that.

wtf is this? can't you just link to an article?

[Vijay]

And then there's surdéclinaison. Oh boy, if anything warrants Basque's qualification as a weird language it is that.

wtf is this? can't you just link to an article?

I've seen it before. IIRC it's supposed to be the most thorough explanation of what it is, so there surely are articles on it, but people don't think of them as explaining it as well and conveying just how complicated it is. (Or something like that).

[Fixsme]

The Wikipedia page dealing with surdéclinaison or Suffixaufnahme, overdeclension?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffixaufnahme

Fun fact, Etruscan displayed also this feature.

[linguoboy]

Plurality marking on verbs is irregular, varying with the verb, often including stem alternations and at least five different possible affixes. ["nau", "has me", but "zaituzte", "has you (pl)", seemingly?]

True, but also only applicable to the few synthetic verbs, and the verbs themselves are still conjugated regularly except for the position and form of the plural affix.

It also makes more sense once you realise the diachronics: Widespread use of the 2P for singular address (cf. vós) followed by innovation of a new 2P. Many languages of Western Europe did this with pronouns, they just didn't follow through and reshuffle their verb conjugations to match (presumably because they were too fusional). But it's reminiscent of certain features of Osage verb conjugation.

[Ser]

I for one was surprised the other day to find that Basque, being located where it is, distinguishes three numbers in its nouns: singular, plural and unmarked.

[Vijay]

Mucha niña mona pero ninguna sola

[Soap]

All I can add is that I find it really interesting that Old Basque is commonly reconstructed with just eight consonants, remarkably low for Europe. In fact, with the assumed basic setup of five vowels, the number of phonemes in Old Basque is the same as Hawaiian. Trask adds an /h/ , but seems to consider it a suprasegmental sound rather than an ordinary phoneme. Still that leaves just 9 consonants and 5 vowels. He also adds diminutive phonemes, but adds that these were not part of the lexicon, which seems odd ... phonemes that occur only in hypocoristic forms. Perhaps they were originally just consonant + i, since they dont seem to occur word-finally even in diminutives.

https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gatewa ... pdf&site=1 see page 14

Trask describes the fortis and lenis series as if they were separate phonemes, but to me it makes a lot more sense to just consider the fortis ones to be geminates, and to consider the distinction to be neutralized in both word-initial and word-final position. Some people might object to contrasting clusters like /lt/ vs /ltt/, but such distinctions do occur in other languages, even in European languages such as Finnish. Also, Chuma's post earlier in the thread seems to agree with this analysis, by saying that /ts/ is underlyingly /ss/ and /tz/ is underlyingly /zz/.

Also, i guess it's worth noting that of the eight basic consonants, six are coronals (/t n l r s z/), and among those there is an unusual distinction between apical and laminal sibilants. Leaving just two sounds for the entire rest of the mouth: /p k/, which are more often realized as . Thus Basque acquired its distinctive sound early on.

edit: i meant to point out that Im using /z/ for the uncertain but likely [s̻] sound, a lanimal alveolar fricative, the ancestor of modern Basque {z}.

[Cedh]

And then there's surdéclinaison. Oh boy, if anything warrants Basque's qualification as a weird language it is that.

wtf is this? can't you just link to an article?

I've seen it before. IIRC it's supposed to be the most thorough explanation of what it is, so there surely are articles on it, but people don't think of them as explaining it as well and conveying just how complicated it is. (Or something like that).

The document that Frislander linked to is the "slides" for Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets' presentation at the 4th Language Creation Conference in 2011. Since it's in Prezi format rather than the more familiar PowerPoint, it's relatively hard to follow when you're just reading it, compared to when you're watching the talk live. You can find a video of the presentation here (unfortunately with rather bad sound quality). I was there in person, and I remember Christophe explaining what he calls surdéclinaison both on the example of Basque, and on the example of how he implemented it in his own conlang Moten. The term surdéclinaison doesn't seem to be especially widely used though (possibly only by French linguists?); I haven't been able to find any useful scholarly papers on it so far. It's probably mentioned in some reference grammar of Basque though (and other languages, if Yng is correct that e.g. Turkish has it too, which it seems to be confirmed by his example).

The Wikipedia page dealing with surdéclinaison or Suffixaufnahme, overdeclension?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffixaufnahme.

Suffixaufnahme is not the same as surdéclinaison.

With suffixaufnahme, you get case agreement in complex noun phrases so that the inner element (e.g. a possessive phrase) is marked with a copy of the case affix of the outer phrase as a whole. Basically, the idea of adjectives agreeing in case with their referent is extended to possessives and other adnominal modifier phrases. Some hypothetical examples of suffixaufnahme:
king-DAT great-DAT "to the great king"
king-DAT Spain-GEN-DAT "to the king of Spain"
king-DAT castle-LOC-DAT 3SG-GEN-LOC-DAT "to the king in his castle"

Whereas with surdéclinaison, you do not get case agreement, but you can use inflectional nominal morphology (in Basque not only case, but also e.g. the definite article -a) derivationally, and then inflect the resulting word once again, potentially indefinitely. A Basque example from Christophe's presentation:
poneta-a "the beret"
poneta-a-(r)ekila "with the beret"
poneta-a-(r)ekila-ko "being with the beret" = "wearing the beret"
poneta-a-(r)ekila-ko-a "the one wearing the beret"
poneta-a-(r)ekila-ko-a-(r)ekin
beret-ART-COM-GEN.LOC-ART-COM
"with the one who is wearing the beret"

(Both comitative suffixes, -ekila- and -ekin-, can etymologically be decomposed into even more complex overdeclined structures: *-e-ki-la- POSS.GEN-INSTR-ALL; *-e-ki-n- POSS.GEN-INSTR-INESS)

(For comparison, "to the king in his castle" in Basque would presumably be something along the lines of *gaztelu-a-n-ko-a-ri castle-ART-INESS-GEN.LOC-ART-DAT, literally "to the one being in the castle", or probably more properly *gaztelu-a-n-ko errege-a-ri castle-ART-INESS-GEN.LOC king-ART-DAT) ((the stars are there because the examples are constructed by me, and I can't claim to be able to construct correct Basque sentences))

[kuroda]

Yes, surdeclinaison is very common. Turkish can do basically the same thing with genitive and locative phrases (bahçe-miz-de-ki-ler-e 'to the ones in our garden' < garden-1pl-in-NOM-PL-DAT; Hasan-'ın-ki-ler-e 'to Hasan's (ones)' < Hasan-GEN-NOM-PL-DAT).

Most of the weird features of Basque are really strange only by Western European standards - you certainly don't have to go to the Amazon to find examples of them. But that they all occur in the same language in the middle of Western Europe is pretty odd.

I strongly support Yng's perspective on this. As someone who's never worked with Western European languages at all, it's always been rather puzzling -- or ridiculous -- to hear about how Basque is exotic or weird. IRL (face-to-face, I mean) I once did actually pretend to be astonished in order to stop a pair of enthusiasts from convincing me it was the weirdest thing ever. I may have even gasped out loud, I'm sorry to say.

[Viktor77]

I don't know if it's weird but I can ask the about 100 Basque people I know* if they think their language is weird. It might be an interesting question to ask about identity.

My university (my alma mater now oh my) has a very large number of Basque grad students studying in the Dept of Spanish and Portuguese. I never was sure why but it was always fun to learn about Basque sociolinguistics in my SLA classes.

Like did you know that some Basque students living in the US will refuse to aim for accent free speech in English? Their accent is a marker of identity and they do the same in Spanish. That was something one student found that I remember.

[Vijay]

Like did you know that some Basque students living in the US will refuse to aim for accent free speech in English? Their accent is a marker of identity and they do the same in Spanish. That was something one student found that I remember.

That's not the least bit surprising to me. I remember a guy from Mallorca in grad school who said that when Americans talk, they sound like they have gum in their mouths, and when British people talk, they sound like they have a muffin in their mouths.

[Zaarin]

Like did you know that some Basque students living in the US will refuse to aim for accent free speech in English? Their accent is a marker of identity and they do the same in Spanish. That was something one student found that I remember.

That's not the least bit surprising to me. I remember a guy from Mallorca in grad school who said that when Americans talk, they sound like they have gum in their mouths, and when British people talk, they sound like they have a muffin in their mouths.

A lot of Americans do have gum in their mouths. I hate gum chewers. :p

[Vijay]

Like did you know that some Basque students living in the US will refuse to aim for accent free speech in English? Their accent is a marker of identity and they do the same in Spanish. That was something one student found that I remember.

That's not the least bit surprising to me. I remember a guy from Mallorca in grad school who said that when Americans talk, they sound like they have gum in their mouths, and when British people talk, they sound like they have a muffin in their mouths.

A lot of Americans do have gum in their mouths. I hate gum chewers. :p

I like chewing gum but very rarely get any. I never got how to blow bubbles in bubble gum.

[Io]

And then there's surdéclinaison. Oh boy, if anything warrants Basque's qualification as a weird language it is that.

wtf is this? can't you just link to an article?

That link didn't exactly make it clear, I googled it and one of the first results is this thread: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=44132