Essai sur la Langue Basque Basque Legends

Abstract

THE Etruscans perhaps excepted, there is no race that has had a greater attraction for the ethnologist and the student of language than the Basque. Defended by the mountain-fastnesses of the Pyrenees, with peculiar physiognomy, language, and manners, they seem to be the last waif and stray of a people and family of speech which have elsewhere disappeared. Whence did they come? and what is their kinship? are the two questions which have long been discussed warmly and to little purpose. Are we to regard them as the descendants of the ancient Iberi, and find their traces, with Wilhelm von Humboldt, in the local names of Spain, of Sicily, and of Southern Italy, or are we to bring them from Africa on the one side, or from America on the other, or finally let them drop from the clouds, or grow up spontaneously on their native soil? Certain it is that languages like Basque were spoken in the north of Spain under Roman rule; at least, the town called Graccuris, in honour of Tiberius Gracchus, is a genuine Basque compound of iri or hiri “city,” like Iria Flavia, “the Flavian burgh.” Exclusive of emigrants in South America, the present Basque population amounts to about 800,000, of whom 660,000 are Spanish, and 140,000 French. Their language has little resemblance to any other known tongue, whether ancient or modern Erro claimed for it the privilege of having been spoken in Paradise; and Larramendi proudly named his grammar (1729) “El Impossible Vencido”—“The Impossible Conquered.” The native works upon the language, however, were all tainted with mysticism and want of scientific method, and it is only of late years that this interesting speech has been examined in the light of science and exact scholarship, and grammars composed which treat it in a rational way. Materials for the work have been prepared by the researches of Prince Lucien Bonaparte, who has accurately mapped out the several dialects of the language, has noted their individual characteristics and peculiarities, and has actually discovered some fast-perishing dialects which had hitherto remained unknown. His magnificent work on the Basque verb has, it may be said, created the scientific philology of the language.

Essai sur la Langue Basque.

Par F. Ribary. Traduit du Hongrois par J. Vinson. (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1877.)

Basque Legends.

By W. Webster. (Griffith and Farren 1877.)