B is for Basque

[muckefuck]

Basque-English dictionary Aulestia, Gorka. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1989.

Few acquisitions do I recall as vividly as the purchase of this huge hardcover Basque dictionary. Europa Books, a place of pilgrimage on Clark Street just north of Belmont, was having a gigantic half-off closeout sale in the early 90s. I made it to the counter with a stack of books a least two feet high, but this 672-page monster was easily the biggest among them. I think it retailed for something like $50-70 dollars, but that's assuming you could find a place to buy it. When the owner reached it, he said, "Do you know how hard it was for me to get this?" "I do," I replied. "Why do you think I'm buying it?" (In retaliation, he went on to drop the entire godblessed stack in an attempt to fit it into my bag in the most weak-minded manner imaginable.)

Even though it was a prize possession, I made little use of it until recently. I'd browse it occasionally, but I wasn't trying actively to learn Basque. The most useful feature for many years was the fact that it lists virtually ever Basque place or personal name I've ever heard anywhere (provided one can figure out how it should be spelled in normalised Basque orthography). But, as y'all may know, a couple months ago I dusted off my copy of Colloquial Basque which had likewise spent years neglected on the shelf and worked my way through the first couple lessons. As a result, I discovered just how comprehensive and useful the conjugational tables in the prefatory material could be.

The genius of Basque is that almost none of the verbs are conjugated. The madness of it is that the few auxiliaries which are have a confusing array of forms. They vary based not only according to the number and person of the subject, but also of all objects. That's not so crazy--Osage does this, too, as I've explained at length--except that the suffixes and prefixes are almost completely different in the past tense from what they are in the present. Other than that and the fact that few of the words bear any resemblance to the vocabulary of any other language (despite a seemingly endless number of attempts to show a relationship between Basque and literally any other language in the world), it's really not as impossible as it's cracked up to be. The Basques like to brag, for instance, that the Devil spent ten years in the Basque Country trying to tempt souls and left knowing only the words for "Yes" and "No". (You'll find an excellent introduction to Basque grammar penned by the late great Larry Trask on Martin Buber's website.)