At the present time, Linguistics does not consider the former theories as supported by sufficient evidence and classifies Euskara as a language isolate. (5).

(5) Language isolate: it is a natural language for which it has not been proven any relationship with any other living or dead language and furthermore, it is not part of any family of languages (in other words, the language is the only member of its family). The languages like Ainu, Japanese, Sumerian and Euskara are examples of this classification.

Several linguists like Joseba Andoni Lakarra and Larry Trask, after taking into account the results of the studies that were carried out in order to rebuild Proto-Euskara (6), indicate that the formerly examined theories have no basis and therefore, they also consider Euskara as a language isolate. According to the linguists, if Euskara was part of a group of languages prior to the Indo-European expansion, those languages disappeared completely. This would be supported by the fact that the existence of any linguistic substratum linked to the Basque language outside the region that includes the Basque Country, the Pyrenean area and the southern half of France has not been sufficiently proven.

The relationship of Euskara with the languages that the different theories tried to establish hypothetically took place during the neolithic and especially in the prehistory. According to the assumptions of Trask and Lakarra, there have been erroneously used Basque words of Latin, Celt and even Arabian origin to establish the comparisons in most of the cases, as well as Basque words in its current form when the Basque vocabulary, the same as the rest of languages, has evolved to a large extent throughout its history.

While current Euskara is an agglutinative language where just one word can agglutinate different meanings, initial Euskara or Proto-Basque that was spoken during the prehistory, points to the fact that it was a language with a few or without declensions, as well as being isolating (that is, each word had a differentiated meaning, as in Vietnamese).

The nouns and adjectives were especially two-syllabled in Proto-Euskara, where the verbs were monosyllabic. On the contrary and due to agglutination, there is possible to find words in current Euskara that are made up of more than ten syllables. Furthermore, the verb goes at the end of the sentence, while it went at the beginning of the sentence in Proto-Basque.

Current Euskara and Proto-Basque were very different languages concerning vocabulary, syntax and grammar. Therefore, it is of central importance to bear in mind the diverse evolution stages of Proto-Basque if a serious and comprehensive comparison with any other language is intended to be made. In the opinion of Lakarra and Trusk, those exhaustive comparisons have rarely been made.

 

 

 

 

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The History of Euskara continues on the following page >> The Proto-Basque language