Basque has to include so many other parts of speech. The Arabic language is similarly primitive. It has words for yellow, red, green, and other tints, but no term exists to express the idea of "color," apart from the substance of the thing on which, so to speak, the color lies.
A second primitive psychological characteristic of the Basque is found in the order of the words. These follow the natural sequence of ideas more closely than in European languages. The importance of the idea determines precedence. Thus, instead of saying "of the man," the Basque puts it "man, the, of." Nouns are derived from one another in this manner. From buru, head, comes buruk, "head-for-the," or bonnet.[1] Many of the words thus contain traces of their derivation, which have long since vanished from the Aryan. Sayce gives some good examples. Thus orzanz, thunder, comes from orz, cloud, and azanz, noise. The word for month is illabete, derived from illargi-bete, meaning "moon-full." The first of these two parts is again divisible into il, death, and argi, light. In this manner we can trace the process of reasoning which induced the combination in many more cases than in our own languages. We still have some, like twilight or hidalgo, which in Spanish signifies "son-of-somebody," a noble-man; but these are the exception.
Probably the most primitive element in the Basque is the verb, or the relative lack of it. It was long asserted that no such part of speech existed in it at all. This, strictly speaking, is not true. Most of the verbs are, however, really nouns: "to give" is in fact treated as if it were "donation" or the "act of giving." It is then declined quite like a noun, or varied to suit the circumstances. This is indeed truly primitive. Romanes has devoted much time to proving that the verb requires the highest power of abstraction of all our parts of speech. Certain it is that it is defective in most primitive languages, from the Chinese up. Its crudity in the Basque is undeniable evidence of high antiquity.
The archaic features of these Basque dialects in the days when language and race were synonymous terms led to all sorts of queer theories as to their origin and antiquity. Flavius Josephus set a pace in identifying the people as descendants of Tubal-Cain and his nephew Tarsis. In the middle ages they were traced to nearly all the biblical heroes. Such hypotheses, when comparative philology developed as a science, gave way to a number of others, connecting the Basques with every outlandish language
- ↑ Good details on the structure of Basque are given by Pruner Bay in Bulletins de la Société d'Anthropologie, 1867 pp. 39-71. Bladé, cited above, also describes fully. Jules Vinson is the best modern authority. Vide his Le verbe Basque in recent volumes of the Revue de Linguistique-et de Philologie Comparée, Paris.
