Basque

Basque is spoken by around three quarters of a million people in the western Pyrenees, on both sides of the border between Spain and France, and it is related to nothing. Every other language in western Europe belongs to a family that arrived: Indo-European overwhelmingly, with Uralic and Turkic at the margins and Semitic through Arabic and Maltese.

Basque was there first and stayed. Its immediate ancestor, or a very close relative, is Aquitanian, attested in personal and divine names on Roman-era inscriptions in southwestern Gaul, which shows the language in place two thousand years ago and no further back. Attempts to link it to something else have been made continuously for centuries. The Caucasian languages, Iberian, Berber and a hypothesised Vasconic substrate underlying place names across Europe have all been proposed.

R. L. Trask, who assessed the proposals in detail, found none of them sound, and the mainstream position is not that the question is contested but that there is no answer. The atlas records that as unknown rather than debated, and carries an open question saying what would change it. The language itself is nothing like its neighbours. It is ergative, it is heavily agglutinative, its verb agrees with more than one argument at a time, and its numeral system is vigesimal, counting in twenties. None of that proves isolation, since typology is not descent, and all of it is why the question keeps being asked.

The pre-Christian religion of the Basque country is documented thinly and late, mostly from folklore collected in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, notably by Jose Miguel de Barandiaran, and from witch trial records, above all the great Basque prosecutions of 1609 to 1614 in which the Spanish inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frias investigated thousands of accusations and concluded that he had found no evidence of witchcraft at all. His report is one of the most important documents in the history of European scepticism and it happens to be about this region.

What survives of the older material centres on Mari, a female figure associated with mountains, caves and weather, with a companion figure Sugaar, and with a body of subordinate beings. The linguistic point is that none of this vocabulary has cognates anywhere. For Norse or Vedic religion, a divine name can be checked against related languages and its antiquity assessed. Here there is nothing to check against, so the age of any Basque religious term cannot be established by comparison, only by attestation. A language isolate is also an evidential isolate, and that is a real limit on what can be known. The divine names recorded in the Aquitanian inscriptions are the one exception, and they are a short list, cut in stone by people writing Latin. Everything else rests on folklore collected after nineteen centuries of Christianity, which is not nothing and is not a text either.

Sources Selected Writings of Jose Miguel de Barandiaran: Basque Prehistory and EthnographyJose Miguel de Barandiaran, ed. Jesus Altuna, trans. Frederick H. Fornoff, Linda White and Carys Evans-Corrales with The Witches' Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, 1609-1614Gustav Henningsen