Bla bla bla

[nooj]

I translated this bertso of Alaia Martin from last year's 2022 National Bertsolari Competition. I was disappointed that she was not given more points...in fact, I think on the day she had done enough to qualify in the final two, head to head with Maialen Lujanbio (who was a goddess, as always).

It was already a historic day, given that there were three female bertsolaris on the stage, which had never happened before, but if the two finalists were female, the crowd would have gone off. Unfortunately, I could only put English subtitles on. I'd like to have put the Basque and English subtitles, one above the other, but I don't think that's possible on youtube.

[nooj]

Speaking Spanish to tourists
Is like showing them
The Cathedral of Burgos
And hiding from them
The Cathedral of Santiago

[nooj]

A comment that I find quite exasperating from a French tourist, nostalgic of the Basque Country of forty years ago.

Je me souviens quand, dans les années 80, j'allais boire le rouge-limonade dans un petit bistrot du petit Bayonne, le samedi matin. Il y avait là des "anciens", béret sur la tête, qui discutaient entre eux. ici, pas de chichi. On nous servait dans des verres ronds, avec un chiffre inscrit sur le fond, ces mêmes verres qui se trouvaient sur les tables des cantines scolaires.
Moi j'attendais mon amie qui finissait de travailler à midi. Alors j'échangeais quelques mots avec les "anciens" qui, avec moi, étaient obligés d'abandonner leur langue pour revenir au français.

Quand je sortais du troquet, après quelques verres bus avec eux, je me disais: "oui, c'est ça le terroir, c'est ça le Pays basque".

Depuis ce temps là, je suis retourné dans ces endroits où l'on se sentait si bien. Mais les temps avaient bien changé ! Les "anciens" au béret ont été remplacés par des gens venus d'ailleurs. L'accent "pointu" a remplacé la langue basque (y compris, malheureusement, chez les jeunes autochtones). Une grande partie de l'année, pour ne pas dire toute l'année, les touristes sont partout.

Le Pays basque s'est longtemps défendu pour préserver son identité. Mais cette magnifique culture qu'il était parvenu à sauver devient presque un handicap maintenant: les populations françaises à qui l'on rabâche continuellement qu'elles n'ont plus d'histoire, plus d'identité, plus de racines, sont en recherche de ce qu'on leur vole. Et elles sont naturellement attirées par les quelques rares endroits, comme le Pays Basque, qui n'ont pas renoncé à cultiver leurs racines.

A cause de la migration des populations qui explose depuis peu de temps, la richesse culturelle des Basques, comme celle des Catalans, est en danger. Il est à craindre que cette culture que l'on trouvait autrefois dans les bistrots du Petit Bayonne ne se trouve plus bientôt que dans un musée.

I find it exasperating, because, when he complains about the fact that he can't hear the Basque language as he used to, and that young Basques no longer know the language, or that the French he hears is now spoken with a "pointu" accent and not the thick one he is used to, and then blames it on the influx of incoming new populations, he doesn't seem to reflect on the role that he himself plays as a tourist.

Let me explain. He explains how he would enter into conversations with the old men he would find, and how they would be obliged to switch from speaking Basque between themselves to speak in French with him. The choice of words, obliged, implies that he acknowledges to some extent his imposition and coercive force.

He doesn't seem to take the next step and ask himself whether a hundred thousand more people like him, tourists or residents, obliging Basque speakers to speak French, might be one of the reasons why Basque is an endangered language. He's happy to blame others, but I see no self criticism, nor self redress, because to correct oneself would be to remove oneself from the so-called neutral observer position and implicate oneself. I don't think it ever occurred to him once to...learn Basque.

He claims the influx of French tourists and immigrants is due to them searching for an "authentic" French culture in a France that continually tells them that their French culture is not good, and thus feel an absence that they try to fill with the Basque one...an "interesting" reading, but ironically, if his culprit is the outsider, then logically the best way to "conserve" what remains of this "authentic" Basque culture would be to not come at all, as merely by coming, you change what you're hoping to find. The observer's paradox.

If you don't know me or you vastly misread my posts, I think you might suspect that I harbour the same views because he mentions keywords that come up in my posts. I really don't, and I don't have much time for people like him. Just because I don't like tourism and he doesn't like tourism (depending on what you mean by tourism) doesn't mean we don't like it for the same reasons, and the reasons are very important.

[nooj]

But anyway, the point is that no one other than Occitan activists cares about what these old people think, and certainly not what they have to say, and least of all in what language they say it in.

I find it deeply saddening when French people - even if it's humourously - rally around certain totemic words and symbols and elevate them to a defining trait of their "regional" identity. Such is the case in the southwest for words like chocolatine or poche...a handful of words which people spend a crazy amount of time talking about, when their own linguistic and cultural richness in the south-west is enormous, and almost completely ignored on an institutional level in the education system, in the media etc and indeed by most ordinary people themselves. If you want to make your southwestern identity dependent on something, do so on something that's really valuable, really interesting. I personally find it baffling that I, a foreigner, am more interested in the language and culture of their grandparents than they themselves are.



I also have a quiet chuckle when I see those linguistic maps showing off how French words differ from one place of France to another. Yes, that dialectical diversity exists, but don't make a mountain out of a molehill. Any two podunk villages in the Occitan speaking area has more dialectical diversity between them than the French language in France...combined.

[nooj]

Peio Ardohain (1893-1987) was a soldier of fortune from the town of Ezterenzubi (Low Navarre), fighting in places as distant as Algeria, Belgium and Greece...he wrote to his parents in Basque, the only language he knew how to write, but his mail took 2 years to arrive home, at which point his mother had already believed he was dead. His story and those of 14 other Basques like him are collected in the book "14eko gerla, 14 lekuko" by the Basque priest, writer and journalist Xipri Arbelbide, where Aberlbide examines 14 witnesses of the First World War.

My mother was still alive then. She was about 80 years old. She thought I was long dead. At that time she was still bathing in the Behobi river. She refused to bathe until she knew what had happened to me, then my letters arrived, and it was then that she went back to her normal routine. She said to my father: "Would you look at that, he's still alive!"

I knew how to write in Basque. I didn't know French. I knew enough to write in Basque. But not in French.

Didn't you go to school?

Ezterenzubi's school? I didn't learn anything! I learned more in Algeria than at Ezterenzubi. In Algeria, we (the soldiers) had to learn French.

A similar story is told by this man, Erramun Negueloua (1935-2021) from the town of Gamarte, Low Navarre, in this video, who tells us that he learned most of his French with his comrades in arms during the Algerian War. As he says, the French he learned was wonky, back to front.

His fellow soldiers would attempt to correct him, saying "no, that's not how you say it in French"...basic things like confusing the gender of the words he learned, saying "le" instead of "la" etc.



Speaking of monolingual Basque speakers, this is a story from the North Basque journalist Janbattitt Dirassar. After talking about the poor Portuguese immigrants who tried to sneak across the border and ended up caught and hauled in front of North Basque courts, and how they needed Portuguese translators, he mentions how he sometimes acted as a translator from Basque to French and vice versa when a translator was needed in the court cases he was covering, although of course he was not a trained interpreter.



He tells that a Basque man from the Donibane Garazi region was on trial for smuggling contraband across the border. Apparently the man could not understand French, let alone speak it, that is at least what the man said.

When the judge asked him a question, the journalist translated the question into Basque. The defendant then said to Dirassar, "Hey, you know how things work here. What do you think I should say to get out of this sticky situation?"

Dirassar couldn't tell him how to "get out of it", nor did he want to further incriminate the man by explaining his words to the judge, so he simply told the judge who was waiting on his words that the man had mistaken him for his lawyer. He then proceeded to tell the man that he was just the translator, and nothing more than that. But the story has a happy ending. In the end, the man escaped judgment by pretending to be mad. Of course, they took all the money he had earned from contraband...

[nooj]

His story and those of 14 other Basques like him are collected in the book "14eko gerla, 14 lekuko" by the Basque priest, writer and journalist Xipri Arbelbide

Xipri Arbelbide (1934-), from the town of Heleta in Low Navarre, was one of the founders of Gure Irratia ("Our Radio") in 1981, the first radio in the North Basque Country to be completely in the Basque language.

Before that, the amount of time given to the Basque language in all of the French radios of the North Basque Country could be counted in minutes.

He remembers the opposition that he experienced from the part of self-proclaimed Basque language sympathisers who argued that the first Basque radio should be bilingual. A frank contradiction. His intransigence won the day, thankfully, and he remains very critical of the contradictions of today's Basque activists:

Zaharrak joan gara. Gazteek ez dituzte garai horiek ezagutu eta orain, Gure Irratiak ere noiznahi egiten ditu frantsesezko elkarrizketak. Ez da gehiago euskarazko irratirik hemen. Ez Pariseren erabakiz! Sekula nehork ez digu erran zer ekartzen dioten euskarari frantsesezko emankizun horiek. Ezin ukatua frantsesari eman minutu bakoitza euskarari lapurtua zaiola. Frantximent bat mintzo den aldi oroz euskaldun bat isilik egoterat kondenatua dela. Lapurra ez da Parisen, baina hemen, euskaltzalea da. Abertzalea. Euskarak ez ote du irrati bat osoki berea izateko eskubiderik mintzaira guziek bezala? Hogeita sei irrati entzuten dira hemen frantsesez. Eta horien denen ondoan, bat bakarra euskaraz aritzea sobera zaie. Nolaz eman ditzakete euskara hutsez, berri eta elkarrizketa berak, BERRIA, Argia, Herria eta beste zenbaitek, baina ez irratiek?

Young people today don't know what it was like. And now, Gure Irratia as well does French language interviews from time to time. There's no more fully Basque language radio here, and it's not because of some decision from Paris! No one has ever been able to tell me what these French language programmes has ever done for the Basque language. It's undeniable that every minute given to French is a minute that has been stolen from Basque. Every minute you give to a Frog to speak French, a Basque is condemned to be silent. And the thief isn't in Paris, but here. The thief is the Basque activist, the Basque nationalist. Does Basque not have the right to have a whole radio for itself, like all other languages? You can hear 26 radio channels here, all in French. And just one in Basque seems too much in comparison. How can the newspapers Berria, Argia, Herria and others be able to give the news entirely in Basque, but not radios?

Izan naiz Baionako udal liburutegian. Begiratu diet hemen plazaratu aldizkariei. Zenbatu ditut euskaraz eta erdaraz idatzi orrialdeak. 17 aldizkari, 3.060 orrialde. Horietarik 234 euskaraz eta 2.826 frantsesez. % 7,6 ematen diote euskarari, % 92,4 frantsesari hemengo “militanteek”.

Idazle horietan badira beren izena euskal kulturari zor diotenak; euskal kultur munduan bidegileak direla uste dutenak. Serioski uste duzue hala direla? Zein bide erakusten diete gazteagoei? Ez ote euskara frantsesez salba daitekeela? Ez du balio eska eta eska aritzea Parisen eta Madrilen, hemen berean euskararen geroan sinesten dugula hobeki erakusten ez badugu.

I was in the municipal library of Baiona. I had a look at the magazines that they had there. I counted how many pages were in Basque, how many in French. 17 magazines, 3060 pages. 234 of those were in Basque and 2862 in French. Our "militants" here give 7.6% to Basque and 92.4% to French.

Among those writers are some who owe their name and fame to Basque culture, those who believe that they are trailblazers in the Basque cultural world. They really believe that? What "trail" are they showing to our youth? Can the Basque language possibly be saved...in French? There's no point demanding things from Paris and Madrid if we ourselves don't believe in the future of Basque!

Zer erran beren bilkurak frantsesez egiten dituzten elkarte abertzale politiko eta … “kulturalez”? Duela mende erdi bat, Euskaltzaindiaren bitzarretan ere espainola entzuten zen. Txillardegi eta Krutwig euskaldun berriek zituzten euskaraz mintzatzerat bortxatu. Ez dut ikusten nolaz, omen euskaran sinesten, eta euskara baztertzen duten zenbaitek? Nola izan daitezke abertzale euskararik gabe?Alderdi eta elkarte horiek behar lukete bost urteko epea hartu, beren zuzendaritzan sartzeko baldintza egin gabe, euskaraz mintzatzea, abertzale munduan bederen euskara mintzatua izan dadin. Bost urteko epean euskara ikas dezakete. Milaka dira jadanik indar hori egina dutenak, batere zuzendaritza batean izan gabe.

What can I say about those Basque nationalist, political and "cultural" groups that conduct their meetings in French? Half a century again, even in the meetings of the Euskaltzaindia [the Basque language academy] you could hear Spanish as well! Txillardegi and Krutwig, who were neo-Basque speakers, they were the ones who imposed their will and forced the native speakers to speak in Basque. I don't see how you can supposedly believe in Basque but at the same time abandon it. How can you be a Basque patriot without speaking Basque? All these Basque parties and Basque cultural associations, they should be given a maximum five year period...to learn Basque. They can learn Basque in five years. Thousands of people have already done it.

[nooj]

If you're interested in learning the dialect of Arabic spoken in Tangier, Morocco, a recent and unmissable book:

[nooj]

I am reading a novel set in the Second Carlist War. The protagonist must flee from Donostia, and to do this, he chooses the sea as his escape route. The sailor who smuggles him out sings a ditty in Gascon.

It's a nice recognition from the part of the author of a mostly unknown part of the Basque linguistic landscape.

Given what today's South Basque Country looks like, it's easy to imagine that South Basques only ever had to deal with Spanish. But that's not true. In previous centuries, the South Basque Country linguistic landscape was more complicated...Basque has always been in close contact with various Romance languages in the past centuries. In Navarran kingdom there was Aragonese (which I will talk about soon), but there was also Occitan in the parts of the Basque Country that belonged to Castille, specifically Gascon was spoken along parts of the coast in "Spain". To be fair, we don't really know much about the Gascon speaking community in the South Basque Country...that's a history that is yet to be written by a Basque historian. But we know they were there.



The sailor, quite advanced in age, was not the talkative type, and spoke quite funnily, more Gascon than Basque. I still remember the song that he sang from between his teeth, again and again, enough to drive anyone crazy.

In normalised orthography:

S'èri brojina damisèla
a les alòtas de dentèla
de pur argènt
me pausant sus le canabèra
qui's balança, mince e laugèra
au mendre vènt

If I were a beautiful lady
With wings of pure silver
Sitting on the fishing rod
That sways in the lightest breeze
Slim and light

And the second part of the song is in Basque:

nire besoetan maitia ez duzu
izango penarik batere

In my arms, my love
You would not have any hurt

[nooj]

Basque has always been in close contact with various Romance languages in the past centuries. In Navarran kingdom there was Aragonese (which I will talk about soon)

Basque hasn't merely been in close contact with various Romance languages, as if it were in a meeting between equal peer languages. That's the case for e.g. Spanish and English today.

In fact, Basque has always been in a situation of administrative diglossia. We know that most of the population of the Kingdom of Navarre was Basque speaking in the Middle Ages. However, paradoxically, even in the kingdom where you'd expect Basque to be most used for official purposes, most of the time it simply wasn't. That honour was taken by Latin and various Romance languages, starting with Navarro-Aragonese and ending with Spanish.

If we took the official documents of the time at face value, you could be forgiven for thinking that no one spoke Basque...which is obviously not true, not only for Basque but for plenty of other languages. If you're interested in the transition from Latin to Romance languages, apart from several important documents where you can see traces of the Romance languages slipping through (the Appendix Probi, monastery deeds and land owning documents, wills and testaments), the Romance languages "suddenly" appear with much of their main linguistic characteristics in the early Middle Ages as if by magic. That's not true, but because the scribes held the monopoly on alphabetisation and literacy, they wrote in Latin, which served as a lid to hide what was really happening, until it couldn't be hidden any longer.

In a way then, Basque has always been the minoritised language throughout recorded history...not the minority language, as it was very much the majority language spoken by the majority, but the minoritised language, i.e. treated differently, when not directly treated as lesser. It's a matter of speculation as to why the Navarrans chose Romance languages and chose to ignore Basque in order to run their kingdom at the highest levels. I suspect it's probably because of the prestige of Latin, but if Navarre had survived the Middle Ages as an independent political entity, I also predict that it would have ended up promoting Basque in much the same way as other European countries did as well, such as Hungary, Finland, Estonia etc with the rise of nationalism. Navarre only had to survive into modernity...



Academics use the term Navarro-Aragonese to refer to medieval Aragonese, and reserve the term Aragonese for the current Aragonese language as it is spoken in Aragón. That's because Aragonese or something like it was also spoken in the Navarran kingdom, particularly in the bottom south. But this is where Spanish is dominant today. So what happened?

Well, unfortunately, Aragonese, the administrative language of Navarre for many centuries, was rapidly replaced and ultimately exterminated by Spanish from the 15th century onwards. The Aragonese linguistic past has left a more or less strong influence on the Spanish spoken in Navarre today. In fact there's dictionaries about the Spanish variety spoken in Navarre...an Aragonese speaker would not be surprised at stumbling upon hundreds of words that he or she would recognise, such as the Vocabulario navarro (1952) of the Navarran José María Iribarren. Take the word rasmia. On the left, its use in Navarre...on the right, its current day use in Aragón (even in the Spanish spoken in Aragón).



I want to talk about a remarkable Navarran document that was discovered in 1969 by a historian digging around in the Royal Navarran Archives. This historian, Florencio Idoate, found a bilingual letter, a written correspondance between two high ranking Navarran nobles. The message is dated to 1416. The two languages used in the letter are Navarro-Aragonese and Basque, which is very interesting. Given the extreme scarcity of written documents in Basque, it was assumed by many historians that the Navarran elite were or had become Romance speakers and that the administration was also Romance-speaking. In effect, because of the paucity of written material in Basque, they assumed that the sociolinguistic situation of the Navarran court was pretty much the same as what it would become after the Castillian conquest of the kingdom of Navarre, when Spanish became dominant and Basque was in fact marginalised.

However, the two correspondants of the letter are the highest officials of the land, the elite of the elite: the secretary of King Charles III himself, Martin San Martin, and the head of the Royal Treasury Matxin Zalba. Indeed, Idoate found this letter in the treasury accounting books. Moreover, it was written in their hand, that is, not via a third party scribe.



It's also worth noting where the two were from, although like all functionaries they moved around a lot, depending on need. Martin San Martin was from San Martin Unx and Matxin Zalba was from the Capital, Iruñea (Pamplona). At the time, most of Navarre, including well into the south, was majoritarily Basque speaking. We have to forget the very sad situation of Basque today in Navarre, where it is mostly limited to the north of Navarre, and imagine a language that most Navarrans spoke. It seems impossible to imagine today, but it was the case:

.

A transcription of the text, with Navarro-Aragonese in blue and Basque in red:

Machin seinor, supplico vos que me imbiedes por escripto quoanta es la
gracia que los de Sant Johan han de la imposition. Et jaunatiçula egun
hon. Et me imbiat a dizir si berres al combit o non.
El todo buestro Martin
de Sant Martin

Seynnor maestre Martin. Acomendo vos a Miguel Papon bien amic. Et se-
redes
bien ayssa en casa de Peyre de Tors del bon baron que mal li se faga en el
coillon et escusatme de combit que non puedo ser que huespedes tiengo.
Et jaunatiçula abarion ez nayz bildur ezten alla. Et jaquiçu Done Johanne
Garaçicoec dute gracia erregue baytaric hurtean yruroguey eta amaui
florin hurtean baytator sey florin eta tercio bat ylean rebatiçera colectoreari. Et alegraçaytec ongui.
Çure guçia Machin
de Çalua

The context is this. The Navarran town of Donibane Garazi (which you might know better as Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, in what is today Low Navarre, France but at that time of course it was all one Navarran Kingdom. Not Spain, nor France), asked the King, Charles III for monetary aid in order to help repair their walls. The King granted them a small remission on their taxes, the gracia mentioned in the letter. The officials are talking about this remission of their taxes. The last part does not have to do with official business, but mixes pleasure: a high ranking person from the court, one Peyre de Tors has invited them and other officials to dinner.

Sir Matxin, I ask you to send me in writing how much the town of Donibane Garazi is exempted from in their commerical tax. And may the Lord grant you a good day. And by the way, send word of whether you want to come to the invitation or not. Yours truly, Martin de Sant Martin.

My lord Martin, I entrust you to Miguel Papon, your friend. You will be welcome in the house of Peyre de Tors, good man, may his testicle rot on him, and excuse me from the invitation, I can't go, I have guests. May the Lord grant you a good dinner, I am not afraid that it will not be so (= I'm sure it'll be good). And know that the inhabitants of Donibane Garazi have a remission from the King, 72 florins in a year, which comes to 6 florins per month, discounting a third for the tax-collector. Have fun. All yours, Matxin de Zalba.

These letters are fascinating for their content, but also for their implications. You have a swear word in Navarro-Aragonese, humorously intended I suppose. May his balls hurt!

You have an early mention of the name of Donibane Garazi in Basque as well as in Navarro-Aragonese (Sant Johan, in today's Aragonese Sant Chuan Piet de Puerto).

You have a curious mix of business and personal affairs. You have what seems like a routine formula of greeting in Basque from Martin San Martin, but then a long reply in Basque from Matxin with the expectation and the knowledge that his correspondant will understand it. This suggests that the two are used to speaking to each other but most importantly, writing to each other in Basque. If they were hesitant in reading and writing Basque, they don't show it. They are literate in Basque.

And this long reply in Basque by Matxin Zalba significatively does not deal with the dinner, which he dispatches promptly in Navarro-Aragonese, but he reserves the part in Basque to deal with business, including administrative and technical matters, using administrative and technical Basque words.

Like I said in the beginning, Basque was not used as an administrative language in Navarre. But the reasons behind that must have been other than socio-economic, because the richest and most powerful men of Navarre spoke Basque. And it must have been for some other reason than "Basque was an exclusively oral language", because we know that isn't true, the Navarran elite themselves did write in Basque. It provides a fascinating glimpse into what the Navarran court must have been like, a multilingual place, where Basque also had its place.

By the way, here's a comparison between the Basque of the letter and a retranscription with modern Basque orthography. It's extremely readable to a modern Basque speaker:

Et jaunatiçula abarion ez nayz bildur ezten alla. Et jaquiçu Done Johanne
Garaçicoec dute gracia erregue baytaric hurtean yruroguey eta amaui
florin hurtean baytator sey florin eta tercio bat ylean rebatiçera colectoreari. Et alegraçaytec ongui.
Çure guçia Machin
de Çalua

Eta Jaunak dizula afari on, ez naiz bildur ez den hala. Eta jakizu Donibane
Garazikoek dute grazia Errege baitarik urtean hirurogeita hamabi
florin urtean, baitator sei florin eta tertzio bat hilean rebatitzera kolektoreari. Eta alegra zaitez ongi.
Zure guztia, Matxin de Zalba

[nooj]

I find this academic's voice incredibly aesthetically pleasing. Would listen to her all day. What she said about the Welsh language bringing her back to Wales, despite living in continental Europe, speaks to me.