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nooj
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Re: Basque and Guarani

Postby nooj » Mon Mar 01, 2021 2:04 pm

A poem by Susy Delgado, Paraguayan poet.

Happily the vast majority of everything in this poem is grammatically understandable thanks to what I read in the grammar. The problem is the vocabulary, I have no idea how I'm going to learn Guarani vocabulary. I'm still learning hundreds of new Basque words every month and Basque vocabulary is generally well documented. The first monolingual Guarani-Guarani with 2000 entries was finalised last year, but still hasn't been published as far as I know.

Mba’éicha héra
Mba’éicha héra
pe cherenóiva?
Mba’éiko aipo
ipu asýva
ipu mbegue
ha ipu meme
jevy jevýva
ombotaroguáicha
amo okañyhápe
che ánga rokẽ...
Ipu meme
ku pyhare
cheaño jave
cheñatõi
chemombáy
chejopipa
chemoangekói
che pireguýpe oikérõguáicha
chemonga’u
che korasõ ombotarova...


What is the name
What is the name
Of that which calls me?

What is it that
Makes a sound
Delicately, slowly
Repeatedly
Again and again
As if it is knocking
On that which is hidden
The door of my soul

It makes a sound
On those nights
When I am alone
It pokes me
It wakes me
It prickles me
It unsettles me
As if it get under my skin
And inebriates my heart...

asýva - the root asy by itself means pain, but is used in Guarani to express superlative degrees of a quality.

ao hovy asýva - intensely blue clothing
h'eẽ asy - it is very sweet

But at the same time, paradoxically, to express fragility, delicateness.

Ivevúi asy pe kambuchi - this jug is very fragile

Máva mba’e
yvypóra mymba
Ñanderu pytu
yvytu ravel
ka’aguy jarýi
terã póra yma
heruguã?

Máva mba’e
yvypóra mymba
Ñanderu pytu
yvytu ravel
ka’aguy jarýi
terã póra yma


Who what
Human animal
The breath of God
The rabel of the wind
The spirits of the forests
Or ancient spectre
A mystery?

Who what
Human animal
The breath of God
The rabel of the wind
The spirits of the forests
Or ancient spectre

ravel - I think it is referring to the introduced Spanish stringed instrument, also called the rebec.

jarýi - literally means grandmother. But the 'grandmother(s) of the forest' refers to the deity of the forest. It's interesting to know that whilst ka'aguy means forest, its singular form ka'a means yerba mate, and the mate plant has an important place in traditional Guarani culture (among other things it is a widely used medicinal plant), in fact, ka'a jarýi, the grandmother of the mate plant, is a deity.

Image

Mba’e piko aipo
oñehendukáva
ha ipu rasẽngýva
he’ívo che réra?
Mba’éicha héra
pe cherenóiva?


What is that
That is heard as
And sounds like a cry
When it says my name?
What is the name
Of that which calls me?
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nooj
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Re: Basque and Guarani

Postby nooj » Thu Mar 04, 2021 5:13 pm

Still studying Guarani!

Looking at social media, as it's always a good place to search for informal conversation, I've found that the majority, even the vast majority I'd say, of posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc from Paraguayans are in Spanish...

What I mean by this is not that they can't write Guarani. Guarani definitely can be written down. I mean that most Guarani speakers in Paraguay simply...don't.

You can write Guarani using the most casual orthography that copies Spanish rules and this is accessible to anyone who's had the Spanish language education. The orthography of Guarani is still not completely fixed, there's technically no orthography that everyone accepts and uses, and even the ones who use the officially promulgated' orthography differ in how much they adhere to it in their own writing.

As far as I know there are three novels that have been written in Guarani, although that's only one genre and there are short stories, poetry, theatre and Guarani is amply represented in Paraguayan folk music.

These novels are Kalaíto Pombéro (1981) by Tadeo Zarratea, Pore'rape (2016) by Hugo Centurión and Tatukua (2017) by Arnaldo Casco.

The absence of Guarani written literature is probably a problem at both ends, a lack of a market of Guarani readers and a lack of authors interested or capable of doing so. In their reading and writing practices on a societal level, many Paraguayans seem to be functionally illiterate in Guarani, in the sense that some of them can read/write in Guarani but choose not to. Some people of course really can't because they were born in a time when Guarani was not taught and did not teach themselves to read/write Guarani since then.

This is what I mean when I say that Guarani is doing much worse in language normativisation than many Spanish languages, including non-official languages like Astur-Leonese. Of course, Guarani enjoys a speaker base and is spoken on a day to day basis to an extent that Spanish languages could only dream about. But man, Guarani still needs so far to go!
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Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Thu Jun 03, 2021 2:40 am

In other news, in two or so weeks I'm planning to do the GR11, a long route in the Pyrenees (800ish km, 30-50 days of hiking, altitude that goes up to 2000m) that goes from the Cantabrian Sea to the Mediterranean Sea.

I had to struggle long and hard in deciding which route to take, because I dearly wanted to do the GR10 that hugs the other side of the Pyrenees: it would have allowed me to see parts of the North Basque Country and Bearn and North Catalonia, almost all of which I've never seen before as well as give me the opportunity to explore the Basque, Gascon (Occitan) and Catalan languages in the French state. But the uncertainty over being in a different state at this particular point in time has made me wary. I have heard tell of a few absolute madmen/women who do the one GR from sea to sea and then turn around and do the other GR...

Image

The GR11 passes through various linguistic zones. The EAE, Nafarroa Garaia (both Basque speaking), the high mountains of Aragon (Aragonese speaking), Andorra (Catalan), the Val d'Aran (Aranese, i.e. Gascon) and the rest of Catalonia (Catalan). If I can find opportunities to do so, I'll use all of these languages but that's not the point.
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Re: Basque and Guarani

Postby nooj » Thu Jun 03, 2021 11:26 am

This year's Pastorala was written by the Zuberoan Basque nationalist from the previous post, Jean-Louis Davant, and in a very surprising turn of events, he wrote the Pastorala around the central figure of...Abdelkader!


After being pushed back because of coronavirus, we have our dates for this year. Exceptionally, in three performances and not two, as the crowd sizes for each performance have to be limited.

Image

Here they are doing their preparations:



In the last century the Pastorals have chosen Basque historical figures as the central character of the play. Abdelkader, Algerian freedom fighter, politician, Islamic theologian, poet, is the first Muslim to be chosen in its history, and although he doesn't have a direct connection to the Basque Country, the Basque people do have a connection to Algeria, as thousands of Basques were conscripted and sent to fight in Algeria. And the Pastoral wants to pay hommage to Abdelkader's inextinguishable desire to free his country from French colonial rule.
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nooj
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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Thu Jun 03, 2021 7:33 pm

Image

As I mentioned in this log before, Joseba Sarrionandia is considered to be one of the greatest Basque writers alive today. He was convicted and sentenced in 1980 to 27 years in prison for being a member of the Basque terrorist group ETA, but he managed to escape from prison in 1985 by hiding in the speakers of a band that came to play in the prison. Consequently, he made his home in Cuba for 31 years, steadily writing novels, essays, poetry. All in Basque of course. It's a curious paradox, the greatest Basque writer not living in the Basque Country.

Well, a couple of months ago he returned home and is now in the Basque Country. Due to some legal reasons which I don't understand, he's not longer in risk of going back to jail.

Here's a poem of his called 'Red Wind'. Come, revolutionary wind, come!

Image

Come, red wind
To our country
To take the sun
Beyond the horizon
Come to dry the leaves
Fructify the moss
And explode in sighs
Come, mad wind
Like a troop of eagles
Wings spread
To snap umbrellas
And displace tiles.
Don't be beautiful
Don't be skilful
Be frightfully cruel.
Come and scatter
The lapwings in the sky.
Blow off the masks
Of lords and ladies.
Come strong and throw
Mud on clean, white peace
Come to change the perspective
Of object-subject
Come in might
With the branches of old trees
To break down the doors
Of our houses.
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nooj
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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Fri Jun 04, 2021 3:43 pm

A poem by Bernardo Atxaga.

Gure herria andere zabala da
morez jantzitako andere zabala
bere zainetan odola
gasolinaz nahasten da
bere bularrak bi botila
bi botil berde dira
eta hoietako egunen batean
suak pizten direnean
bere bihotza
molotov koktel bat bezala
hautsi eta
lehertuko da.


Our country is a wide woman
A wide woman dressed in brown
In her veins
Blood is mixed with gasoline
Her breasts are two bottles
They are two green bottles
And on that day
When they lit
Her heart
Like a Molotov cocktail
Will break
And explode
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Languages: Speaks: Spanish (N), English
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Re: Basque and Guarani

Postby Querneus » Fri Jun 04, 2021 3:56 pm

nooj wrote:What I mean by this is not that they can't write Guarani. Guarani definitely can be written down. I mean that most Guarani speakers in Paraguay simply...don't.

[...]

This is what I mean when I say that Guarani is doing much worse in language normativisation than many Spanish languages, including non-official languages like Astur-Leonese. Of course, Guarani enjoys a speaker base and is spoken on a day to day basis to an extent that Spanish languages could only dream about. But man, Guarani still needs so far to go!

Very interesting post. Regarding Internet usage, I wonder to what extent it matters that they're in a space where Spanish speakers from out of Paraguay hang out, e.g. Twitter, where the people reading you may well be from Mexico, or a Paraguayan who's really uncomfortable reading Guarani. Maybe there are Facebook groups which are niche enough to a Paraguayan region, a region where Guarani is strongly spoken in, that people often write in Guarani in there?
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nooj
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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Sat Jun 05, 2021 12:08 am

If you want to learn Aragonese, which as I previously explained is a heavily endangered Romance language, non-official in its own land, with around 9,000 speakers, I recommend you this book that came out this year (2021 is not all bad). If you pick up the ebook copy, it's only 14 or so euros.

If you're short for cash, there is a draft version from 2017 that is free online, but it's about 200 pages shorter.

It is meant to be a descriptive grammar and is an overview of the different Aragonese dialects, in the absence of a standard Aragonese. The grammar is written in Aragonese, which of course it should be.

Image

I have two friends visiting my town, my German friend and her Russian friend. They've each been living in Madrid for six years. We speak to each other in Spanish. I took them out with my Basque friends. The Basque speakers spoke to the German and Russian tourists in Spanish, but with each other we only spoke in Basque. The Russian friend commented "Wow, it's like we're in a different country!". To which I replied, completely seriously, "Yes, we are." ;)

Later my German friend was telling me about her capoeira groups in Germany. They receive visits from capoeira masters from Brazil, and when these people visit, they make a point of speaking in Portuguese (even if they might know German or English) and they use a translator to talk to the group, made majoritarily of non-Portuguese speaking Germans. She said that it reminded her of that. From her perspective, capoeira is a Brazilian thing, created in Brazil, spread by Brazilians and impregnated with Brazilian history. It's natural - even for Germans - for Portuguese to be the vehicular language.

I asked her: don't you do this in Germany as well? Let's say we were 6 Germans at a table and 1 Englishman/woman. Wouldn't you speak in German? No, she said. We'd all speak English in an effort to maintain the English speaker in the gloabl train of conversation, although of course when we split off into smaller groups, we'd speak German. But around a table where everyone participates in the conversation, it would be English. This is surprising to me.

I personally choose a different communicative approach, and that's the one my friends use too, which is to speak Basque to Basque speakers in all situations, even if we are 6 Basque speakers and 2 Spanish speakers. Naturally they don't understand, they don't follow the train of conversation, they lose quite a bit of the ability to direct the conversation or participate in it. I translate for my Spanish speaking friends at the same time or a bit later.

In one respect, what she described about a language fitting a certain cultural context, I think is correct, but when we're out in a bar and we speak Basque, I doubt it's because Basque 'fits' better to a cultural context of drinking at a bar. Spanish, English or indeed any language works just as well for drinking. There are special times and places where Basque is 'necessary' and using any other language seems absurd or even kind of sacrilegous, like in bertsolari sessions. But going to a pub is not one of them.

I reject the idea that Basque is limited to certain cultural fields, and instead if I had to explain it to my German friend again, I'd say it like this. Imagine how natural and right it feels to speak Portuguese in capoeira...imagine how wrong it would feel to do it in German. Now imagine how natural and right it feels to speak Basque in the Basque Country with Basque speakers and how wrong it would feel to speak Spanish/French/English or any other language in the Basque Country with Basque speakers. It's as simple as that, in my opinion. It's an imperative that overrules any other social decency or decorum. I don't care about being rude, if being polite means I have to give up Basque.

Luckily, I don't think my friends take it as a sign of rudeness!
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nooj
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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Sat Jun 19, 2021 2:49 pm

Reporting from a rest day on my hike.

I had a disagreeable incident in Hendaia, where since it is the French state, there were French policemen checking ID and vaccination papers. Well as it happens I had lost my travel card on the train (I wouldn't have been able to enter without it, and so I tried explaining it to them). They tried to speak to me in Spanish and I spoke to them in Basque which - of course - they didn't know, and then I switched to Spanish because that was the language they were using with me, but as it turns out they could only babble a few words of it, and then because I was losing my patience given their arrogant attitude (common to many policemen), I finally spoke in their language. You'd think they'd assign bilingual policemen to work in a border town but no. In contrast, to explain what happened and to ask how to make a new travel card, I talked to the Euskotren operator in her cabin, who was a Basque speaker (from the South Basque Country). The French police officers looked at us in confusion. Oh noooo, how weird to speak OUR language on OUR land.

Of course this is not just true of the French. Here in the South Basque Country, where legally (theoretically, more like it) our language is co-official, the majority of policemen don't speak Basque and what's more, knowing Basque isn't even necessary. This discrimination was yet again beaten into our heads a few weeks ago, when the city of Irun was looking for 12 new positions in the local police force, and it included the requirement of knowing Basque. See article here. This was taken to trial because the idea that having to know Basque might be 'discriminatory' (HAHAHA), and guess what happened, as always in this stupid country we're forced to live in, of course the court said that this was discrimination because this requirement “estaría dando preferencia a un grupo de ciudadanos frente a otros por el mero hecho de que aquellos conozca la lengua cooficial”. That is to say that just because someone knows the co-official language, you can't privilege them for a job...

Uh yeah, that's the point! Of course we're privileging bilinguals over monolinguals! I want the police to know BOTH languages!

Instead we live in Bizarro Spain and France where monolinguals trample over our rights everyday. If anyone every tried to do the opposite, arguing that it's not necessary to know Spanish to work in the police force, the Spanish nationalists and their lackeys in the judiciary would be screaming their heads off.

All cops are bastards? Maybe, and all cops are monolinguals. Someone said that if your police doesn't speak your language, then they're not your police, they're an occupying force.

Living in the Basque Country and trying to live a normal life in Basque just makes me progressively angrier and angrier...
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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Sat Jun 19, 2021 8:58 pm

Today I was talking with the priest of the town I'm staying in and I used the berori system of address. According to what I read, it was a South Basque invention, not used in the North. It is used to address people of high social category. For example, priests, doctors, teachers etc.

Unlike berori, the hika and xuka systems are native to Basque and used for people you are familiar with (on the same social ranking). You wouldn't use hika with your parents for example as they're not on the same ranking. Exceptions: you speak to God with hika, even though you can never get to God's level.

The morphological difference between these systems is that whereas hika and xuka come with their own dizzying amount of special verb forms, berori only requires the use of 3rd person personal forms, consistent with its etymological origin, ber(a) + hori "that same one, that very one". That makes it easy to learn.

Berori stopped being used around the mid 20th century or a bit later. So as he was showing me around the church, and showing me where to sleep (I love sleeping in churches), I used berori, he stopped me and told me, here you don't speak to me in berori, because here we're all equal.

Equal in the eyes of God of course. After that I used zuka (not to be confused with xuka!!) which is the generalised neutral form in both the North and South Basque Country.

Then I attended mass, although I'm not Catholic, to see how the language issue would be. The town is majority Basque speaking but not entirely. I met a pharmacist originally from Iruñea (Pamplona) for example who's been living here for 20 years and doesn't speak Basque...he explained that in his time during the dictatorship there wasn't any way to learn Basque... which isn't entirely true, and in any case he's had 20 years to learn it living in a Basque speaking town.

And the priest is a Basque speaker too of course. The mass is bilingual, the songs are in Basque, but his sermon is in Spanish. It's interesting to hear the church faithful, most of them elderly, sing in Basque. What I mean is that it's curious how the priest says something in Spanish, then sometimes in Basque, then the rest entones along with him in Basque. But I could almost swear they said the Basque bits stronger. Probably my imagination. Maybe the parts in Basque touched me more. "Eta zurekin..." But given the majority of those in the church were native speakers of Basque, I find it curious how they interspersed languages instead of just using the Basque. What's the point?

Now I want to take a look at the Missal.
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