Bla bla bla

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nooj
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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Mon Aug 01, 2022 4:25 am

Nothing very language heavy today, but I wanted to share a Galician song.



We have the classic Galician folk canon, thankfully much of which was written down and transcribed in the past century. Today in the 21st century there are a number of artists reinterpreting them, the most famous of whom - unexpectedly - have become As Tanxugueiras. Really, who could have predicted...? I couldn't be happier though.

In this song, you have three Galician artists.

Aliboria is a percussion focused group made up of Xosé Lois Romero as well as a group of his musical students. Here, the two sisters Alejandra and Andrea Montero. They are more along the lines of recompiling and rearranging traditional songs with the accompaniment of traditional instruments and the simple voice, so this collaboration with Baiuca. who specialises in electronic folk music, is unexpected but it works perfectly in my opinion. The song is named after the small Pontevedran town of Caroi, because the music itself, the Xota de Caroi, was collected from there. The video is filmed in the stunning Pontevedran town of Catoira, where Baiuca comes from.

Notice that Xosé is playing with a saucepan and a key (!) and the sisters are playing pandeiras, which are the bigger versions of the panderetas. Traditional Galician music is played with instruments that were easy to make or get a hold of. The original pandeiras were literally sieves that you remove the net from and put metal pieces into for percussive purposes. The one instrument that you associate immediately with Galicia, the bagpipe has moving parts and was more expensive to make or order, so it was a much rarer instrument in the past.

One linguistic note. Aliboria is the name of the group but if you look in most major Galician dictionaries, it's nowhere to be found. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It's said in some parts of the province of A Coruña, for example in the town of Feás, meaning something that is out of the ordinary, extravagant, excentric. It can also mean something that is badly or shoddily done.

I did find the word in one lexicographical work in the Dictionary of Dictionaries (a collection of Galician dictionaries that were made between the 19th to 20th centuries) and it also gave me the proposed etymology: a distortion of the word alegoría. Specifically referring to the allegories of the Gospels that the ordinary people would have heard at church. The Gospels themselves say that the allegories that Jesus told confused his contemporary listeners, so I'm not surprised that it would still confuse people millenia later on the other side of the sea in a very different cultural context from a Jewish-Aramaic-Greek-Roman one. Being confused by allegories and from there to describing things in general that are very strange is a short, logical step.

Is it a surprise that major Galician dictionaries don't include all the words of the Galician language? No. Galician is dialectically rich, and everyday I learn a new word that's only spoken in one town...or in one household! Sometimes I think that Galician is more dialectically rich (in some respects) than Portuguese, even though Galician is spoken by less than 2 million people and shrinking, whereas Portuguese is spoken by 270 million people and growing...

In reintegrationist orthography:

Dá-me umha pinga de vinho
Para molhar a garganta
Cantarei como umha rola
Verás como a rola canta

Baila aqui, baila aqui, minha nena
Baila que nom hai pó nem areia
Nom hai pó nem areia nem nada
Baila aqui, baila aqui, minha amada

Minha gargantinha rouca
Minha gargantinha rouca
Hei-te de levar à feira
E cambiar-te por outra

Vai esta e nom vai outra
Vai esta e nom vai outra
Que me canso de tocar eh
Para cantar estou rouca


Give me a swig of wine
To wet my throat
I will sing like a dove
You shall see how the dove sings

Dance here, dance here, my sweet girl
Dance, for there is no dust nor sand here
Dance here, dance here, my sweet beloved

My sweet raspy throat
My sweet raspy throat
I shall take you to the market
And replace you for another

This one I have here goes, and not the other one
This one I have here goes, and not the other one
Because I'm tired of playing
My voice is too gone to song.
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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Mon Aug 01, 2022 8:28 pm

Like the medieval Galician poem/songs that I have read, the tune manages to be both primitive and sophisticated at the same time. Marvelous stuff! Thanks for posting.
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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Mon Aug 01, 2022 11:01 pm

Sometimes I think that Galician is more dialectically rich (in some respects) than Portuguese, even though Galician is spoken by less than 2 million people and shrinking, whereas Portuguese is spoken by 270 million people and growing...


In a discussion with a Portuguese person who is interested in Galician, I was comparing the dialectical diversity of Galician with European Portuguese dialectical diversity. This Portuguese person was lamenting that 1) much of the European Portuguese dialectical diversity is moribund 2) was never recorded in the first place 3) it might be too late to do this kind of collecting work, as standard Portuguese is well on its way to pulverising them.

Portugal is the Holy Land for the Galician language in terms of sociolinguistics. It's an 'alternate-universe' where the Galician language (which the Portuguese later started to call Portuguese) actually succeeded, thanks to political independence of Portugal. Portuguese has never been a minoritised language within its own borders.

Having all of the immense power of a normalised language in a state that, if it deigned to, could thoroughly record and document all of its dialectical diversity, it is shocking that European Portuguese dialectology is in a poor state compared with its Spanish neighbour, and the Portuguese interloctor compares this to Galician. Galician had to wait until the mid 20th century before the standardisation process started, but documentary efforts (lexicographies, dictionaries etc) had already started before that in the 19th century. Thus, paradoxically, a minoritised language was the subject of intense dialectological work, whereas Portuguese, a fully normalised language...was not.

O galego, na altura em que foi feita a normatização, foi alvo de vários estudos dialetais, e no século XIX, como não havia uma escrita oficial, a maioria dos escritores da Galiza escreviam aquilo que falavam, muitas vezes com vocábulos regionais que pouco se usam hoje em dia (e muitos também mais semelhantes ao português).

Enquanto isso, o português, na altura em que ocorria isso no galego, não só já tinha uma estrutura totalmente padronizada como, na altura do Romantismo lusitano, o português foi "purificado", e em muitos casos a "purificação" foi feita sobretudo a partir do português que se falava em Coimbra. Foram também introduzidos vários galicismos e anglicismos e removidos bastantes castelhanismos que tinham entrado no português na altura do Renascimento (desde castelhanismos verbais a palavras do dia-a-dia). O português já tinha sofrido com dois séculos de fraca literatura devido à Inquisição (com poucas exceções, como Padre António Vieira ou Barbosa du Bocage), e, na altura do Romantismo, o português seguiu um caminho diferente do galego, matando qualquer perspetiva de registo de regionalismos. Mais tarde, o Estado Novo de Salazar impôs o português padrão a toda a população portuguesa através da escola obrigatória, o que ainda desincentivou mais a investigação nesta matéria. Só após o fim do Estado Novo é que surgiram os primeiros estudos neste respeito, e o principal estudo no qual se baseiam a maioria dos dicionários atuais é o de 1988 da Academia de Letras de Lisboa e Houaiss.


Portugal is the Romance speaking country in Europe that has the poorest dialectical description and study of its own language. All other Romance speaking European countries have either dialectological studies on a national scale, or at least very detailed regional scales. For example, the ALF in France, the AIS and ALI in Italy, the ALC in Catalonia, the ALR-I and ALR-II in Romania, the ALGa in Galicia etc. For Portugal, that either doesn't exist on a national scale or there were preparatory works done, but the data is as yet unpublished, meaning largely unaccessible to researchers. As far as I know, the only published lingustic atlas of Portugal is the Atlas Lingúistico-Etnográfico dos Açores, which is very interesting, but is about the Açorian archipelago, some 2000km away from the European mainland.

The best known of the dialectical classifications of European Portuguese is that of the Portuguese linguist Luís F. Lindley Cintra, who presented his proposal in 1971, but it is important to note that this classification was based on data that he himself had collected for the Atlas Lingüístico de la Península Ibérica. He carried out this data collection in the 1950s. Of course, as he was collecting data from informants who were preferably traditional, non-mobile speakers, in the 1950s he was actually describing varieties of European Portuguese that were more representative of the late 19th century and early 20th century than of the 1950s. The 1971 map that he proposed was even at the time of publication already out of date. Today what Cintra described as the dialectical state of affairs in European Portuguese has changed significantly.

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First of all, in the 1950s, a large proportion of the Portuguese population was still illiterate and thus, less affected by the standard Portuguese dialect. The standard Portuguese dialect, or something very similar to it, certainly had been around for centuries by that time, but until the 20th century, most Portuguese people simply didn't have access to it because they either didn't go to school or they were at school for a few years before dropping out to work. In such a circumstance, the traditional Portuguese dialects were still vibrant. Today, pretty much everyone in Portugal is literate in the standard Portuguese dialect, and thus the standardising effect that national education and the media based in Lisboa have on the rest of the country is absolute.

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Second, the demographic shifts. Cintra separated European Portuguese on the continent into two roughly large groups, the northern more conservative dialectal group and the southern dialectal group, but already in the mid and late 20th century, vast demographic changes were taking place. People were leaving the rural, eastern parts of the country and settling along the coastal regions. Today, starting from the north to the south, the biggest Portuguese cities are Braga, Guimarães, Porto, Aveiro, Lisboa, Setúbal and everything in between this string of cities. The entire eastern side of the country, from Trás-os-Montes to the Alentejo, is being emptied out of people. This is a serious problem for people living in these regions in terms of health care, infrastructure, education, public transport etc as you can imagine, but it also radically changes the dialectical situation in Portugal.

1) Yes, there are still people who speak the traditional dialects of their regions, but they are increasingly fewer and fewer. As the birth rate is below negative replacement, as old people die, as people emigrate to other parts of Portugal and the world looking for employment, whole towns are full of old people speaking their old dialects. But with no next generation to take them up.
2) City folk who move to these eastern regions, perhaps pressured by the spiralling housing prices along the coast etc, do not learn the traditional dialects of the regions they move to.

As the Portuguese linguist Ivo Castro explains, the dialectical situation of Portugal today is not so much north vs south, as west vs east. You could say that all of the dialects of the major cities are (becoming) more similar to each other than they are to their inland varieties. Despite the rivalry between the major metropolitan areas of Porto and Lisboa, they speak more similar to each other than Porto residents themselves realise. He even says that at this point, instead of talking about 'dialectological' differences properly speaking between different geographical areas, soon we'll have to start talking about sociolinguistic differences, that is, diastratic differences between urban vs rural populations, because the old dialectical distinctions are collapsing before the steamroller that is standard Portuguese.

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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Tue Aug 02, 2022 9:44 pm

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The source of the picture is the Danish historian Gustav Henningsen, who took these pictures in the mid 1960s.

What the girl is doing is washing her face in the cacho . The cacho is the concoction of water and plants in which you wash your face, on the early morning of the 24th of June, which coincides with the summer solstice. Tradition says that it has magical protective and curative properties. Before that day, you must collect the water from seven different fountains and mix it with at least seven plants, and leave it outside during the night, preferably in moonlight, so that it is imbued with dew. That's an important part, the dew (orballo) has some kind of magical property as well.

The 'canonical' plants used are the following: romeu (Rosmarinus officinalis), fento (Dryopteris filix-mas), herba luisa (Aloysia citriodora), xesta (Cytisus scoparius), fiúncho (Foeniculum vulgare), malva (Malva sylvestris), hipérico which is also called herba de san Xoán or abeloura (Hypericum perforatum), but you can throw in the leaves or petals of the sabugueiro, ruda, espadana, nogueira, castiñeiro, rosa, tormentelo, mexacán, macela, chopo branco, mentraste and dozens of other species of plants.

Whatever the number of plants, 7 or 20, all of them are used in Galician herbology and popular medicine. Don't let the following picture deceive you, because whilst 7 may be the canonical number, there's plenty of grandmothers who have their own methodology, which amounts to: "This one smells good! Let's put it in."

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I'm happy to say that this is one of the Galician traditions that is alive and well. As you might have noticed, this is a tradition that is primarily transmited by women to women. In this video from 1990, a grandmother shows her grandaughters what plants she collects. If you can't see the video from here, you might have to click on the button to see it in YT, it definitely works there.



She collects two plants I haven't mentioned: nébodas (Clinopodium nepeta) and a herba de Nosa Señora (Artemisia vulgaris), as well as a third that she wasn't able to find, comiño (Cuminum cyminum). Finding all these plants is very much dependent on what you have around you or the amount of effort you're willing to put in to find them. There are people who record the locations on their GPS to come back and find them the next year, but I feel like that's a bit excessive and maybe cheating?

She also mentions at the end what is done with the plants after the washing of the face. They are left to dry for next year's San Xoán. You see, it is a tradition to build cacharelas, cachadas, cachelas, fogueiras, luminárias, lumeiradas, lumaradas, foleóns, caleiras, laradas, rachoeiras, borallos etc. How you call it depends on the variety you speak (did I mention that Galician has a lot of words for any one thing?).

You light this collection of wood and plants on fire and jump over it multiple times. This is something that is very common in all of Europe, I think. The woman relates that when jumping over it there is a verse that you say. These differ, again, from place to place:

Sáltote cabra vella
para que non me morda can nin cadela


I jump over you, old goat
So that neither dog nor bitch can bite me.


And then when jumping back over:

Sáltote herba de San Xoán
para que non me morda cadela nin can


I jump over you, St. John's Wort
So that neither bitch nor dog can bite me.


The grandmother does not mention another practice that is commonly done with the dried, left over plants, which is that they are bundled up and attached to the windows, doors, doorknobs, cracks in the walls of the house, to protect the household from witches. A proverb said in San Xoán says precisely that: En San Xoán meigas e bruxas fuxirán 'on Saint John's Eve, witches will flee'. The tradition varies a bit in the details. Many people make sure to make two collections of fresh plants for San Xoán. One for the cacho and washing the face and another to attach to the house instead of using last year's dried ones, but the time schedule remains the same, it must be done before midday on the 23rd of June.

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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Wed Aug 03, 2022 8:44 pm

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One winter evening, there was a girl from Recaré in the kitchen with her mother, when Fermín da Gaita passed through there. Fermín was 'effeminate', sometimes a man, other times a woman, depending on the moon. Fermín had a thick beard, and he always went around dressed in black. He wore a skirt on top and underneath, a dress. That day, he sat down next to the fire and asked for a glass of wine. The woman gave it to him and they chatted a little bit. When night was falling, Fermín said:

"I'm going to leave, as today I'm a woman and I'm scared that I'll get into problems with the others."

The mother replied:

"Stop that nonsense Fermín, what you are is a man."

"Really?" said he. "Well, you'll see."

And he unbottoned his shirt. The woman covered her daughter's eyes with a hand, but the child could see between her fingers that Fermín had a woman's chest.

Some time later in summer the girl was taking the cows out to pasture in Alvariña, when she saw Fermín taking in the sun, naked. And that day, he was a man.



Story collected by Isaac Ferreira, Manuel Lourenzo and Xesús Pisón in their book 'Contos do Valadouro'. Valadouro is a town in the province of Lugo.
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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Thu Sep 08, 2022 1:36 am

Over the holidays I travelled (by foot of course) through around 290km of north Portugal and Galicia. Speaking Galician in Portugal, Portuguese in Galicia, Galician in Galicia and Portuguese in Portugal.

Many boring stories to tell, but yet another reminder for me why I like learning Galician, and for the same reason, why I like learning any language.

Many Galician villages are semi-abandoned, rural Galicia is being brutally depopulated, as people immigrate to the cities in Galician, or to Spain orto overseas.

In one village, Ventoxo (<90 inhabitants) in the region of Forcarei, I met a woman in her 70s with her herd of goat. I stopped to talk to her, ending up speaking to her for an hour. Lives alone, has had a hard life as a worker since she was a child, has serious health problems that has left her hands barefully functional, and on top of that, barely survived COVID. But despite that, she told me that "inda ronca". She looked at me mischievously: do you know this word? Of course I do, I said, it means that you still snore! No, in this context, she said, it means something different, it means I'm still strong, it means I can still be a show off!

I dutifully jotted down the word in my mental cahier in order to look it up later. In the official RAG dictionary, the word roncar only shows up in the physical sense of snoring, which is the only sense that Brazilians also know it in. But it turns out that the Portuguese use this word in the same sense.

I like talking with old people, apart from the intrinsic value in their experiences and stories, there's also the interesting language that they have. What I call patrimonial speakers or 'paleofalantes', that is native speakers who grew up mostly or exclusively speaking the language in a community of other native speakers. That wasn't hard in the case of Galician, it's easy to find patrimonial speakers born before the 60s, 70s, 80s. But even if you're a patrimonial (native) speaker from the 80s, that doesn't necessarily mean you speak like a patrimonial speaker from the 60s! Even native speakers speak differently depending on generation, social class etc.

Which is why speaking to the oldest strata of speakers is so fascinating, because they speak differently from what you hear on TV or radio. I found myself wanting to stay in the mountains, for a couple of years, immerse myself in their fountain of linguistic knowledge, the immense advantage of having people like that to talk to everyday, learning words I wouldn't find in the dictionary or worse, are in the dictionary but I wouldn't think of looking up unless having heard it before.

And also another pressing reason, which goes beyond merely liking talking to old people who are sometimes 40, 50, 60 years older than me: the NEED to talk to them, before they go away, and I won't be able to talk to them any more. I'm afraid that if I wait any longer to go back to Urepel in the North Basque Country, Jean-Claude will not be there, and when I go back to Ventoxo, Maruxa will no longer be there.

Every day that passes, another speaker of Occitan, Basque, Aragonese goes away, and I feel that there is a time sensitivity with these languages that I don't feel with other languages. If I don't go to the Capcir region (North Catalonia) to talk to the last speakers of the Capcir dialect of Catalan, I don't know if I'll have the opportunity to do so in 30 years time. It's a heck of a motivation to go to the Pyrenees.
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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Mon Sep 12, 2022 12:01 am

As you know, I cycle through my languages. Recently I've been in my Galician phase, and I personally feel like I've improved immensely by reading through Galician literature as well as of course, talking with Galicians. But not for much longer. I will need to move on to my other languages.

This is a poem by the Galician writer Amador Villar, in issue number 4 of the 1921 version of the Nós cultural magazine. In this poem, Villar, who is a man in the 1920s is surprisingly perceptive of the hypocritical attitudes of society and of the very difficult gender roles that women then, like today, have to navigate.

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Be careful with kisses

The lover asked Rosalia for a kiss
But this she would not give to him
And the lover, who would have died for love
Died of great pain instead.
The poor man asked for a sign
That she loved him
And the poor woman did care for him
But she was also chaste.
Thus, when she learned that she had killed
Her first love
It's no surprise that she blamed her modesty
For her pain
But since time heals all wounds
She found another lover,
And when he asked her for a kiss
She remembered the grief
Of her other lover right away.
"What should I do?", said she, "for I fear what
will happen with my second love...bah, blast it!
To him, I shall give my entire self."
And the poor woman gifted him her kiss
But that unjust man thought:
"You are not fit to be my companion,
Because it turns out you're too loose."
And when that bad man abandoned her
Such suffering did she suffer
That a terrible sickness killed the ladybug
When the leaf fell.


The next poem is one of the rare examples of literature from the Seculos Escuros 'the Dark Ages', the period after the Golden Age of Galician-Portuguese literature, when Galician was almost entirely surpressed by Spanish as the literary language. It was written by the Galician grammarian, Juan Antonio Torrado, for a literary contest, the Festas Minervais in 1697, the purpose of which was to glorify Algonso de Fonseca, the founder of the University of Santiago de Compostela. For this poem, he ended up getting the second place prize. I'm not going to translate the whole thing, because it's too long, but if you speak Galician or Portuguese, it should be easy to read it.

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Some obvious things.

First, the pre-modern orthography that is more Portuguese looking in some respects than today's Galican orthography, which was modeled after the Spanish orthography in the 20th century. This is because some of these orthographical choices that were made by Juan Antonio Torrado were in fact, traditional to Galician language and were one of the options for writing them way back in Galician-Portuguese. For example, note the J and the GE/GI in words like longe (lonxe) igreja (igrexa), vejo (vexo), sojeito (suxeito).

Second, the use of some vocabulary that is closer to Portuguese than today's standardised Galician. Examples? Asas (in modern Galician, ás or alas are the ones that are accepted) or penas (plumas).

Another thing is the use of the pretérito mais-que-perfeito do indicativo, but with conditional values. If you recall, I criticised a similar example as a flagrant castelanismo, an influence from Spanish on Galician that we would do well to avoid. I mean, in that example that I gave, it is a flagrant castelanismo, but in this poem, we see multiple examples where - in normative Portuguese and in normative Galician - you would overwhelmingly see the use of other tenses. Is this a castelanismo?

Examples?

Se non fora (=fose) este fidalgo, esta cidade quen era?
Quitando a igreja, e o santo, fora (=seria) peor que Caldelas.
Viñeran (=virían) os estudiantes?
Claro está que non viñeran (=virían).
Que habia de ser dos xastres?
E tamén das taberneiras?

Estou crendo certamente
Se non nacera (= nacese, tivese nacido) Fonseca,
Que houberan (= habían) de andar roubando
O pan e o millo nas eiras

Moitos que foron doutores
Cregos, famulos colegas
Anduberan (andarían) polo monte
Gardando cabras e ovellas


If it were not for this gentleman (Fonseca), what would Santiago de Compostela be?
Except for the Cathedral and the Saint (James), it would be worse than Caldelas!
Would students come?
Of course they wouldn't.
What would happen to the tailors?
And the inn-keepers?

I certainly believe, if Fonseca had not been born
That they would go around stealing
Bread and corn in the fields

Many who were academics
Clergymen, servants
They would be in the mountains
Looking after goats and sheep.


The thing is that it's a little more complicated than that, as I have come to learn since my extremist days of seeing influences from Spanish in every thing. You see, the use of pretérito mais-que-perfeito do indicativo with conditional values is actually something that comes from the earliest days of the language, as you can see in this Galician-Portuguese poem by the 13-14th century Portuguese troubador Martim Peres Alvim:

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Ca, se nom viram (=vissem) estes olhos meus,
nem viram (=vissem) vós, u vos eu fui veer,
e se eu rem nom soubess'entender
do mui gram bem que Deus a vós quis dar,
nom haveria este mal, par Deus,
por vós, d'Amor, que mi há ced'a matar,
a que me vós metestes em poder.

E mal dia mi Deus deu conhocer,
u vos eu vi tam fremoso catar;
ca mi valera (=valeria) mui mais nom nacer.



If these my eyes could not see (= if I were blind)
When I went to see you my lady,
They wouldn't have seen you either (= and this would be a good thing, I prefer to be blind, not see you and therefore not suffer)
And if I were to not understand anything
Of that great gift that God chose to give you,
I would not have this pain caused by love for you,
To whose power you subjected me to
And which soon will kill me

Curse the day in which God gave me knowledge
When I saw you looking (at me) in such a beautiful manner
For it would have been much better for me to not have been born.


In modern day Portuguese, unlike in medieval Galician-Portuguese, this use of the pretérito mais-que-perfeito do indicativo with conditional or other such meanings is almost completely fossilised in certain fixed expressions:

Quem me dera fosse assim = I wish that this were the case.
Tomara eu poder comprar um automóvel! = I wish I could buy a car!
Quisera eu estar no teu lugar = I wish I were in your place.
Prouvera a Deus que tu pudesses adquirir tudo isso de que me falaste! = May God see fit that you get everything that you spoke to me about.

But you can still hear this use in songs and poetry. Example? A traditional song from the Alentejo region, called Oh rama, oh que linda rama. Here are two versions for you, one with the Portuguese artist Maro who I've already talked about in this thread:





Eu gosto muito de ouvir
Cantar a quem aprendeu.
Se houvera quem m'ensinara,
Quem aprendia era eu!


I very much like to listen
To the song of someone who has learned to sing.
If there were someone to teach me,
I would be the one learning


So, now that I have tried to establish that 1) it is indeed a traditional Galician-Portuguese usage 2) even in modern Portuguese it's still kind of used, I go back to my question. In Galician, is it a castelanismo to use the pretérito mais-que-perfeito do indicativo as it is known in Portuguese or the antepretérito/pluscuamperfecto de indicativo as it is known in Galician, with values of the conditional tense and even the subjunctive mood...?

I think a good way to think about this, is not yes or no, but yes AND no. That is to say, the actual phenomenon can be an authentically traditional Galician-Portuguese usage, but at the same time the frequency of its usage in modern Galician can be heavily attributed to the massive force that Spanish is exercising over Galician speakers.

To give an example with numbers I just invented, if in medieval Galician-Portuguese, a poet would have said "se houvesse ua flor..." 70% of the time and "se houvera ua flor..." the remaining 30% of the time, but today in modern Galician we have a proportion of 50% "houvesse" vs 50% "houvera", the castelanismo would not be the phenomenon per se, which remains authentically Galician, but how much Spanish is normalising the use of forms that are convergent with itself. That is, Spanish is so dominant in the minds of Galician speakers or in the minds of Spanish speakers who later learn Galician in life, that it is favouring certain forms that ressemble Spanish, which is why it's now 50% 50% and not 70% 30%.

What is the solution to this kind of castelanismo, which is more subtle and also probably far more difficult to combat than simple and obvious castelanismos, like 'abuelo/abuela', which you can easily point to and say 'don't say these words, these are directly from Spanish'? How do you rebalance structural imbalances? The Galician normativists, both from the official camp as well as from the minority reintegrationist camp, from what I have seen, are strict about it: they condemn the general use of the pretérito mais-que-perfeito do indicativo or antepretérito/pluscuamperfecto de indicativo with conditional values, except for those fixed expressions I've mentioned above, and basically call every other use, a castelanismo.

I personally am much more suspicious. What I would do is try to balance it out. I believe it is possible and healthy to create a standard language where the options are not 'use only this form, the other one is incorrect', but 'use this form, but you can also use this other form'. Unfortunately, if we took this second laissez-faire approach to Galician today, which is under immense pressure from Spanish, it would be entirely counterproductive. Let me explain. If we were to create a standard today where we say "50% of the time, you can use this structure, which happens to be quite different from how Spanish does it, and 50% of the other time you can use this other structure which happens to be how Spanish does it", then what you're effectively going to get as a result is actually 95% of the time, people are going to use this other Galician structure which also happens to be how Spanish does it.

So for purely pragmatic reasons, yes, you do need to be strict, perhaps overly so in school, on TV, in the radio, in the literature, with favouring the Galician structures or forms that have been losing popularity in favour of other (equally authentic!) Galician structures or forms that coincidentally, unfortunately, happen to match with Spanish. It's like affirmative action, but for the aspects of a language (vocabulary, syntax, phonology etc) that are under threat. Give special attention to what is under threat. When the balance has been redressed, then you can think about actually promoting both forms in an equative manner, so that we don't push too excessively in the other direcftion and accidentally or intentionally eliminate features of Galician that happen to align with Spanish.

The difference between my way of thinking about things and the way of thinking of those other people I mentioned, is that I accept that there can be many authentically Galician-Portuguese ways of saying things. There are several things about Galician that I actually disagree with reintegrationists AND official Galician supporters with, where they say that this one thing is 'wrong', either because they really believe that this phenomenon is nothing but a castelanismo and has no authenticity or tradition whatsoever in Galician.

Or because they think that a standard should not accept all the ways of saying a thing, even if they are authentic and are traditionally attested. On one hand, this makes sense. If some forms are overwhelmingly more widespread and popular in Galician than other forms, I can understand (but still disagree with) the desire to standardise these much more popular forms, and not bother with allowing different, minority forms. I, put simply, disagree. I believe that a standard language should standarise basically everything, allow everything...which in the opinion of many, would defeat the purpose of creating a standard language in the first place.

I however think a standard language, as a concept, can be much bigger and much more diverse than most of the standard languages that people and institutions have created up until today. Many standard languages are made by excluding instead of what I would prefer, which is including. Standard Portuguese, for example, is a pale reflection of what I personally think standard Portuguese has the potential to be, by embracing its vast dialectical diversity.

A final example. Standard Portuguese had made standard the forms convosco and connosco, but in some varieties of Galician, and increasingly so (?), there are people who say con vós and con nós. Official Galician and reintegrationist Galician circles usually condemn this usage, marking it as an obvious castelanismo. Peninsular Spanish says con vosotros and con nosotros, not convosco and connosco, therefore, it exerts a pressure upon Galician speakers to say con vós and con nós.

It's probable and likely that the frequency of these forms has been modified by the pressure of Spanish,, but the thing is that these forms are also traditional, from the medieval Galician-Portuguese days living side by side with the forms convosco and connosco. For more info on the history of this polymorphism, read the paper ÁLVAREZ BLANCO, María Rosario: «A variación nosco, connosco, con nós en galego medieval», Verba. Anuario Galego de Filoloxía, ISSN 0210-377X, vol. 31, (2004), pp. 45-72.

But you don't even have to look so far into the past to realise that these forms also exist in non-standard forms of Portuguese today. The first image is from the ALERS, which shows the distribution of com nós and conosco (spelled conosco in Brazil, spelled connosco in Portugal) and com a gente in the south of Brazil. But it's certainly not limited to only these regions in Brazil.

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The second is from an interview I read of an elderly man from the north of Portugal, who had returned to 'studying', after having left school at the age of 12 in order to work, this time in an employment centre for adults in Porto. At his advanced age, he explains that his teachers are also teaching him to speak 'correctly', by correcting him when he says com nós, which was the way that many people - formerly - in the north of Portugal also used to say it.

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Should we condemn con nós/com nós and con vós/com vós in Galician as 'castelanismos', when we know that 1) it existed in Galician-Portuguese 2) it still exists in Portuguese? That's what many people - users of standard Portuguese, users of official Galician, users of reintegracionist Galician, want. They want to bar these forms altogether from the standard forms of their language.

I however, think we should condemn the relative frequency of these forms, not the forms themselves.
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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Mon Sep 12, 2022 10:26 pm

Image

This year is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Sardinian poet and schoolteacher Maria Chessa Lai (1922-2012). Although she was not of Alguerese origin (she was born in the town of Mònti, so one can presume that her native language was Gallurese) she moved to Alguer in order to work there at a school, and in order to connect better with her students she learned their language, which at that time was still Catalan for the majority of them. She wrote in the Alguerese dialect of Catalan.

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Children

To my daughter, Enza

An almond seed
has fallen
into a gap
in the black earth
the earth
has kept
it
in her belly
for the days
of time.
The hidden seed.
From it a tree
has grown
but the almond
bitter and acid
is different
even if it ressembles
its parents in everything.
Children
who are born
when they come to this world
the mother makes them
but they are other people.
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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Tue Sep 13, 2022 6:52 pm

I have a friend who is a history teacher. He taught Basque in the only ikastola in Tutera, in the far south of Navarra. When I told him that my favourite architecture style is the Romanesque and also knowing my interest in Navarra, he created for me a route to walk through the whole south of Navarra, in order to visit the 'greatest hits' of Navarran architecture. Which I dutily followed via hiking and hitchhicking. One of the towns I visited was Uxue, a very beautiful town with a stunning monumental fortress-church, which really needs to be visited to be appreciated.

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Today, Uxue is in the 'mixed zone' of Navarra, that is a zone where both Basque and Spanish is official or to be more accurate, where Basque speakers have an official recognition and certain rights than they would not otherwise have. As I've previously explained, Navarra is legally split into three linguistic areas, the Basque speaking area, which is roughly the north third of the community, the middle third, where most people live and is the mixed zone, and the bottom third, where Basque is not official and only Spanish is official.

Uxue passed from a non-Basque speaking zone to a mixed zone in 2017. Today, if you go to Uxue, you will hear very little Basque spoken. In 2018, only 8.80% of the population said they knew Basque (up from 0.44% in 2001, so you know, it's getting better). But that was not always the case. You see, long after the Middle Ages, well into what we can call 'modern' Spain, what we now classify as the mixed zone was solidly Basque speaking. As you can see in the following picture, in Navarra Basque has rapidly retroceded from its dominant position because of the pressure of Spanish. Including from Uxue.

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How do we know this for Uxue? Because we have historical documents that say so.

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This is a letter from 1676, written by the bishop of Iruñea (Pamplona), who was a Mallorcan (!), Pedro de Roche and adressed to the Royal Council of Castille.

Earlier that same year, the priory of Uxue was left vacant when its prior died. After the kingdom of Navarra was conquered in 1512, it behooved the Castillian king to name the prior who was to exercise their duties in Uxue. So the Council from Madrid asked the bishop to suggest some good candidates for the post, and also asked whether these candidates needed to know the Basque language, a criteria that the residents of Uxue had asked for.

In the letter, the bishop replies:

Por otro despacho me manda Vuestra Magestad informe aparte si es necessaria la intelligencia de la lengua vascongada para el exercicio del Priorato de Santa Maria de Uxue. Y conferida la materia con los padres examinadores y otras personas noticiosas, se halla ser necesaria y precisa la intelligencia de dicha lengua, por ser la común y general de aquel pueblo, y en que muchos no entienden otra. Así lo sentimos y firmamos en Pamplona a 6 de agosto de 1676.


Your Majesty has asked me to tell you in another letter if it is necessary to know the Basque language in order to exercise the duty of the Prior of Santa Maria de Uxue. After discussing the matter with the examiners and other notable individuals, the knowledge of aforementioned language is found to be necessary, as it is the common and general language of that town, and many of its residents understand no other language but the Basque language. It is thus that we feel, and thus that we sign in Pamplona, 6th of August 1676.

After which follows the name of the bishop and a list of the examiners who interviewed the candidates:

Fray Pedro, obispo de Pamplona
Fray Luis Diez de Aux,
Fray Alonso de Villarino
Fray Alberto de Undiano
Joseph de Moret
Fray Francisco Rezio


Of the names here mentioned, one of them stands out, Joseph de Moret, better known as José de Moret. He was a Jesuit priest, and official chronicler of the Navarran kingdom. If you're interested in Navarran history, his Anales del Reino de Navarra is obligatory reading. We know from other sources that José de Moret was also a Basque speaker, probably thanks in large part to his mother who was from Low Navarra (Baxe-Nafarroa). Even though at this point the Spanish language was running rampant through the conquered kingdom, being patronised from high on up and being institutionally promoted at the expense of all the other Navarran languages, Basque was still a language of many of the Navarran elites - this is no longer the case, of course, today.

The examiners interviewed the candidates both on theological grounds, as is obvious, and also linguistic grounds. The document goes on to give a record of the candidates that were examined so far, and apart from giving the theological imprimatur, so to speak, alongside each of the names the bishop also states 'this candidate knows Basque' or 'this candidate understands Basque but does not speak it'.

I want to finally share a small story about Uxue. When I was there, walking through the literally medieval streets and admiring the façade of the church, I got to talking with a man who was doing the same thing. He spoke to me in English first, I suppose because he did not think that I spoke any of his languages. And the man spoke it very well indeed, although he was obviously not a native speaker. I couldn't quite place the accent, and so while the conversation was going on I looked for hints as to where he was from, until I detected something that made me suspect he came from the north - that is, the North Basque Country. So I ventured to speak with him in Basque, and he nearly fell down with how surprised he was. It turned out that he was from the North Basque Country, from Baigorri, and he was here on tourism. Basque tourism does not always go South-North, it also goes North-South!

Obviously he didn't expect people to speak to him in Basque this far south in Navarra, nor did he probably expect someone who wasn't typically Basque looking to speak it (although of course, today, we have many non-white Basque speakers). And we had a lovely conversation, I was gushing to him about my time in Baigorri before his companions dragged him away, and he was telling me that in Lekeitio there was a Baigorri friend of his who had moved there, which I was not aware of! When I went back home, of course, I immediately started asking questions about this man, who turned out to now be working as a local firefighter. Did I mention the Basque Country is small? It seems like everyone knows everyone.

But I never got to ask him how he spoke English so well...I am positive that he was one of many other North Basques to have worked in North America, perhaps as a shepherd.

Many centuries after Basque used to be the common and often the only language spoken in Uxue, there we were, two Basque speaking tourists in Uxue! I hope the recuperation of the Basque language continues, so that Basque as 'the common and general language' of Uxue is not just something that we can read from the history books, but becomes reality once again.
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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Tue Sep 20, 2022 12:42 am

I was in Sara last week for the towns' festival. This is the second time (?) I think I've been there, maybe the third.

Sara is a town in the North Basque province of Lapurdi, with about 2700 residents. Despite its small size, it is quite important in the history of the Basque language. In Sara, the Franciscan monk Esteve Materra wrote the Doctrina Cristiana (1617) in Basque. He was not Basque, but learned and wrote extensively in Basque precisely in order to reach his flock, most of whom did not speak French.

The priest Pedro Agerre Azpilkueta who is also called by the name of his family farmstead, Axular, lived in Sara. He was originally born in Urdazubi, in the South Basque Country but it was in Sara where he wrote his famous Gero (1643), a kind of Christian ascetic treatise. It's worth dwelling on Axular for a moment, because his Gero is a classic of Basque literature. People talk about English being Shakespeare's language and French as the language of Molière. Axular is the closest thing you have to that for Basque. Axular came from an extremely distinguished Navarran family. On his mother's side, he's related to both Martin Azpilikueta, a very important Navarran theologian, and also Francis Xavier...yes, that Xavier, the founder of the Jesuit Order.

Here is a passage of the book, so you can have a taste of what it's like. In chapter XII, he is discoursing about the passage of time:

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Ordea, den beçala eta behar den beçala demboraren hartcera, edirenen dugu deus guti dela, mehar dela eta labur. Presentecoa goça deçaquegu, ethorquiçunecoa desira eta iragana lauda, edo auhen eta deithora. Iraganac eztu erremedioric, hura joan da; ethorquiçunecoa eztaquigu emanen çaicunz; presentecoa hain da guti, labur eta ez deus, ecen orai ere, bigarren hitza hasi dudaneço, iragan baitateque lehenbicicoa, eta lehenbicicoaren denbora.

Içatu da erran duenic dembora eztela deus, hartçaz orhoitçapenic edo pensatceric eztenean. Eta, halatan, lo datçanari etçaicala orduko dembora deus iduritcen, eztuela sentitcen, ezpailiz beçala iragaiten çaicala. Ceren orduan ezpaitu hartan pensatcen, eta ez gogoric eduquitcen.

Urarequin nahi nuque conparatu dembora. Ceren demborac eta urac elccarren idurica handi baitute. Ura bethi doha, bata bertceari darraica. Iragana aitcina da, ethorquiçunecoa guibela dago, eta aitcinecoac aitcinean guti irauten du. Eztu nehorc iragan den uretic hartcen, eta ez ethortceco dagoenetic ere: aitcinekotic, iragaitean, presentean denean behar da atrapatu. Hala da, bada, eta hala eguin behar da demboraz ere, presentecoari lot çakitça, hari probetcha çakitça. Ceren, bertcela, haice ona denean bela eguin gabe guelditcen den untca beçala, gueldi ahal cindezque çu ere.


However, although we take time as it is and as it should be, we shall find that it is so little, that time is fine and short. We can enjoy the present, wish for the future and regret the past, or lament or cry about it. The past can't be remedied, it has gone. We don't know what the future will bring us. And the present is so scarce, so short, so nothing at all that even now, as soon as I have written the second word, the first moment has passed by, and the moment of the first moment.

There are those who say that there is no time when there is no rememberance or thought of time. Thus, for someone who is asleep that time is as nothing to them, they do not feel it, that it passes for that person as if it didn't exist. For they do not think about time, and they have no consciousness of it. I would like to compare time with water, for time and water ressemble each other greatly. Water is always moving, it always follows itself. The past is in front, the future is behind, and what is in front, remains in front for a very short period of time. No one can seize water that has flowed by, nor what is to come. What is in front must be caught when it is passing by. That's how it is with water, and that's how it must be with time as well, link yourself to the present, take advantage of it. Otherwise, you can get stuck, just like a ship that stays still when there is a good wind, because it doesn't have its sails unfurled.


Thanks to these authors, the variety of Sara, a variety of Nafar-Lapurtera, became a prestigious dialect to write Basque with, much copied by other authors who did not speak this dialect as their own. The Bizkaian priest Pedro Antonio Añibarro for example translated Gero into the Western dialect in the 19th century, shaping the literary western dialect as well.

Curiously enough, despite its prestige status, the dialect of Sara has had to wait a long time for any serious linguistic study. The German linguist Hugo Schuchardt briefly investigated Sara's dialect in his work Zur Kenntnis des baskischen von Sara (Labourd) (1922) but unfortunately, it wasn't published until 1992. And you'll struggle to find any more studies apart from that. Luckily, we now have Koldo Zuazo's 2017 published book + dictionary on Sara's variety of Basque, which while it isn't the exhaustive tome that you would hope for, is a great introduction to the particularities of the Sara dialect. It's from this book that I will quote the Basque citations below.

The situation of Basque in Sara is as serious as it is in other parts of Lapurdi. Lapurdi, as you know, is by far the most Frenchified Basque province in the North Basque Country. Let's charitably ignore the coastal regions of Lapurdi, the Baiona-Angelu-Miarritze urbanisation where the majority of people live, indeed, where the majority of people in the whole of the North Basque Country live and where only 8% of the population is Bascophone and only 2% of people use Basque.

Instead if we only take into account the rest of Lapurdi, more inland, we have 23% of the population as Bascophones and 11% as people who partly understand Basque.

However until the mid 20th century, Sara was very Bascophone, as the South Basque priest Jose Miguel Barandiaran recounts in his memoires. He, like many other South Basques, fled to the North Basque Country during the Spanish Civil War and lived in Sara for over 13 years, between 1940-1953. He gives a linguistic description of the town in the 1940s:

Saratarren mintzaira euskara da. Gehienek frantsesez ere badakite nola edo hala, baina ez da ohikoa beren arteko solasean. Zenbait merkatarik, aberats jendek edo zerbitzu lanetan ari diren neska gazteek egiten dute frantsesez. Baita eskola haurrek ere, horixe baita eskoletan erabiltzen den mintzaira bakarra.

Eskola emaileek (hiru errient eta bi errientsa) ez dute mintzazten eta ez diete haurrei mintzatzera uzten euskara: frantsesez da irakaskuntza guztia. Eskola libroan gauza bera gertatzen da, baina katixima euskaraz da. Dena den, neskatoek elizan kantatzen dituzten kantuak - seroren zuzendaritzapean zenbaitetan - frantsesez dira. Haur frantsesak edo frantses mintzodunak eta haur euskaldunak ez daude, beraz, pedagogiak galdegiten duen berdintasun egoeran: frantsesdunak abantaila izanen du beti. Frantsesaren alde egiten du eskolak; baita garai bateko handiki familiek eta oraingo burgesek ere. Errientek mutikoak jotzen dituzte; errientsek, berriz, neskatoak aldi batez xokoren batean bakartu edo atsedenaldian esaldi bat hainbat aldiz kopiatzera behartzen dituzte. Konparazione, Ibarsorobehereko neskato batek, atsedenaldian oharkabean euskaraz mintzatu baitzen, ehun aldiz eskribatu behar izan zuen "Je ne parlerai pas le basque" esaldia.


The language of Sara residents is Basque. Most people 'know' more or less French, but it's not usual for them to speak French between them. Some traders, rich people, the young women who work in the service industry speak French. School children as well, as that's the only language that is used in school.

The teachers, three male teachers and two female teachers, do not speak Basque, and they do not let the children speak Basque. School is entirely in French. At the private school, the same thing is true, although they do the catechism in Basque. However, the songs that the girls sing at church - sometimes under the supervision of the sisters - are in French. The children of French origin or French speaking children and the Basque children are not in the same position that pedagogy requires: the French speakers will always have the advantage. School is on the side of the French language. So too the town's old money and today's bourgeois families. The male teachers hit the boys. The female teachers send the girls to one corner of the room or they force them to copy a phrase during the break time. For example, a girl from the Ibarsorobehere farmstead was caught speaking Basque at play time, and she had to write one hundred times "I will not speak Basque."


None of this will be news to anyone. I don't have any up-to-date figures on how many Basque speakers there are in Sara. I can't give you any data in the absence of sociolinguistic surveys, only my impression. But I would hazard a guess that it's still at least 50% of the population. However if you start off from a town that is nearly 100% Basque speaking, you have a long way to 'fall' before you hit the bottom. At the festival I spoke Basque with most of the elderly local people in Basque. As for children and young people?

Sara saw its first ikastola open in 1997 for a handful of 2 to 5 year old children, which was then closed down in 1987 due to a lack of students. It reopened in 1992, again as a pre-school or school for infants. In 2003 they set up a primary school section, so with kids up to 11 years old. In 2020, they had 107 children in total, from Sara itself and from neighbouring towns. That's not a despreciable number.

Yes, I spoke Basque to many young people, some from Sara, others from neighbouring North Basque towns who had driven there to party. It probably drove up the numbers, in the sense that when you have a party that's oriented towards Basque speakers, you're going to get more Basque speakers, and so Sara on a normal day is probably less Basque-speaking. And it was a party that was very much oriented towards Basque speakers, in the sense that the activities that were organised by the youth organisation of Sara were in the Basque language with little or concession made for the French speakers.

I'm not referring to the very simple things like the prices for alcoholic drinks being in Basque, which a French speaker could easily ignore by just ordering in French, which I noticed that many people did but 1) the bertsolaritza session, which was held in Basque with no French translation, to the complete bewilderment and incomprehension of the French monolinguals 2) the concert by the Aire Ahizpak, who of course sang their setlist of Basque songs but also only spoke to the audience in Basque between songs, again, excluding the French monolinguals 3) the late night concerts (both by South Basque bands) who only spoke in Basque and sang in Basque and only played music by Basque bands.

The bertsolaritza session was an interesting thing, held by three North Basque bertsolari. Two were locals, Amets Arzallus and Haira Aizpurua. Amets is from Hendaia, but has moved to Sara to live and raise his family there. He sat next to me as we were listening to the Aire Ahizpak concert and I was star-struck as he's one of those bertsolaris who I absolutely adore, but as he was with his family, I didn't want to disturb him! But I was happy to notice that he spoke to his children in...Basque, of course. He spoke to his children in Basque and in turn his children spoke to each other and to their parents in...Basque, of course. Something so normal, and something that has become rare in the North Basque Country. If he had not spoken Basque to his children, I think my estimation of him would have dropped like a rock.

Haira however was born and raised in Sara, so she is a true local. Whereas the third bertsolari, Oier Urreizti is from Bidarrai in Baxe-Nafarroa. I learned this from talking to him...I wanted to know when the bertso session would be starting, so I asked the nearest person to me, who turned out to be precisely one of the bertsolaris! We had an interesting chat while we waited for the clock to tick down. The theme setter was also a bertsolari teenager from Sara, Julene Etxeberri. It was shaping up to be a very nice local affair.

I didn't take any videos of the bertsolaritza session, but I will show a video of Haira Aizpurua on another occasion (which she won). She's only 16 years old but she has already won three times the North Basque Country Interschool Competition, as well as the All Basque Country Interschool Competition last year, and is very comfortable going toe to toe with older, much more famous bertsolaris as well. I choose this video because it shows a grammatical trait of the Sara dialect (and dialects along the Bidasoa river) that I find quite interesting:



Zure familiak etorkin bat aterpetu du orain arte
gaur duzu adio erraiteko eguna.

begi berdeak
ditu lagunak
eta iluna azala
burasoekin aipatu eta
neretzat zena normala
azken eguna zuena egun
erran nahi niola hala:
gure etxean
egoki zira
maitekiro berehala
adio Ibrahima
maitatu zaitut
anai haundi bat bezala


Your family has sheltered an immigrant until now
Today is the day when you say goodbye.

Green eyes
Has my friend
And dark skin
I brought it up with my parents
And what for me (seemed) normal
His last day, today
I wanted to tell him:
You are
In our home
Right away loved
Good bye Ibrahim
I loved you
Like a big brother


In Sara, instead of using the synthetic verbs (doa, dabil, dago etc), they use periphrastic constructions made from the participle + the suffix -ki. So instead of doa 'he/she/it goes', they say joaki da 'he/she/it goes', and like in this bertso, instead of dago 'he/she/it is', they say egoki da 'he/she/it is'.
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