@beautiful-basque-country / beautiful-basque-country.tumblr.com
TEXTBOOKS: - Arian (A1-B2) - A1 pdf version - Gramatika eta ariketak (I & II) - Lehen urratsak - Euskal gramatika (pdf) - Gramática didáctica del Euskera (pdf)
BASQUE COURSES ONLINE: - Lots of useful links Several languages available: - Ikasbil - Ikasten
neguko jantziak - winter clothes
beroki - coat
eskularru - glove
eskuzorro - mitt
txano - beanie
bufanda, tapauka - scarf
jertse - pullover
jaka - jacket
txamarra - anorak
praka luzeak - long trousers
botak - boots
galtzerdiak - socks
lepo-berogarri - neck gaiter
euritako - winter coat
aterki - umbrella
buru-beroki - ski mask
eskijama - winter pyjamas
Eternal glory to Spain's first astronaut!!
Somebody posts about some show character's name being Basque - when it's not - and meaning something - that's impossible because it isn't Basque to begin with.
I politely ask what sources they have to claim that.
I politely get blocked by that somebody.
That trope of people on Tumblr who act like they can say whatever about Basque because is some sort of magical language nobody truly speaks, and later blocks you or start a drama - remember the RWBY one? - when you say something are 💀.
Iruña will have an EH Bildu mayor now that PSOE will support the vote of no confidence against current mayor (from UPN, rightwing party).
The Spanish right is MAAAAAAAAD.
Elbira Zipitria was born in Zumaia (Gipuzkoa) in 1906, but her family soon moved to Donostia where she later became a teacher. After a few years, she left the school where she worked in and founded the first ikastola in Donostia. Ikastola is the name given to private schools offering an education 100% in Basque.
She wasn't just a teacher but an activist, and was a member of the Basque Nationalist Party, as well as other associations related to the development of Basque language.
During the Spanish Civil War she escaped to Lapurdi, and came back in 1939. In 1943 ikastolak and Basque language were banned, but Elbira found a legal loophole - all teachers with a degree could privately educate children younger than 9 years - and started to give private classes to children 100% in Basque, at first in the students' homes but, as more students demanded her classes, she would teach in her own house.
Soon there were too many children for just one teacher, so Elbira also started forming new teachers to help her with her clandestine ikastola. When the teachers were ready, they started giving classes in their homes, so the ikastola grew, one teacher and one home at a time. In 1957 one of these teachers opened the first clandestine ikastola in Bilbo, and others opened ikastolak in other Gipuzkoan towns. The already existing ikastolak implemented the Zipitria method, and all the teachers formed by Elbira soon began to teach the new generation of teachers.
Elbira worked until 1968, when the net of illegal Basque schools was too big and became noticed by the Government, that sent the police to make registrations, forced to close them down, and overall made their job impossible since a new law prohibited to open any private school center without a proper registration. The net of ikastolak was dead.
But Elbira Zipitria met with all the ikastola teachers and decided to open a school - another clandestine ikastola in fact - with the help of priest José Elgarresta Iturbe. Since it was supported by a priest, the center was officially acceptable to open and so the Ikastola Orixe was born in 1970. Elbira retired just one year later.
Elbira Zipitria was a corageous defender not only of Basque language, but of education of both kids and adults. She, her teachers, and the students' parents, all of them risked themselves to severe fines and prison if caught, but somehow managed to teach for +25 years unnoticed. If that wasn't enough, she developed a long-lasting methodology for education in Basque and helped Euskadi keep our language alive amidst a cruel and suffocating ban.
Of course she deserved a statue:
what a whitewash. "Basque people are historically anti-fascist to the extreme and characterized as terrorists because of it" and "but it's safe to say that the Basque Country and Cataluña are historically the most vocal about it - even in Spain, those two communities are stereotyped as the rebellious anti-monarchy types, or even "whining" or "terrorists" for how vocal they are". You weren't just characterized as terrorists or so-called for being rebellious, there were in fact Basque terrorists
kaixo! I’m just wondering what traditional basque weddings are like please, I’m struggling to find much online 😢 love your blog! ❤️
Kaixo anon!
Basque weddings aren't different from any other Catholic wedding. The main difference is the presence of a cart of oxen carrying all the presents:
And the costumes. Here are some newlyweds:
kaixo! i don't know if you've seen it, but there's a group of philologists that tried to translate the words in the hand of irulegi.
https : // alea . eus / komunitatea/bizkaiko-filologo-taldea/1669808272770-analisia-irulegi-eskua-testua-I-aurkikuntzak-posibilitateak
https : // alea . eus / komunitatea/bizkaiko-filologo-taldea/1670405937734-analisia-irulegi-eskua-testua-II-aurkikuntzak-posibilitateak
Kaixo anon!
Yes! I've seen those articles but haven't shared because they're too technical and demand a deep understanding of Basque language and linguistics.
Let's see if these philologists came close to the meaning, once it's cracked!
It amazes me how the fascist propaganda about Gernika being a center of the resistance instead of a rural town full of women, children, elderly, and wounded - men were fighting in the mountains - is the version that has survived internationally.
I hope that a century from now the story that will be told isn't that Gaza was annihilated because it was a huge center of islamist terrorism.
Boats and fog, Hondarribia (Gipuzkoa) [x]
I've seen the weirdest responses to Guernica's protesting for Palestine and the sounding of the sirens; the stupidest of which said something to the effect of "proof that Spain is still a fascist country"
Like bro the Basque people are historically anti-fascist to the extreme and characterized as terrorists because of it
Most of the autonomous communities tend to dislike the central government in Madrid, and most have suffered some kind of discrimination from the central government, but it's safe to say that the Basque Country and Cataluña are historically the most vocal about it - even in Spain, those two communities are stereotyped as the rebellious anti-monarchy types, or even "whining" or "terrorists" for how vocal they are
I can't blame the average person for not knowing the ins and outs of Spanish politics and history but it really does tell me that certain people's understanding of the European aspect of WW2 is limited to Germany, a little of Poland and France, and the treatment of Jewish people - but have real blind spots when it comes to what else was going on and who else was suffering from the Nazis
It also tells me some people's understanding of WW2 stops at 1945
(And it tells me you know nothing of Picasso... but art, and Picasso in general, is not everyone's cup of tea)
Also - and I'm usually not prone to defend Spain - Spain is one of the very few countries that has been openly against what Israel is doing and the Spanish President has been quite vocal and clear on this.
So, no. Spain is not siding with fascism this time.
What’s the deal with Basque. It’s a language isolate but are the Basque people like an “ethnic isolate”? Are the Basque people significantly genetically different than neighboring peoples? Is there any particular reason everyone else in Europe was either exterminated or assimilated by the Indo-Europeans, at least to the point that they adopted IE languages—but not the Basques?
Regarding genetics, I can't really say. Genetics is way outside my area of expertise, and looking online it doesn't appear that there's a real consensus. It appears that the general picture is that they have some amount of local hunter-gatherer ancestry and some amount of admixture from steppe populations, which is qualitatively the same as the rest of Europe. They may have these things in different proportions(?) than other European populations, or something like that; it sounds like a number of the studies disagree with each other. I think I'd have to have a better understanding of human genetics in general to give a more confident assessment of what is going on.
Linguistically speaking, Basque is the only non-IE language spoken in Western Europe today (Uralic languages, such as Finnish and Hungarian, are spoken in Eastern Europe, although they are probably later arrivals to the region than even IE), but it is not the only non-IE spoken in Western Europe within recorded history. The collective name for the languages spoken in the Iberian peninsula before the Roman conquest is the paleo-Iberian or Paleohispanic languages; of these, several were not Indo-European. Aquitanian in particular is generally identified as a direct ancestor of Basque. But there were also others, scantily attested, that may or may not have been related. These existed alongside Continental Celtic languages in the region.
There was also Etruscan, in Italy, which was non-IE. Etruscan civilization largely predated the Romans in the area and was highly influential on them; the Latin alphabet is principally adapted from the Etruscan alphabet (itself adapted from Greek), and Latin borrowed a number of words from Etruscan. Some of these have even made their way into English, for instance the very common word person, from Latin persōna "mask", possibly from Etruscan phersu "mask".
Anyway, whether or not any of these languages represent holdovers of the pre-IE linguistic environment in Europe is hard to say. For instance, some have argued that the Etruscans or their ancestors were actually late arrivals from somewhere south, possibly Anatolia. But I don't think there is any conclusive evidence for or against such ideas.
It is worth noting that ethnic and linguistic groupings very often don't align. Groups may remain ethnically distinct while adopting a majority language, or may remain linguistically distinct while losing a sense of ethnic identity, and so on. So genetic studies are often-useful-but-highly-imperfect proxies for linguistic relatedness, and vice versa. For instance, most of the "Negrito" peoples of South East Asia are highly genetically distinct from neighboring populations, but many of them speak Aslian languages related (distantly) to Vietnamese and Khmer. These languages are clearly distinct, but should not be misunderstood as holdovers predating the spread of genetically East Asian people to the region.
My understanding is that the evidence regarding Basque points to it being as pre-IE holdout in Western Europe. However, this need not say much about the genetics of the Basque people.
In any case, as to the question of "why" it held out when other pre-IE languages disappeared? I think it's kind of impossible to say. Presumably the mountainous and isolated nature of the Basque Country played a role; indeed all the studies I looked at seemed to say that genetically Basque people showed signs of isolation within the last thousand years or so, suggesting that they did not have as much contact with other European populations. But, beyond that, if you look at the fact that other pre-IE (or at least non-IE) languages survived in Western Europe until the historical period (Etruscan and some paleo-Iberian), it is perhaps not so surprising that at least one of them would make it to the modern day. Basque looks like a complete outlier now, but going back even 2000 years and there were a number of other languages in its position. In some sense the Indo-European migration into Europe was "not that long ago", on archeological timescales, so perhaps things like this are to be expected.
A theory defends 4,500 years ago Yamnaya people came from nowadays Ukraine and Russia and successfully anihilated almost 100% of the men in the Iberian peninsula. Still nowadays 80% of Basque men are said to have Yamnaya chromosomes.
If true, very few original, ethnic Basque genes were left after that, just on women's side. Fast forward and another study: according to Barry Cunliffe Haplogroup R1b-S116 - said to be commonly found among the early Celts - is also found in a very high frequency among us Basques, reaching 75%. I'm not a geneticist and don't know if this percentage can make sense with the previous theory.
Personally, I think that in the 21st century it's almost impossible to find an ethnic isolate in continental Europe, especially in Western Europe with its history of millennia of invasions. Besides, our people traditionally identified as Basques just because we spoke the same language. It was the Basque language what made us Basques, not certain genetics or visible ethnic differences 🙂.
One of the oldest carols in Euskal Herria: Birjina gaztetto bat zegoen (The virgin was a young girl). It's written in Zuberera - the dialect from the Zuberoa region - and this version by Zuberoa Aznárez - Diabulus in musica vocalist - is just 🥰🥰🥰.
Fun fact: in the 19th century, one priest translated it to English and it's now known in the anglo-sphere as The Angel Gabriel From Heaven Came.
Birjina gaztetto bat zegoen kreazale Jaonaren othoitzen, The Virgin was a young girl praying to the Lord of creation, nuiz et'ainguru bat lehiatu beitzen zelutik jaitxi mintzatzera haren. when and angel came running and down from heaven to talk to her. Ainguria sartzen, diolarik: «Agur, graziaz zira betherik, When the angel entered, he said: «Hail, full of grace, jaona da zurekin, benedikatu zira eta haitatu emazten gañetik». the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou, and chosen among women». Maria ordian duluratu eta bere beithan gogaratu Mary then was in distress and thought to herself zeren zian uste gabe ebtzuten hura agur erraiten. Hanbat zen lotsatu. what meant that unexpected greeting that he was saying. Suddenly she blushed. «Etzitela, ez, lotsa, Maria; jinkoatan bathu'zu grazia: «No, don't be ashamed, Mary; thou hath the Lord's grace: zuk duzu sabelian ernaturen, eta haor bat sorthuren Jesus datiana». thou hath your belly awaken, and a child created / called Jesus». Mariak arrapostu ordian: «Hao naizu Jinkoren zerbutxian, Mary then responded: «Thou hath me at God's service, zuk errana nitan biz konplitu». Jaona aragitu haren sabelian. may what thou said be fulfilled in me». The Lord was incarnated in her belly. O Jinkoaren ama saintia, bekhatugilen urgaitzarria, Oh, Saint mother of God, supporter of sinners, zuk gitzatzu lagunt, bai Jinkoaren, baita berthutiaren bihotzez maithatzen. help us, thou of God and of virtue, loving us with all thy heart.
Different traditional costumes of Euskal Herria [x]
[ID Summary: A tweet about a political peaceful protest in Guernica protesting the genocide of Palestine. In 1937, Nazis bombed a village for Franco's Spanish Nationalists, because the Nazis saw it as a center of resistance against fascism.
86 years later, descendants of the village show solidarity with Palestinians and protest the genocide of Palestine.
There is a video included with the protesters holding up several different colored flags, which, when held to be viewed from above, form the Palestine National Flag.]
The town's name is Gernika, by the way. "Guernica" is the Spanishised spelling that Franco forced on us when he rose to power and tried to erase our language and culture from existence.
Not to derail the post, but Gernika wasn't bombed because "it was the center for the resistance against fascism" - it was a tiny rural town - but to kill Basque civilians as psychological warfare. Friendly reminder that Gernika was bombed on a market day - meaning not only Gernika locals were there, but lots of people from the surroundings - and that the town was hosting the survivors of the bombing of Durango. The town was packed with women, elderly, children, and wounded. Center of the resistance my ass.
Also, it was a calculated attack against one of the biggest and oldest Basque symbols: the Tree of Gernika, that represents our old laws and traditions since before the Middle Ages. Gernika burnt for three days and three nights, but the tree and Basque people survived.
So the fact that innocent civilians in Gaza are being pruposely murdered echoes especially loudly in Gernika.
Blue hour in Bilbo (Bizkaia). Pictured, Louise Bourgeois' Maman.
[x]
sorry if this was asked before but is it guernica or gernika?
Kaixo anon!
When Picasso painted his masterpiece in 1937, Basque ortographic rules hadn't been set yet and Basque words were written following the Spanish ortography. That's why the artwork is called Guernica, just like the town name was written when painted.
However, since we have our own ortographic rules and language standards since the 70s, the official name of the town follows the Basque ortography - as it should, since it is a Basque town: Gernika.
Long story short: Guernica for the painting, Gernika for the town.
