It seems like a simple question: what is the Basque word for God? But, like almost everything Basque, there is a lot of nuance in this simple question. The modern words for god and God in Basque are not typical Basque words. Does that mean they were borrowed? Or created by a priest only semi-literate in Basque? Or do they come from a more ancient source, the pre-Christian religion of the Basques? We’ll likely never know for sure, but this “simple” word carries a lot of history with it.

• The modern Basque word for god is jainko, and for God in the monotheistic Christian sense Jainko. However, the more typical word for the Christian God is Jaungoikoa, which literally means “Lord from on high.” In earlier texts, especially in Iparralde, Jainko is more prevalent than Jaungoikoa.
• As Larry Trask discusses, the form of Jaungoikoa is very atypical for Basque words. We would normally expect a word that meant “Lord from on high” to look more like Goikojauna. While no one knows where this word came from, it might be a more literal translation of “Lord from on high,” the typical Latin phrasing, where that Latin word order was kept in an invented Basque word.
• There are at least three hypotheses on the origins of these two words.
  • Jainko is the ancient Basque name for some god in the Basque folk pantheon and Jaungoikoa was invented, as mentioned, as a backwards formation of the Christian “Lord from on high.”
  • Jainko is not ancient at all and is some kind of contraction of Jaungoikoa.
  • The two words are not related at all and just share a coincidental similarity (Trask favored this hypothesis).
• Jainko is also odd in a few other ways. It is rare, though not impossible, for native Basque words to start with ‘j.’ And, the letter/sound combination ‘nk’ is also very rare.
• There is another Basque word for god, and that is ortzi. The French pilgrim Aymeric Picaud, in his “tourist” guide to the Way of Santiago, has a brief Basque “dictionary” and lists ortzi (in his notation Urcia) as meaning god. Probably, ortzi is the native Basque word for sky, and it is present in many modern Basque words: as a few examples, orzargi ‘daylight’ (argi ‘light’), ortzadar ‘rainbow’ (adar ‘horn’), ortzantz ‘thunder, storm’ (azantz ‘noise), ortzitsu ‘stormy’ (tsu ‘full of’), orzgarbi ‘clear sky’ (garbi ‘clean’). There is speculation that, when Picaud pointed to the sky and asked what the word for god was, the natives thought he was literally pointing at the sky and told him the word for sky. That the Basque word for Thursday is ortzegun or ostegun – `ortzi-day’ – suggests that, just like our Thors-day, Ortzi was originally a god of thunder.

A full list of all of Buber’s Basque Facts of the Week can be found in the Archive.

Primary sources: Some Important Basque Words (And a Bit of Culture) by Larry Trask, Buber’s Basque Page