Nearly none of the young men and women who immigrated to the United States from the Basque County to herd sheep in the American West had any knowledge of English. This wasn’t much of a problem as they typically worked with other Basques. However, encounters with the dominant language of their new home were unavoidable and sometimes represented concepts that they didn’t have a Basque word for, so they simply transliterated the English word into Basque spelling. This leads to an interesting collection of “Basqlish” words.
- Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe, who has done extensive research on Basque arboglyphs, has uncovered a number of transliterations of English words to Basque. Some of these will be familiar to those who had a Basque parent – you can almost hear their accent coming through. He shared these with me after I wished him Happy Thanksgiving.
- Here are a few of Joxe’s favorites. The English equivalent is hidden in white text next to each Basqlish word – just highlight the text to reveal the English word. But, before you do, can you guess what the word is? I only got about half of them…
aizkrime
anburgesa
esprinkola
estorra
foki
grinjouse
karrue
kukia/kukije
morojona
mubije/mubia
paia/paije
pikapa
sanabitxe
saniskibi
sizpaka
taia/taije
troka
txip
uintxila
xata
zereala
ice cream
hamburger
sprinkler
store
the f-word
greenhouse
car
cookie
motorhome
movie
pie
pickup
son of a bitch
Thanksgiving
six pack
tire
truck
sheep
windshield
shot
cereal
A full list of all of Buber’s Basque Facts of the Week can be found in the Archive.
Primary sources: Joxe Male-Olaetxe, private communication.
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That was cool definitely a brain teaser.I got about half myself,but missed the bad word ones.Not sure how that happened I would have thought those would be the only ones I got.Go Figre
Yeah, given that was half of my dad’s vocabulary – my wife said she had such a hard time understanding my dad until she realized that every other word was a bad word… 🙂
I am howling! That is my Aitxitxe speaking! He didn’t learn any language very well so everything was a combo of euskara, castillano and english. Our family favorites are: escrewdrivera, hammera eta laddera.
Awesome! And those words are great!
This is hilarious!! I got few of them!! But the Basques, Bearnais and Gascons -the whole Aquitaine region punctuate the conversation with bad words. so does one of my cousins!! and my little nieces when they are with their Basque schoolmates. They look at each other and giggle.
It is funny but on the other hand, a bit sad. Sad because immigrants who came to this country must work twice as hard, put up with twice as much chicken s*&^. It takes intestinal fortitude to survive and to raise their children well, like all of you are. I hope that you realize that you stand on the shoulders of great people.
Thank you for the laughs!
Monique Durham