A few weeks back, I flew up to Idaho to visit my parents. As I’ve written about before, my dad, once I left home for school (coincidence, or something more…?) started to make chorizo and jamon. He’d never done that before. Sure, he had his massive garden full of txurizeros (txuritxeros? That’s the way he […]
Gontzal Aranguren is an old friend and roommate from my days in Seattle (old in the sense that we’ve known each other a while, not saying he is an old man (baina, gizon zaharra bada…)) Since he returned to the Basque Country, he has gotten involved in a number of very interesting and very different […]
I first visited the Basque Country in 1991. The Internet was just starting to reach students at universities. I remember that, at the University of Idaho, I had barely learned about email before leaving for Spain. When I got to Spain, it was difficult to find any computers to log into and read or send […]
The Basques have been an integral part of the history of much of the world, from their role in Magellan’s voyage around the globe to their participation in the Spanish conquests of America. The Basques also touched a lot of the American West, and, while I should by now be accustomed to the pervasiveness of […]
Not hosting my site on WordPress.com, I never noticed this fancy button that allows people to enter an email address to receive notices of posts to the blog. It wasn’t until I saw Hella Basque‘s follow button that I became aware of this feature. I found a plugin that allows and WordPress-driven site to have […]
This year marks the 40th anniversary of NABO — the North American Basque Organizations. NABO’s goal is to bring together the Basque clubs of North America (NABO has member clubs in Canada and the United States) to help those clubs in their efforts to preserve and promote Basque culture. NABO is thus a collection of […]
I’m not a geneticist, but I am fascinated by what modern genetics can tell us about the history and prehistory of humans. The Basques are particularly interesting because of the pre-Indo-European origins of the population. As more and more genetic studies are done, I think we will ultimately recreate a detailed map — both spatial […]
Today is July 10, 1813. Donostia has been occupied by Napoleonic troops for 5 years. The Marquess of Wellington, commander of the allied troops, reaches Hernani. The British have already landed troops and weapons and ships have begun the blockage. The siege of Donostia begins. 200 hundred years ago today, the Siege of Donostia began, […]
Yesterday I posted about another blog that ranked languages in terms of “weirdness”, which made the claim that Spanish, German and English were much weirder, in comparison with other languages, than Euskara. Well, another blog, this one from the Language Log at the University of Pennsylvania describes some issues with this analysis. In particular, a […]
One of the people who follow Buber’s Basque Page on Facebook (thanks Rachel!) sent me this link to a blog post that evaluates the weirdness of languages. I’m not a linguist, so I can’t really comment on their methodology, but it seems that what they’ve done is compared all of the languages that are assessed […]
