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 […]
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 […]
Ok, so maybe this isn’t a common problem, but if you are hosting a Basque-themed party, you might be at a loss for finding those party favors and decorations that have that Basque touch to them. BSG Baiona has you covered! They have toothpicks with Basque flags, Basque flag banners, and much more. Some nice […]
The last few weekends, my family and I have been visiting consignment galleries, hoping to put an item up for sale. Usually, we simply hear that they aren’t interested and then we end up wandering the gallery for an hour, looking at all of the memories people are hoping to get a little bit of cash […]
A pidgin, according to Wikipedia, is “a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common.” That is, when two new groups come into contact and they can’t communicate, they begin create a new language that is some hybrid of the two. […]
Way back in 1991, in between my sophomore and junior years at the University of Idaho, I took a year off to study both Basque and Spanish in the Basque Country through the program offered by the University Studies Abroad Consortium — USAC. I was more interested in Basque, but both my dad and my […]
I’m trying to get caught up on my email and am finally getting to some news that I should have shared months ago… My apologies to those who alerted me to these. First, a little-known but interesting side story to the history of the United States. During the time that the fledgling country was developing […]
On the way to work this morning, I heard a story on NPR about a woman of Puerto Rican heritage from north Philly that wrote an ABC book from her neighborhood’s perspective. It got me thinking what would an ABC book from a Basque-American perspective look like? Some of my thoughts are below, any others? […]
Paul Etxeberri alerted me to the .eus campaign to create a Top Level Domain for the Basque Country. From puntueus.org, the website promoting this effort: “An endangered language will progress if its speakers can make use of electronic technology” David Crystal [ Cambridge University, 2004 ] “languages without social prestige will disappear” Amadeu Abril i […]
