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 […]
Mikel Morris, an American with dual US/Spanish nationality living in Zarautz, Spain, has written the definitive Basque-English dictionary and is currently working on the Morris Magnum which promises to be the largest bilingual Basque dictionary in existence. In the first part of this interview, Mikel shared his thoughts and hard-hitting observations on the status of […]
I’ve been meaning to share this set of links for a while and just thought I’d “dump” them on you before I either forget or they get outdated. 🙂 Last.fm, an online music station of sorts, has a channel dedicated to Kortatu and similar artists. I haven’t spent a lot of time with it yet, […]
My Euskara is very poor. I have a basic understanding of the grammar, but my vocabulary is very limited and I don’t have the declensions nor the conjugation of the verbs in my head. Even so, I’d like to pass what little I can on to my daughter, to at least give her an exposure […]
Finding nice overviews of the Basque Country — its history, culture, traditions, and language — is rare in English. There are, of course, The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky and The Basque Country: A Cultural History by Paddy Woodworth. But, both of those are rather lengthy and certainly have their authors’ respective […]
There seem to be two camps in linguistic circles on the role language has in shaping how we think. I’ve read a number of books by Stephen Pinker, who is of the opinion that the particular language we speak doesn’t shape how we think, that there is a meta-language underneath, common to all of us, […]
Two more points about Euskara that I wanted to mention. First, Renee Marticorena sent me a note about UNESCO‘s new classification of Euskara as unsafe. They have an interactive atlas of languages in danger, which is interesting in its own right, but, with regards to Euskara, shows it to be in an unsafe position in […]
In 1991, I went to Euskal Herria to learn Euskara. My dad is from Munitibar, and my mom’s grandparents were from Leikeitio (her grandma) and Mutiloa (her grandpa). While of course my dad was fluent in Euskara, my mom hadn’t had the opportunity to learn. Her dad, while born and raised in Oregon, also knew […]
