618 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Basque has to include so many other parts of speech. The Arabic 

 language is similarly primitive. It has words for yellow, red, 

 green, and other tints, but no term exists to express the idea of 

 " color," apart from the substance of the thing on which, so to 

 speak, the color lies. 



A second primitive psychological characteristic of the Basque 

 is found in the order of the words. These follow the natural 

 sequence of ideas more closely than in European languages. The 

 importance of the idea determines precedence. Thus, instead of 

 saying " of the man," the Basque puts it " man, the, of." Nouns 

 are derived from one another in this manner. From burn, head, 

 comes buruk, "head- for- the," or bonnet.* Many of the words 

 thus contain traces of their derivation, which have long since 

 vanished from the Aryan. Sayce gives some good examples. 

 Thus orzanZj thunder, comes from orz, cloud, and azanz, noise. 

 The word for month is illcibete, derived from illargi- bete, meaning 

 " moon-full." The first of these two parts is again divisible into 

 il, death, and argi, light. In this manner we can trace the process 

 of reasoning which induced the combination in many more cases 

 than in our own languages. We still have some, like twilight or 

 hidalgo, which in Spanish signifies "son-of- somebody," a noble- 

 man ; but these are the exception. 



Probably the most primitive element in the Basque is the- 

 verb, or the relative lack of it. It was long asserted that no such 

 part of speech existed in it at all. This, strictly speaking, is not 

 true. Most of the verbs are, however, really nouns : " to give " is 

 in fact treated as if it were " donation " or the " act of giving." 

 It is then declined quite like a noun, or varied to suit the circum- 

 stances. This is indeed truly primitive. Romanes has devoted 

 much time to proving that the verb requires the highest power 

 of abstraction of all our parts of speech. Certain it is that it is 

 defective in most primitive languages, from the Chinese up. Its 

 crudity in the Basque is undeniable evidence of high antiquity. 



The archaic features of these Basque dialects in the days when 

 language and race were synonymous terms led to all sorts of 

 queer theories as to their origin and antiquity. Flavius Josephus 

 set a pace in identifying the people as descendants of Tubal- Cain 

 and his nephew Tarsis. In the middle ages they were traced ta 

 nearly all the biblical heroes. Such hypotheses, when compara- 

 tive philology developed as a science, gave way to a number of 

 others, connecting the Basques with every outlandish language 



* Good details on the structure of Basque are given by Pruner Bey in Bulletins de la 

 Societe d'Anthropologie, 1867, pp. 39-71. Blade, cited above, also describes fully. Jules 

 Vinson is the best modern authority. Vide his Le verbe Basque in recent volumes of the 

 Revue de Linguistique et de Philologie Comparee, Paris. 



