My husband suddenly found it necessary to discuss some hair-raising medical developments with other doctors in the sunshine of an out-of-season ski resort in the Pyrenees, and for once he let me come too, and enjoy some healthy walks while the menfolk were playing at Frankenstein. Perhaps he had heard they have reintroduced wild bears in the Pyrenees.
Well I wasn’t eaten by a bear, but I did get an appetising sample of a language that I hardly knew existed. I don’t mean Basque, which is a language that does not belong to the Indo–European group. This one does, and it is called Aranese (Aranes by its speakers).
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It is spoken in the valley of Aran, which had no proper road into it until a tunnel was completed. I had assumed therefore that Aranese was a mere dialect of Catalan with an admixture of Aragonese (which is pretty much like Castilian).
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