My husband has just been to a professional conference in La Rioja. Why do doctors feel they confer better in places renowned for wine? I was allowed along for the ride, although it meant that even when we had a delicious dinner (those bream with gold-painted noses and bits of animals that would make Digby Anderson’s heart glow) it was to the accompaniment of conversation about ventilation and macabre things done with butterflies.
There was a poor Chinaman at a neighbouring table with never a grain of rice to be had unsteeped in milk and cinnamon, and I began to experience the sense of the alien that he must have felt when we ventured into the nearby Basque country. Wales I can cope with; one soon learns that tacsi means ‘taxi’. I should love to know Basque, that ancient tongue left like the last turret of a sandcastle when the tide of Indo-European swilled around it. But I never shall. And that makes me uneasy about the twin-language approach of the local government of that autonomous region.
None of my business, of course, but most of the Spanish-speakers in the region will not become systematic Basque-speakers any more than I am. All they are left with is notice-Basque. I mean things like ‘public lavatory’. The notice-Spanish for that is aseos (although what people say in restaurants or bars is servicios). The notice-Basque is komunak. That looks to me suspiciously like a loan-word. There are all sorts of long Latinate words for things like demonstrations, organisations and other notions that are represented by even longer but fundamentally similar words in Basque with a k at the end.
I do not mean to say anything deep about Basque by such ignorant remarks.
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