Some Thoughts on Basque and Irish

 

Last night I was a little scared before my first Zoom Basque class. Would I be the oldest one in the class? Would everyone else know each other? Yes, and know what else? It didn't matter! I had so much fun! The teacher looked about 21, and he kept saying things were "sick" and other slang like that. He didn't have an accent at all, other than a West Coast one, but he is a native speaker of Basque. It was early evening for the rest of them, and they were amazed to hear I was in the Midwest, not because it was so late for me but because they assumed (correctly!) that it must be so cold and snowy for me right now. I hadn't really spoken Basque since before any of them were born, but it did start to come back to me. I even sang the little song for them that I learned to conjugate the "permanent" verb that means to be. (Like Spanish, they also have one that means temporary state or location.) I think my brain enjoyed delving into something it hadn't done in almost three decades, because all night I dreamed about going dancing at the nightclub here in town that no longer exists.

Studying Basque again reminds me that it still isn't as weird as Irish. In fact, I wouldn't really call Basque "weird," it's just got a different syntax. It's kind of like in the passive voice all the time, like you would say "Euskadi maite dut," which is literally "The Basque Country has my love," instead of the "I love the Basque Country." But it's an easy language to pronounce, and very phonetic, and easy to sing in too. Just because it's set up so differently than English or the Romance languages, it still seems orderly and makes sense. It just has its own logic. Contrast that with Irish, where the syntax always leaves me thinking, "What the what now?" Basque has a verb for "to have," and words for yes and no, but does Irish? Heck no! I don't have a computer that I'm writing this on, the computer is at me in Irish. And I'm not sorry, I have sorrow on me. My favorite is probably not that I like Irish, but that Irish shines with me. We are always having to translate Irish sentences into the torturous English that is a literal translation and then figure it out from that. And what's with the first consonant always changing? I've never seen that before! But I'm starting to get a real feel for it.

But I think that's why I like Basque and Irish. It would have made so much more sense to go for the low-hanging fruit like French, where a trip to the French House tells me I am clearly not fluent, but there's a lot more to build on. But French isn't that interesting in that it works so much like English. To me it's fun to learn a language that works so differently. Maybe I should indulge that lifelong dream to learn Mandarin...

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