You make it sound that at one point in time there was a true basque language. But isn't language an evolving matter? It is slightly different from one village to the next, changes continuously over time, words get a different feeling, mixes as family members marry someone from a different village, etc.

There are lots of actual reconstructions of nearly-lost languages, though. Language certainly evolves, but there are people, that you can name, that sat through committee meetings putting together and voting on some of these reconstructions; for example Modern Hebrew and Hindi (to name probably the largest ones.) Modern Greek also seems like a bit of a disaster of historical reconstruction committees arguing with farmer observation committees for ages. Even English got clumsily rebased onto Latin and Greek from the 16th century on as its spelling was being standardized by prescriptivists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_language_question

So regardless of whether there's a "true" Basque language, it certainly could have gone through a period of conscious, top-down reconstruction after some period when middle-class academics (and politicians, usually) who would be interested in either rediscovering or purifying the language, or just plain looking for a nationalist project to rally around couldn't find anyone left who spoke the language at all, spoke it purely enough for them, or even spoke it prettily enough for their image of what the language should be.

I don't know that this happened to Basque, but it happens all the time.

Also, current "Spanish Batua" in Spain it's the same as the Batua in Basque. No one uses it on the streets, specially in Andalucia, Murcia and Extremadura, and the 90% of the speakers around the world use the local language. It's mainly "properly" used... in academia.

Come on... what a comparison. Spanish has been very alive and spoken for centuries with a proper standard. Even the RAE (royal academy of spanish language) was founded in 1713, and this already set standards at the time.

Standard spanish is used all around in the sense that: people have known it for a long time. We understand it all. Of course there are localisms, but the same way Andalucia, Extremadura or Murcia speak a very strong dialect, in my area or Valladolid, Salamanca, Madrid or even Cataluña people speak a very standard one. In fact, the areas you said are the most "dialectizied". The rest of Spain is way more standard when speaking it.

Soy nativo. Prueba con los chilenos y argentinos. No, el periódico Clarín no vale. Habla con ellos, lee textos destinados a la gente con jerga más que localizada.

Soy español. No he leído un periódico argentino en mi vida, pero hablo valenciano/catalán además de español y conozco mi país bien. Tengo amigos vascos, he estado allí, conozco el entorno, la historia, los mitos. Lo he comprobado por mí mismo. Es un tema altamente politizado el de las lenguas.

Pero no me informo por canales políticos exclusivamente. Sé de lo que hablo, créeme.

Y yo conozco tanto vasco como castellano y entiendo perfectamente los euskalkis siendo hablante algo de vizcaino (ahora no tanto por donde vivo) como de batua.

Las diferencias entre euskalkis son como las que puede haber entre un murciano, un chileno, un cubano, un colombiano y un mexicano. El léxico puede variar enormemente, incluso las conjugaciones verbales auxiliares (dot/dut/det) pero el idioma es el mismo. En castellano pasa igual con dile/decile al otro lado del charco en el cono sur.

Sobre el uso político, para mí portugués y gallego podrían ser el mismo idioma perfectamente salvo diferencias morfológicas triviales, cosa que ya ocurre de forma clara en la conjugación verbal argentina, chilena y uruguaya.

No, what I said is that it was a minority language, even before the dictatorship that so few people spoke in comparison to spanish even in that area that there were things you could not even express in that language anymore.

You can believe it or not. That is not to say that it is not the local language of that area. But they make it look like it was the only, true one, when this has not been the case for centuries. The same valencian was the original in my area. But it was mixed with castilian (what you know as spanish is castilian) for centuries.

What happens nowadays is that they force and do not let people study in spanish in some areas. Spanish have the right to study in the language that they deem appropriate from the official ones in their area. And so that you see I am not inventing anything, because people will jump to me it is not true. It is in fact true that for years there have been people who cannot study in spanish at school in the public system, a few days ago we even had in Mallorca a resolution from judges that denied the right for a student to study in spanish!

Here, catalans denying 25% of teaching in spanish ignoring even court resolutions: https://elpais.com/espana/catalunya/2022-05-31/la-generalita...

My first gf when I was young had to come to my area because she was denied the right to study in spanish in public school. This is not a joke, it happens all the time for years.

Here a student that cannot (has not the right, according to judges) study in spanish, when it is a guaranteed right. This shows the politization of the court system, bc it does not exist in the law, no matter their twisted argument, a denial of the right for a person to study in an official language in that community (county equivalent), yet it is happening: https://www.elmundo.es/baleares/2022/11/14/6372645121efa0721...

Here basques trying to kick out spanish from the education system: https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/espana/2022/09/18/gobi...

This is a topic where they typically say (the nationalists) that since spanish is everywhere they should be able to deny the right to study in spanish, bc they will learn it anyway. I am all for letting people to study in basque, catalan , valencian (which I can speak also) or what they choose.

I am, at the same time, totally against the public system forcing you to choose one of the languages they decide.

This is continuosly used with political goals.

I mean, I can understand Basque medieval writings, and also the first word in the discovery the article highlights. Claiming that it didn't exist before the 70s is rather a stretch.

Yes there was a large effort during the 60s to recover the language and unify it in order to use it in education and governance, comparable to the unification of Mandarin Chinese.

It had to be recovered because using the language was literally criminalized during the dictatorship, so yes, it had to go underground and was forgotten to an extend for a generation. But still, it was spoken in homes in both rural and urban areas, and my father's family attended an illegal basque school during the dictatorship, as well as having to bribe officials to give basque names to their children.

It is definitely true that basque has many many loanwords from spanish and other romance languages. There is in fact significant evidence (including this latest discovery), that this intermixing dates all the way back to the Roman occupation with original Latin, before spanish existed, so it makes sense that there is significant shared vocabulary.

> Claiming that it didn't exist before the 70s is rather a stretch.

Hey, noone said this! Read back what I said. What I said is that the state of the language was bad. Because it was only spoken in villages not in urban area and for lack of standardization/normalization. So they did have to reconstruct a part of it.

> And it had to be recovered because using the language was literally criminalized during the dictatorship.

As far as I understand (know that my family if of valencian speakers, so do not think I am talking out of thin air) local languages were out of the education system but not forbidden or criminalized. Namely: it was not illegal to speak those. It is just that they were not used in the education or administration, which I admit it can have an impact.

> having to bribe officials to give basque names to their children.

Interesting, did not know about this, but yes, I do believe it.

> basque when thinking about real language heritage. Basque is just a reconstruction.

I can read Leizarraga's writtings from the 16-17th century by just using the Batua.

Batua it's just Basque built around Gipuzkoan-Navarrese-Labourtan.

Kinda like yours from Valladolid-Salamanca-Madrid in Castillian. I remind you that the 90% of the world DOESN'T speak like in the former Castilles, but like Andalucia and the Canary Islands.

No one speaks "Español Unificado". No one. Pick up any Galician, Asturian, Extremadura, Andalucian, Canarian or worse, any Spanish speaker from the US to the Patagonia. No one will speak like the Castillians, ever. Even if RTVE has millions of speakers. That's it.

The same thing happens in English with the RP. Everyone in Europe learns BBC English, but no one speaks like a BBC news anchor IRL, maybe the ex-Queen.

On a global scale, the so-called Spanish from the RAE, as if it was spoken from Perez-Reverte, it's the minorized one.

Also, just cross the pond. Even those created "Español neutro" for media, yet no one uses it daily.

Let's get serious: if everyone used their Spanish dialect in a hard way, the 80% of the Hispanic world wouldn't understand half of what were they saying.

The same with Basque. Or... English:

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pit0OkNp7s8

> No one speaks "Español Unificado"

This is true for every language in the world with any relevance. You said nothing here.

> Let's get serious: if everyone used their Spanish dialect in a hard way, the 80% of the Hispanic world wouldn't understand half of what were they saying.

I was not making that point. The point was that it was a more-or-less dead language except in a few areas. I am not saying recovering it is a bad idea either. But since that was the situation, then it needed to be reconstructed by taking many borrowings, whether you like it or not.

This is not the case for spanish or english or chinese, with all their dialects, that are spoken by a big amount of people. Of course, languages keep evolving and what is true today maybe will not tomorrow. But that is another story.

>, then it needed to be reconstructed by taking many borrowings, whether you like it or no

So what. RAE did the same, back in they day they were against anglicisms, italianisms and galicisms. They had to step back against cocktail, carnet, chófer, sonata, acuarela and lots of borrowed words.