Talk:Basque language

Is one preferred? In Spain (non-Basque regions) I had only seen euskera, was surprised/confused to see euskara here. I looked it up in both an English dictionary and the Real Academia and find both variants. Should euskera be offered here as an option/alternate spelling? I didn't want to make the change myself because I don't know if there is a history or controversy between the two spellings. 2600:8807:4040:9C0:B859:87C0:F705:4886 (talk) 00:59, 14 March 2025 (UTC) Reply

So there are multiple regional variants of the language name. When (some) Spanish speakers began to use the/an endonym in the 70s, they went with euskera, presumably because Standard Basque was only just being defined. Standard Basque eventually settled on euskara and my guess is that this change didn't filter through into Spanish usage. See ngrams Akerbeltz (talk) 14:05, 1 May 2025 (UTC) Reply

There is an article about Iberian language by Fernando Villamor, which makes some interesting claims, although its self-published, though I think some of its information is useful and can be mentioned. I suggest we can left a little information about Villarmor in "Hypotheses concerning Basque's connections to other languages" section, but maybe I am simply blind and this article is unacceptable. Celtoi (talk) 10:56, 30 April 2025 (UTC) Reply

A search on Google Scholar turns up (once I exclude works by a Fernando Villamor who writes on Bolivian law) seven works—basically two works, with separate listings for various installments and editions. One of those listings shows three citations, the others (including the one you're citing) show none. Regular Google turns up no commentary on this work in response to a search request for "fernando villamor" iberian. It isn't up to us to give attention to a hypothesis or analysis that has received none in reliable sources, by an author who has also achieved no apparent recognition as an expert in the field. We need to know that outside sources have found information in his work interesting and useful, or else worth a public trashing; that isn't our judgment to make. Largoplazo (talk) 12:11, 30 April 2025 (UTC) Reply

Look at this as well, Villamor's own account of his background at https://independent.academia.edu/FernandoVillamor/CurriculumVitae. Even though all the documents that I have published on Academia.edu deal with Linguistics related topics, my academic background in this area is simply non-existent. I am a Telecommunications Engineer by trade, with a degree from Madrid’s ETSIT at Universidad Politécnica, and my main scientific interests beyond that telecommunications field are in the study of the early stages of civilization. So he's a hobbyist, albeit an ardent one, with no validation from the field. Largoplazo (talk) 12:30, 30 April 2025 (UTC) Reply

WP:SELFPUB by someone who is NOT "an established subject-matter expert, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications". It's clear-cut can't be used. DeCausa (talk) 22:32, 1 May 2025 (UTC) Reply

We had this debate some years back and reduced all the hypothesis claiming to link basque to some other language to a bare minumum. If we listed all the crackpots that attempted to link Basque to IE, it would swell to an absurd size. At best we could tweak it to something like "a genetic link between Basque and the Indo-European languages has been proposed by Forni (2013), Blevins (2018), though their contributions to the hypothesis have been rejected by most reviewers" and leave it at that. Hualde is polite, but basically trashes her 'proposal':

• insightful and interesting, but problematic, internal reconstruction
• One example might be enough to illustrate the methodological problems that I see.
• where does she get the meaning ‘go along’ from a word that means ‘blood’?
• adelu ‘preparation, arrangement; adorment, trim; release, launch’. To me, and I believe, almost any specialist in the language, these do not look like native Basque words at all and appear to be, instead, transparent Romance borrowings, cf. Old Sp adeliñar ‘arrange, prepare, fix’...

Akerbeltz (talk) 11:32, 14 July 2025 (UTC) Reply

Well, obviously the specialists are not going to say that they have been wrong until now and Basque is not an isolated language. Calling a careful study by a Columbia University professor crackpot just for that is very unfair, and the fact that at least 2 specialists have bothered to evaluate the work and publish about it means that it's worth that effort. Gorrochategui says that Blevins' hypothesis doesn't reach the sufficient level of comparative evidence ('no alcanza el nivel de evidencia comparativa suficiente'), and I don't think that is trashing it. --Jotamar (talk) 20:27, 15 July 2025 (UTC) Reply

doesn't reach the sufficient level of comparative evidence IS trashing it, however politely worded :D The fact that two respected vasconists does not lend merit in itself to Blevin's paper. Vasconists have to spent a non-trivial amount of time debunking stuff like that. I stand by what I said, I'm ok adding her name to the same sentence as Forni's and that they're ideas have been rejected by mainstream vasconists. Frankly, someone including obvious Romance loans into a framework for linking Basque to some other language in the 21st centure is SO unforgiveable that 'crackpot' is probably too polite a word. Akerbeltz (talk) 16:11, 17 July 2025 (UTC) Reply

There is too much political baggage around it at this point to have a reasonable discussion, it seems. But I do think some day a connection of some sort will be generally uncontroversial. 2601:280:5383:B690:B8A0:E9:8008:BC66 (talk) 13:28, 18 July 2025 (UTC) Reply

Everything related to the Basque Country carries a lot of political baggage. --Jotamar (talk) 16:08, 27 July 2025 (UTC) Reply

I will settle for the solution suggested above. --Jotamar (talk) 16:08, 27 July 2025 (UTC) Reply

Aren’t Greek, Armenian and Albanian also isolates? 2603:7080:E501:5CB3:B551:3BFD:D8D5:20B (talk) 01:31, 24 July 2025 (UTC) Reply

Those are all Indo-European languages. Largoplazo (talk) 01:47, 24 July 2025 (UTC) Reply

The redirect Useful Basque phrases has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 September 11 §Useful Basque phrases until a consensus is reached. Jay 💬 17:02, 18 September 2025 (UTC) Reply

There is clearly a link between Basque and the now-extinct Iberian language as shown at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_language#Numerals. Languages rarely borrow their entire numeral systems (and never borrow low numbers like from 1-20), so this is strong evidence of a connection between the two languages. Right now there is only a small paragraph in the article suggesting a connection between the two languages, and it is lumped together with a bunch of rejected hypotheses. ~2025-31340-95 (talk) 00:11, 6 December 2025 (UTC) Reply

Sources. DeCausa (talk) 00:29, 6 December 2025 (UTC) Reply

You're basing your claim that "there is clearly a link" on a section elsewhere on Wikipedia of which the first sentence reads Whether Iberian and Basque are two languages of the same language family is still a much-debated question. and the third sentence reads But there is not enough evidence to date to ascertain whether the two languages belong to the same language family or whether the relationship is due to linguistic borrowing. Then you're adding your own reasoning to it (in violation of WP:OR) to reach a conclusion that directly contradicts what the passage you cited says about how "clearly" a link has been established. Largoplazo (talk) 00:52, 6 December 2025 (UTC) Reply

Languages don't tend to borrow their entire numeral systems from another language, that is completely historically unprecedented. Usually when borrowings occur it's for large numbers that weren't originally in the language (million, billion, etc.), never for small numbers under twenty like we see here. Also don't tell me that "we can't link them because Iberian isn't attested enough", when Wikipedia confidently claims that Lemnian (barely attested) and Rhaetic (barely attested) are related to Etruscan (not even fully deciphered yet). ~2025-31340-95 (talk) 04:40, 6 December 2025 (UTC) Reply

It is pointless for you to repeat your own factual analysis like this after I already explained that basing Wikipedia content on contributors' own factual analysis is prohibited. (By "factual analysis", I mean as opposed to analysis of the reliability of the sources or weighing contradictory sources against each other.) Wikipedia says what reliable sources say, it doesn't draw its own conclusions from them. If those other articles are making assertions not found in reliable sources, then they need to be fixed.

Your analysis is flawed anyway. "It hasn't happened elsewhere, therefore it can't have happened here" is fallacious reasoning. And it's still only your own say-so, since you've supplied no sources to support your claim.

It's still odd that you began all this by citing content elsewhere that directly contradicts the claim you were making. Largoplazo (talk) 12:23, 6 December 2025 (UTC) Reply

I linked the other Wikipedia page to show the table comparing the numbers. I wish I could have provided academic sources, but unfortunately most of them seem to be paywalled or otherwise inaccessible from the internet.

Anyway, here are some other Wikipedia pages that are worth looking at because they completely contradict this one:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquitanian_language (bizarrely, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language contradicts this page by claiming without any evidence that Aquitanian was an early form of Basque.)

Even if you disagree with my position, you should at least agree that Wikipedia needs to be internally consistent. ~2025-31340-95 (talk) 18:18, 6 December 2025 (UTC) Reply

Firstly, there's no Wikipedia requirement for consistency between articles. It's actually an impossibility because of the diversity of crowd-sourced editing. WP:CONSENSUS is article-by-article and the approach is generally per WP:OTHERCONTENT. Secondly, I don't even see the conflict. Both this article and the Vasconic languages article both say that a link with the Iberian language has been put forward but is little supported. Thirdly, there's no contradiction in that and saying Basque is a language isolate. Of course it could be related to extinct languages. That's not what a language isolate means. Basque has no genetic relationship with any extant language. DeCausa (talk) 19:32, 6 December 2025 (UTC) Reply

Here is an example of a language that is only genetically related to extinct languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ket_language. Wikipedia clearly indicates that it is part of the Yeniseian family (and therefore not an isolate). I don't see how Basque is any different. ~2025-31340-95 (talk) 19:40, 6 December 2025 (UTC) Reply

You seem determined to take every approach you can think of to this other than the only one that can succeed under Wikipedia's requirements for verifiability: Find reliable sources that directly state what it is you're claiming, without any need to extrapolate from what they any further. Largoplazo (talk) 20:48, 6 December 2025 (UTC) Reply

"therefore not an isolate". No! It says it's "long thought to be an isolate". It's the exact opposite of your point. Just so no one can misunderstand that article like you have done I've made it clearer here. DeCausa (talk) 22:32, 6 December 2025 (UTC) Reply

Just an observation in passing regarding languages never borrowing low numerals. Au contraire? Vietnamese, Korean AND Japanese wholesale borrowed the Middle Chinese number system, including 1-20 Sino-Xenic vocabularies Akerbeltz (talk) 11:56, 23 January 2026 (UTC) Reply

Japanese has 2 systems, one of Chinese origin (ichi, ni, san ...) and a native one (hitotsu, futatsu ...). --Jotamar (talk) 21:14, 23 January 2026 (UTC) Reply

On the other hand (thanks to Google AI responding to "are there languages that borrowed their numbers from another language" for leading me to info I was then able to verify), I found that in Thai the names of the numbers from 3 to 10 come from their names in in Middle Chinese (see Thai numerals#Zero to ten and respective entries in English Wiktionary) and that the name for 2 is borrowed from a Middle Chinese word meaning "pair".

Khmer uses practically the same words as Thai for the numbers 3 to 9 for literary purposes. Otherwise, it uses a native set of names. In addition, Khmer's word for 10 is also a borrowing from archaic Chinese, and its names for the tens from 30 to 90 consist, respectively, of the literary Chinese-derived names followed by the Khmer word for 10 (see Khmer numerals, which also illustrates the relationships among the names from those languages).

So that puts to rest Languages don't tend to borrow their entire numeral systems from another language, that is completely historically unprecedented, which was a waffle anyway—they tend not to, but it's also unprecedented for them to do so? Largoplazo (talk) 23:22, 23 January 2026 (UTC) Reply