Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have disconcertingly long earlobes?
Is this a Basque thing? I have significant Basque ancenstry and people have always pointed out how long my earlobes are.
Apparently it is yes.
The Basque-Icelandic Pidgin
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Re: The Basque-Icelandic Pidgin
#12I'm Basque, I'm a very long time HN regular, and I love linguistics related topics. So I'm keen to see this, but I still don't fully understand how this makes it to the front page :)
General amusement, historical quirkiness, an interesting ad hoc linguistic interoperability framework (between two quite thoroughly-distinct languages) - lots of reasons :)
Agur!
(It's been too long since I visited your country - such a beautiful place!)
Re: The Basque-Icelandic Pidgin
#13I am Icelander and I grew up in a fishing town near Reykjavik. When I was a small child, my greatgranddad was still alive and my mother would call him aitona. Later I learned that it was a basque word and that he came from a basque family. Small world indeed!
Re: The Basque-Icelandic Pidgin
#14I am Icelander and I grew up in a fishing town near Reykjavik. When I was a small child, my greatgranddad was still alive and my mother would call him aitona. Later I learned that it was a basque word and that he came from a basque family. Small world indeed!
Aitite and aitona are synonyms for grandad, the Basque language has a surprisingly large amount of dialects :-)
Re: The Basque-Icelandic Pidgin
#15Re: The Basque-Icelandic Pidgin
#16On a related note, there was also a Fench-Icelandic pidgin
https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/jpcl.4...
Re: The Basque-Icelandic Pidgin
#17Re: The Basque-Icelandic Pidgin
#18I'm Basque, I'm a very long time HN regular, and I love linguistics related topics. So I'm keen to see this, but I still don't fully understand how this makes it to the front page :)
I recently discovered and started frequenting all the internet resources that have grown around the language learning community (there's a lot of websites, youtube channels with polyglots showing off, etc).
As a Spaniard, it was really surprising to see how popular the Basque language is around those circles. I think it's a mix of the historical quirkiness of it being a pre-roman western European language, and the bragging potential for language learners due to how niche and unrelated to other languages it is.
If you ever need to make some money on the side, there are sites where you can book conversations with native speakers to practice, and basque is really in demand, so an euskaldun can make good money :)
Re: The Basque-Icelandic Pidgin
#19On a related note, there was also a Fench-Icelandic pidgin https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/jpcl.4...
Weird. The few lines on preview page look like Danish, except "runet" which looks like English "run" with a Danish past participle ending. I don't see anything that looks French.
I would read the next to last line as: "you have run ashore?"
Re: The Basque-Icelandic Pidgin
#20I'm Basque, I'm a very long time HN regular, and I love linguistics related topics. So I'm keen to see this, but I still don't fully understand how this makes it to the front page :)
I recently discovered and started frequenting all the internet resources that have grown around the language learning community (there's a lot of websites, youtube channels with polyglots showing off, etc). As a Spaniard, it was really surprising to see how popular the Basque language is around those circles. I think it's a mix of the historical quirkiness of it being a pre-roman western European language, and the br…
Yes, that's true. I also think this is due the history of linguistics itself as a field. Until the 19th century, I think scholars focused on european languages. Nearly all of them of indoeuropean origin: Maltese probably just ignored, Finnish and Hungarian found to be distantly related (I never saw Estonian mentioned in older texts), and Basque was "the mysterious isolate".
Please share with me some links to those sites where I could make some side money just by speaking some Basque, sounds like a good mental break from programming :)