[Note: All Basque words are
in Italics and Bold-faced Green]
BASQUE
ASSOCIATED WITH ESKIMO*
A review derived from the following: Nyland, Edo. 2001. Linguistic Archaeology: AnIntroduction. Trafford Publ., Victoria, B.C., Canada. ISBN 1-55212-668-4. 541 p.
----Please CLICK on underlined categories [to search for Subject Matter, depress
Ctrl/F ]: Introduction
An ancient
language form that originated in the North African area of our most ancient
civilizations has been studied by Nyland (2001). He found that
many words used to describe names of places and things in Eskimo languages
seem to be closely related to the ancient language, which Nyland called
Saharan, and which later was predated by the Igbo Language of West Africa.
Fortuitously, the Basque Language is a close relative to the
original Saharan. Following is
a discussion of this relationship: It has been claimed that there are
many names in use by the Eskimo people of Arctic
Canada that appear to be related to Basque Nyland
(2001). The land north of the tree line is called Ungava, which in Basque would be
Ungaba, Unagaba. Many Basque names are assembled from several words by
agglutinating the first letters of these words. Unagaba sounded like it came
from unagarri (boring) gaba (night). Calling the long, dark, northern night, a
"boring night" made very good sense, but the apparent relationship
with Basque seemed to be accidental. The North American reindeer is called
"caribou", spelled karibu in Basque; from
kari-bu, kari (reason, purpose, destination) burdun (roasting
spit): "Destination roasting spit" again made good sense. The
indigenous people of the Arctic call themselves the Dene; dena in Basque means
"all of us" and is the same word as in Denmark. Having been alerted
to the possibility of an unsuspected and unlikely link between Europe and the
eternally frozen land of the Eskimos, Nyland looked for a possible path the
Eskimo language could have taken. Both the names Alaska and Canada looked
promising; Alaska, alas-ka, from alatz (miracles) -ka (suffix denoting continuous action, unending),
"Miracles unending" is exactly the reason why so many tourist ships
cruise along the Alaska coast. Canada, spelled Kanada in Basque, clearly is
assembled with the vowel-interlocking formula: .ka-ana-ada, akabu (ultimate,
extreme end) anaitu (to get together) ada (noise of...), "At the far end we'll have a noisy-get-together" i.e.
"On the other side we'll have a party".
THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN BASQUE & ESKIMO
LANGUAGES
The following may sound implausible, but this is how Edo
Nyland believes it could have happened. To answer the above question, it is
necessary to dig deep into the origin of the "Basque" language. The story started during the Ice Age, which
had peaked 16,000 bce. (see Climate) The melting of
the massive glaciers covering the Alps had caused profound changes in
air-circulation over North Africa. It is estimated that by 10,000 bce. the
effect was starting to be felt by the people living in the central Sahara. By
8,000 bce. the increasingly dry conditions caused serious droughts there, and
by 5,000 bce. the tribes living in the affected areas had to escape to the
shores of Africa, the higher elevation areas and the major river valleys like
the Senegal, Niger and Nile. Tribes that had traditionally lived along the ocean shores
of the Sahara had long been involved in long distance ocean travel and had
discovered many lands. They were also developing star navigation into a
science. While bringing this into
practice, they were well on their way to discover all the continents of the
world, with the likely exception of Antarctica. By the time the refugees from
the central Sahara reached the coast, the Sea Peoples
living there were ready to ferry them to new homes on the north coast of the
Mediterranean and to the fertile and beautiful lands around the Black Sea,
especially the Danube and Dnepr River valleys and also the Caucasus region.
The seafarers living along the coasts of Arabia and Mesopotamia had scouted
out the entire south coast of Asia and discovered Indonesia, Formosa (Taiwan)
and the Japanese islands. Around 6,000 bce., a Caucasian-like tribe which became the
Ainu of Japan probably sailed, probably from the mouth of the Euphrates
river, to settle on one or more of the beautiful and richly forested islands
of Japan (see Sea Peoples). A risky migration
required a strong commitment of support from the people back in Mesopotamia.
There may have been a good reason for this particular group to migrate so far
away. The Ainu had adhered to the extremely ancient religion of the bear
worshippers, evidence of which has been found as far back as 200,000 bce. [This date certainly involved a precursor of Homo
sapiens -- email]. Changing times
and religion in Mesopotamia may have caused them to leave civilization to
seek a country where they could practice their bear sacrifices without
obstruction. Trade prospects may have had something to do with the support
they received from the mercantile class back home. The Japanese islands,
which were already sparsely populated, must have appealed to these intrepid
pioneers. The newcomers, with their superior technical and linguistic skills
taught their Saharan language, boat building, leather tanning, ocean
navigation etc. to the native population with whom they appear to have been
on generally good terms. The long ocean voyages necessary to stay in touch with the
homeland, as well as their long discovery trips in the Pacific, required an
active boat-building and sail-making industry. Wood was no problem in Japan,
the country was full of it in all sizes and qualities. The problem was skins
for sails. These people were still hunter-gatherers and wove no cloth, so
leather was the best alternative. Back home in the Sahara, this problem had
been solved by the Berbers who set up a large hunting camp in Arctic Norway
near Mount Komsa in Finnmark around 8,000 bce. There they annually took large numbers of reindeer out of the
herds migrating through the area and sent the skins to the oak forests of
southern Sweden and Conamara in Ireland for tanning with oak bark. This
example was followed by the Ainu whose scouts had discovered the astonishing
wildlife riches of Alaska, especially the many herds of caribou migrating
through Alaska and the Yukon. Their
numbers were in the hundreds of thousands. Camps were established in the
arctic tundra of Alaska and the hunt began. The skins were either tanned
locally with the brain of the killed animals, or taken back to Japan and
possibly Korea for bark tanning. Thus equipped they explored everywhere and
it is likely that the west coast of North America was discovered by Caucasian
type people long before the east coast was. It is well possible that the west
coast of America was reached by 8,000 bce. [see Climate
for conditions at the time] RELIGION OF THE EARLY
ESKIMOS
The hunters, who later became the Eskimos, do not appear
to have established a religious center similar to Mount Komsa in the Norwegian Arctic. The people involved in this hard
work were mostly the native population of the Aleutian Islands, who did not
share exactly the same religious traditions with the Ainu. However, both the
Ainu and the Eskimos practiced the ancient religion of the Goddess, who represented the
life-generating and nurturing powers of the earth. In other words, the Goddess was nature as created and sustained
by the living earth. To the Ainu black was the color of life, the rich black
soil that sustained all living things and in itself was alive. Black was also
the holy darkness of the sacred cave, regarded as the womb of the Goddess,
the central point of their worship. However, the eternally frozen earth of
the Arctic and the absence of caves was not representative of the Goddess and
thus required an adaptation in belief. In the Arctic it was not the land, but
the ocean which was vibrantly alive and which provided all the riches
necessary to sustain life in the far north. To this day some Eskimo elders
teach that the Goddess "Sedna"
lives at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.
The Goddess controls the seals, the Beluga whales, the arctic char
swimming up the rivers to spawn, the drifting ice floes and the winter
storms. In Alaska, this Goddess is known as Nulirahak and in the Central Canadian
Arctic as Nuliaguk.
The Eskimo did not worship her exactly as the Ainu did, but they had great
respect for her, trying to secure her cooperation and goodwill by persuasion
and sometimes by threats. There is little doubt that some Ainu individuals were
among the hunters and that Ainu blood became mixed in during the long and
dreary Arctic nights. Although living conditions were difficult, once the
housing and travel problems had been solved the population thrived because
there was abundant food in the ocean. The skin boat technology developed by
the Sea Peoples of North Africa was adapted to
arctic conditions by the Eskimos and has been maintained up to now, both for
the one-man kayak and
for the large family boat, the umiak. As the population grew, the people became more
confident of their ability to cope with the extremely uncooperative climate
and the annually repeated extended periods of darkness. Then the population spread ever farther
eastward until they had populated the entire arctic coast of North America
from the Bering Strait to Labrador and Greenland, where they met seafarers
speaking Basque. To the surprise of the Basques they found they could
communicate with the Eskimos to some extent. The language had traveled clear
around the earth, carried by population migration. No people on earth ever
had to do more creative adapting to their environment than the Eskimos. It must be clear by now that the language at the root of
the Eskimo language cannot be Basque because these seafarers were never
active in the northern Pacific. Instead, the relationship lies with the Saharan language from which Ainu, Basque, Eskimo and a
host of other languages derive. The name Inuit, which many Eskimos prefer for
themselves, may come from inu-it, inular (sunset, low-angle sun) itsu (blind), sun-reflection
blindness, or "snow-blind". Their reputation of staunch independence
and high self-esteem may have given the Eskimos their name
"ezki-mo", from ezkibel (easily offended) molde (manner, behaviour), "They are easily offended"
a name likely given to them by the Basques in Labrador. BASQUE WORDS IN
EASTERN CANADA
For at least 500 years, the Basques have been fishing the
Grand Banks of Newfoundland for cod, while their whalers were actively
harpooning off Labrador. Many early visitors had commented over the years
that the indigenous people living south of the St Lawrence estuary and the
Eskimos living to the north used a Basque pidgin language to communicate with
the visitors. The pidgin's existence was explained by the many years of
contact with Basque fishermen and whalers. This could have been the case with
the indigenous people. However, the Eskimos, generally, kept their distance
and avoided unnecessary contact. Yet, they could also talk with the Basques. A
linguist from the University of Amsterdam, Peter Bakker, documented
historical and linguistic evidence of the Basque elements he found in the
pidgin and published this in the fall 1989 issue of "Anthropological
Linguistics". His article was entitled "The Language of the Coast
Tribes is Half Basque", which was an exaggeration because he gave only a
handful of examples. Edo Nyland suggested to him that he could have found
many more Basque-related words in the Eskimo language spoken all the way to
Alaska, thousands of miles to the west, but he wouldn't hear of it. This left
Nyland no choice but to document the existence of Basque throughout the range
of the Eskimo language and to provide an explanation for this startling
phenomenon. To show
that Basque vocabulary can also be recognized in the high Western Arctic,
where no other races ever came, Nyland examined two dictionaries for
Basque-related words. He could not have found a more isolated and unaffected
part in the north:
LANGUAGE OF THE ESKIMOS
Linguists have been at a loss to explain the development
of the Eskimo language. The Eskimo people have a rather small population,
totaling less than 100,000 in 2020. These are scattered over an enormous area
from Eastern Siberia to Greenland. The number and diversity of Eskimo
dialects and sub-dialects surely points to centuries, if not millennia, of
groups living in isolation. Even dialects spoken in relatively close
proximity such as the two named above show extreme differences. Ronald Lowe writes about one of them:
"Siglitun seems to belong to no recognized family of Eskimo dialects and
its loss would mean the permanent loss to the Eskimo language of those
characteristics that are uniquely Sigliq." The speakers often have
difficulty communicating with nearby tribes. Therefore, it is surprising that
some Eskimo words like amaruq (wolf) have survived almost unaltered through
the millennia; in Basque the word amarruki means "cunningly". Another obvious one is
aqittuq (weak), in Basque akitu (tired); also ipun (ear) and Basque ipuin (story).
COMPARISON OF BASQUE
& ESKIMO VOCULABARIES
AINU / ESKIMO
ASSOCIATION IS AMBIGUOUS
During the thousands of years that the
Eskimo have lived in the Arctic, they have created a very special society in
a most hostile environment. Their civilization and art are so unique that
nothing on earth compares with it.
Therefore, it is not surprising that it is a more time-consuming
process to find Basque-related words in the Eskimo language than in the Ainu
language. As the Saharan Language was
introduced to the people who later became Eskimos, the Ainu people, of northern
Japan, must have brought those words that still resemble Basque to them at a
very early time. Trying to show this relationship has been a rather
time-consuming task. To finish the above comparison would be a good project
for a linguistics student. We know
that about 2,000 bce seafarers from Japan visited South America in the area
that is now Ecuador. This is because
advanced Japanese style pottery made its appearance in Ecuador around that
time. That improved technology then spread rapidly throughout
the Americas. |