Page:A book of the Pyrenees.djvu/29

Rh In Basque the auxiliary verbs alone undergo conjugation, and they exhibit a peculiarity that deserves notice. Take an instance: the auxiliary verb izan, to be. "I am" may be rendered in four different ways, according to the person addressed. In speaking to a male familiarly "I am" is nuk; but a woman addressed in like manner is nun; "I am," when used in address to a person highly respected of either sex, is nuzu; "I am" spoken without any particular reference to any one is niz. So "he or she is" may be rendered duk, dun, duzu, da; and "we are" by gaituk, gaitun, gaituzu, gare.

The Basque language is capable of an incredible amount of agglomeration in the formation of words, and of indefinite modification of times, conditions, forms of words. Etche is a house; argizagi is the moon; elhur is snow; chori is a bird; sagar an apple; oski a shoe; aurhide a child; arrolze, an egg. We feel at once that we meet here with a language which has no relations that we can detect with any of the European tongues with which we are familiar. The Basque has not distinguished himself in literature. It is true that a set of poems pretending to be ancient has been produced and published as relics of Early Basque poetry, but they were forgeries, like Macpherson's Ossian. The nucleus of the Basque country may be said to be S. Jean-de-Luz. Formerly it was Ustaritz (i.e. the Oak of Judgment), where the Elders assembled in Council; but at the French Revolution this oak was cut down. The Basque villages have a character of their own. Erected by a people who do not feel eagerness to look in at one another's windows, a people pushing independence to fanaticism, the villages consist rather of isolated buildings loosely united