Etymological Dictionary of Basque - Cryptm.org

8 R. L. Trask
The 13th-century Castilian poet Gonzalo de Berceo, who was raised in the Ebro valley,
included a number of Basque words in his poems.
The earliest known connected text longer than a couple of words is a magical charm
discovered in 1957 in the cathedral of Pamplona and usually dated to the 14th century.
At the end of the 15th century, the German pilgrim Arnold von Harff recorded another brief
glossary; his transcriptions are garbled but mostly interpretable. In the early 16th century, the
Italian humanist Lucius Marineus Siculus published an account of his travels in Spain; this
contained a list of several dozen Basque words collected from an unidentified source but
clearly western in form.
From the 16th century on, we find a growing number of brief Basque texts: songs, poems,
prayers, epitaphs, personal letters. The songs and poems are particularly important, because
they record political events that took place during the 14th and 15th centuries, and they must
have been composed centuries earlier than our records of them.
All of the material discussed above is catalogued in M. (1964**{b}).
By far the longest text preserved from the period before publication began is a lengthy
personal letter written in 1537 by the first Bishop of Mexico to his brother; see Otte (1979)
and Michelena, Tovar and Otte (1981).
The first printed book in Basque was a collection of poems published in 1545 by the French
Basque Beñat Etxepare (whose name is spelled also in several other ways).
In 1562, the Italian diplomat Niccolò Landucci compiled the earliest known Basque
dictionary; since he was stationed in Vitoria (Gasteiz), the chief city of Alava, we assume that
the highly distinctive variety of Basque which he recorded was the local Basque of Alava,
which disappeared before linguistic work on Basque began in the 19th century.
In 1571, the French Basque Ioannes Leizarraga published a Basque translation of the New
Testament. The closing years of the 16th century saw a few more publications in Basque,
mostly religious and mostly minor. The first Basque book published in the south was the
Refranes y Sentencias, a collection of proverbs published in Pamplona in 1596. These
proverbs are written in a uniquely archaic version of the Bizkaian dialect, and this text
represents our single most archaic Basque text of any size. Around the same time the
historian Esteban de Garibay compiled two more collections of proverbs, also in Bizkaian,
but these were not published until centuries after his death.
From the early 17th century on, publications in Basque became slowly more numerous and
more varied; though most continued to be religious texts, there were also some practical
handbooks and miscellaneous works. The works of the 17th-century French Basque Arnaut
Oihenart, the first layman to write in Basque, are particularly important, since he wrote on a
variety of topics, and thus provided us with a richer vocabulary than can be found in the
religious texts.
The 18th century saw the engaging figure of Padre Manuel Larramendi, who published the
first grammar of Basque and a remarkable dictionary; unfortunately, Larramendi’s dictionary
contains a large number of neologisms of his own devising, which are not identified as such,
thus creating headaches for etymologists ever since. The first literary works (apart from
Etxepare) began to appear in the early 19th century. The end of the Carlist Wars in Spain in
1876 brought about a flowering of in Basque culture and language, the Berpizkundea, or
Basque Renaissance; since then publication in and on Basque has been continuous and