Why do I have a mania for Basque?

The video of a nice Neska commenting on how beautiful the language of, let's put, Bernardo Atxaga is, has gone viral.

And the girl offers some examples that, geez, are beautiful in themselves, like all etymology, he will say, well what do I know. But it sounds like a different etymology, a primitive, telluric etymology that prays to Neolithic gods and that is made up of additions of concepts (February: the month of the wolves; moon: light of the dead) or concentrated definitions, a bit like the German, which adds lexemes to build new words: shoemaker / schuhmacher / the one who makes shoes.

I find it poetic and intellectually stimulating. Like that of the 'ñir ñir', tremor of the stars; the 'mara mara', which is the silent fall of snow; or that of 'pinpilinpauxa' which, Pedro Ugarte recalls in his diaries, is "the way of describing the clumsy, convulsive flight of butterflies."

I would love to attend a conference on this topic and learn why firefighters were called "fire killers" or the heart is recognized for its onomatopoeic power ('biohtza', "two sounds", according to our philologist 2.0). The etymology of heart is less graceful in its Latin root, although "remember", I once heard Monedero say, is "to pass through the heart twice" and he then quoted students massacred in Mexico.

To the East, 'ekialde', and I knew this one, since 'iturralde' means the side of the fountain, 'elizalde' the side of the church and 'ibaialde' the side of the sea. I'll tell you what a pleasure to play puns despite my meager Basque heritage: the other day I referred to New Year's Eve as Gauzarra. Txikipoint for me.

In loving words, because I would like to know more about Basque etymologies, their influence on Spanish as well, that if I moo, cowbell, backpack or bruces which, I read somewhere, would come from 'buruz', head. And that discovering new angles of language, because the way of speaking determines us and vice versa, so related to the countryside, the elements, the rural (that a city is called 'village' is another of the reasons for my irrational and elitist mania, but let's not deviate), the sun, the moon or the flowers of the mountain ('loreak mendian', which is also a cool clothing brand and such).

I would like Basque if it were presented from that perspective. From the love for knowledge. From the linguistic archeology that fears for its disappearance. But I am obsessed with it because I don't see it being used as an instrument of communication, and therefore of union, and of wealth, human, cultural, but as the opposite. An element to separate me from you. A language that pursues the construction of an imaginary border. Alde hemendik.

The Jews achieved it at the end of the 19th century with that recovery of Hebrew that the writer Etgar Keret compared to putting a language that had been in the fridge for two thousand years in the microwave and defrosting it in a hurry. And how did the Jews achieve such an undertaking? Well, with the excitement that implies wanting to increase your share of power and strengthen your sentimental ties.

Basque may sound evocative, with that primitive world that seems to be green again, but it is nothing more than the spearhead of an entire political and social project. That is why I have a mania for Basque. Because I don't want an Israel around the Castle.

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION

They say that we are all ethnocentric and that not being so is as impossible as escaping from your shadow. Believing yourself superior to the other, go. Will there be a background of racism in my dislike for Basque? I do an honest examination of conscience and maybe so. An unspeakable feeling of liberal superiority (as opposed to Carlist or conservative) that makes me prefer the city to the town, the centrifugal to the centripetal.

One day I asked my French grandfather, before his probable goodbye not so far away, if he regretted not having done something in his life. «Learn English and sleep with a black woman». It sounds commonplace, but there is in the intention to learn English a desire to embrace the world. Nothing more enviable than studying Italian for the mere pleasure of seeing all of Fellini in the original version without subtitles or traveling to Sicily in the spring. The language as an opening to the other and possible worlds. I believe that it is not contempt for one's own and snobbish praise of others not to detect that in the insistent, in my opinion, defense of the Basque language that is carried out from the institutions.

I don't like Basque because in general I see it extracted from its natural element like a polar bear that is punished on circus tours for the benefit of the businessman on duty. It tastes like cultural appropriation to me, like the one Rosalía is accused of with flamenco, but in a Machiavellian sense. In other words, a language placed at the service of a political worldview whose final horizon is none other than the creation of a Euskal Herría lliure, in the same way that the Jewish people did not rest until they had their own state, whoever fell. All of this connoted with forty years of fascism (this one) of balaclavas in which the language of the regime was none other than Basque. And, as if that were not enough, from the most absolute contumacy: because Basque will not be a language of normal use in life.

In other words, we appropriated a language that was not to blame for anything, free of meaning, and we molded it in our nationalist way, in addition to establishing it as the official language of terror. The strange thing, I think now, is not having a mania for it.

POSTING

Finally, I listen to the girl in the viral video and I don't know if it's peteuve's ethnocentric supremacism exiled to the ovaries of txorradas, but it sounds like a posturing from a Basque Isabel Coixet short. This, of course, cannot be demonstrated, but it is felt. Oh, and how toothless when the Basque of Borona tendencies gets, in short, cheesy. 'Musutruk' to say "free", that is, "in exchange for a kiss". Short circuit.

To me the average aberchándal, which Ancín would say, seems rough to see when he goes for an official Sunday night in polar fleece to Nafarroa Oinez to see various herrikirolaks from the barrier or turns fantastic cafes like the Viennese into depressing taverns. But when he gets touchy, he gives me a bad thing. Perhaps the Basque, the Basque, of the years of the Maribeltza spoke like characters from the village of the happy sarsaparilla with unicorns bathed in lapis lazuli where witches or lamiak danced naked until dawn on top of 'mongis'.

But the euskalberri from euskaltegi y si me apuras from ikastola demokrrrrráatika seems as artificial to me as Jordi Hurtado singing a rap. You can see the trap, the social engineering, that of, oh, "Basque for fucking." The eagerness to strain a language, poor thing, from ideological, tribal motivation, and not so much from a desire for cohesion born of political good sense. And how do you know this? Noticeable. It shows in your eyes, Uxue Barkos.

To those of us who believe in the union, not of the Navarrese people that I voted for in Madril and pass on initials, but of the lords and knights of the world, all this distances us from that innocent and ancient language. What do I propose? Well, an approach to it from the academic, from the cultural, from citizen participation, but not so much from linguistic immersion, this being a private matter for each one. Take away, well, the naive illusion that all of Patxi will speak Basque here in two generations, no matter how many signs you put in bold letters when entering La Morea.

‘Yoga’ means union, in Sanskrit. How beautiful is Sanskrit by the way.