"A New Language" (Eustache Deschamps)

This book re-imagines the relationship between love, poetry (and literature more generally), and literary/theological/philosophical criticism of poetry going all the way back to the Augustan era in Rome. The book tells a story, relates a history of love, through literature and its sometimes adversarial relationship to the laws and customs, the political and economic structures of the times and places in which that literature was produced. But it is also relates a history of the way love has been treated, not by our poets, but by those our culture has entrusted with the “authority” to maintain and perpetuate the understanding, and even the memory, of poetry. Together with the tradition of love poetry has grown a tradition of criticism that tends to argue that what merely seems to be passionate love poetry is actually properly understood as something else (worship of God, subordination to Empire, entanglement within the structures of language itself). The pattern of such criticism—from the earliest readings of the Song of Songs to contemporary articles written about a carpe diem poem like Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time”—is to argue that the surface or exterior of a poem hides the “real” or “deeper” meaning, and that it is the critic’s job to pull back or tear away that surface in order to expose what lies beneath it. Employing a method Paul Ricoeur called “les herméneutiques du soupçon” (the hermeneutics of suspicion), such a reading strategy is a matter of cunning (falsification) encountering an even greater cunning (suspicion), as the “lies” and “false consciousness” of a text are systematically exposed by the critic. In essence, this book is an attempt to defend poetry against a kind of criticism that treats poetry as an illusion that needs to be debunked or an opponent that needs to be defeated.

 It is for us a great pleasure to present this special issue on Basque Studies. 1 The Etxepare Basque Institute had the great pleasure to foster the creation of a Basque Language and Culture lectureship at the University of Liverpool in 2012, a lectureship that became a permanent position in 2014 and that together with the creation of the Manuel Irujo Research Fellowship back in 2013, located the University of Liverpool as the leading academic institution in Basque Studies in the British context. All these facts and achievements will help us to reflect in the following lines on the international academic map of Basque Studies, as well as on the particular shape this map has taken in different countries. A brief presentation of the articles and contributors included in this special issue will complete this foreword.

Working Paper # 03-17, 2003

While France's participation in the early modern Atlantic World offered new opportunities for trade, the dissemination of the Catholic faith, and colonial conquest, it also created new linguistic problems of communication. French explorers, fur traders, and missionaries sought to fashion a linguistic common ground with the Amerindian inhabitants of New France. While the linguistic challenge of communicating with American Indians was a tall one, the experience of linguistic diversity was by no means new for the French. Early modern France was an intensely polyglot society in which French was only one of many competing languages. While inhabitants of the Paris region and high nobles across France spoke French, priests said Mass and university professors lectured in Latin, and people in the provinces communicated in a dizzying variety of local languages and dialects. Inhabitants of early modern France were therefore thoroughly accustomed to linguistic diversity. I propose in this paper to analyze early modern French linguistic cultures in light of the larger French Atlantic experience-how French thinking about language shaped the ways in which French merchants, missionaries and colonial administrators thought about and sought to accommodate linguistic diversity in the Americas on the one hand, and how the Atlantic experience provided new topoi and frameworks for thinking about linguistic diversity back in France. t the close of the French humanist and writer François Rabelais' Tiers livre, a fantastical tale first published in 1546, the giant Pantagruel and his artful companion Panurge resolve to journey across the Atlantic to consult a renowned oracle in order to determine whether Panurge should marry. Pantagruel, Panurge and their loyal companions gather in Saint-Malo, the same French port from which Jacques Cartier had set off to explore North America for the French king in 1534, in order to equip their fleet. Rabelais' Quart livre (1548) opens just as the crew completes its preparations, offers its prayers to God as Cartier's crew did in 1535, 1 and sails west "rather than follow the ordinary route of the Portuguese" around Africa. After four days at sea the merry fleet makes landfall on an island "pleasant and agreeable to the eye . . . which was no smaller than Canada," 2 and the first in a series of Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

Lansing: Barbaroak, 2016. An open access book also available on paper at amazon.com for $12. Feel free to comment and suggest changes. [email protected]

Basque Literary History

Attempts to revitalize Breton have led to the appearance of a learner variety of the language which is by no means universally accepted. This article reviews the major trends that commentators have taken with regard to this variety –néo-breton– and, as the variety of Breton most likely to survive into the twenty-first century, the likely domains where this variety will be used are examined. Differences with traditional Breton are discussed, as is the controversial nature of néo-breton in the eyes of some commentators and native speakers. Within the field of language death studies, the appearance of ‘neo-’ languages has implications for the stages a language experiencing attrition goes through and whether these ‘neo’ varieties do realistically represent a future for the endangered language. An examination of the differing expectations of various groups involved in the debate seeks to establish common ground between them, through making explicit the different aims of the groups and where these aims converge. As tentativas por revitalizar o bretón conduciron á aparición dunha variedade de principiantes que non é unanimemente aceptada. Este artigo pasa revista ás principais tendencias que os investigadores adoptaron fronte a esta variedade –o neobretón– e mais examina os campos onde será máis probable que se use a variedade do bretón con máis posibilidades de supervivencia no século XXI. Coméntanse as diferenzas co bretón tradicional, tal e como se reflicte na controvertida natureza que posúe o neobretón para algúns investigadores e locutores nativos. Dentro do eido de estudo da morte das linguas, a aparición das ‘neo-’ linguas posúe implicacións nos estadios que atravesa unha lingua en proceso de perda, e tamén en se estas ‘neo’ variedades realmente representan unha posibilidade de futuro para as linguas en perigo. O noso exame das diferentes expectativas de varios dos grupos involucrados no debate pretende establecer un marco común entre os mesmos, explicitando os seus diferentes obxectivos e a súa posible evolución.

Sport Science Review, 2016

The goal of my article is to analyze football in Basque Country, or better to say Basque national football representation, as a political tool since its inception. I decided to focus on this specific region because football, and Basque national team as well, has a long history and plays an important role in the whole Spanish society. Football in Spain is a political issue because of the multi-national composition of the state where we observe strong separatist or secessionist demands. In my opinion, Basque national team has never been “only” a football selection. Euskal Selekzioa is a well-known Basque nationalist speaker because of the way how it represents Basque nation. It uses one of the most popular things all round the world, kicking the ball. This article is divided into four main parts. In the first chapter, I deal with the birth of Basque national movement and with the discovery of the game of football in Spain. The second chapter is dedicated to the Spanish Civil War when the world-famous Basque national football team existed. Another part observes the Basque nationalism in the context of football, not only in Franco’s time but during the years of the transition to democracy. I finish my article with a contemplation of the officialization of Basque national football team.

Language Culture and Curriculum, 2002

The acquisition of Basque as a second language by adult speakers in the Basque Country presents some specificcharacteristicsrelated to the minority status of Basque and its limited use in everyday communication. This paper reports a research study on the effect of individual and contextual variables on the acquisition of Basque by adult learners in the Basque Country. Participantswere 411 learners, aged between 17 and 72, who were attending Basque classes in nine different specialised schools for teaching Basque to adults. They were asked to complete several questionnaires so as to obtain background information and measures of metalinguistic awareness, anxiety, learning strategies, attitudes and motivation. Participants also completed tests of Basque language proficiency. Once the data were collected and recorded, statistical analyses were carried out so as to identify the relative influence of several individual and contextual factors on second-language proficiency. The results indicate that metalinguistic awareness is the strongest predictor of Basque proficiency and they also show that the influence of other variables.The results are discussed taking into account both the characteristics of second language acquisition by adult speakers and the specific sociolinguistic context in which the acquisition of Basque takes place.

The hypothesis that the Basque language is genetically related to languages in the Cauca-sus region was developed in the 20th century by respected scholars including C. C. Uhlen-beck, Georges Dumézil, and René Lafon, but has recently fallen into disfavour. The author defends the Euskaro-Caucasian hypothesis in a refined model in which Basque (Euskara) is most closely related to the North Caucasian language family (but not " South Caucasian " = Kartvelian). It is maintained that this hypothesis is not only linguistically convincing, supported by hundreds of basic etymologies, sound correspondences, and shared morphology , but is also consistent with recent results in archaeology and human genetics. Among the Euskaro-Caucasian etymologies is a significant number involving small and large cattle, swine, dairying, grain and pulse crops, and tools and methods of processing crops. These lexical fields are consistent with the spread of agriculture and animal hus-bandry to Western Europe by means of colonisation by bearers of the Cardial (Impressed Ware) Culture who came from the Anatolian (or possibly Balkan) region, and spoke a language related to Proto-North Caucasian. The well-known genetic distinctiveness of the Basques is a result of centuries of low population size, genetic drift and endogamy, rather than purely Paleolithic ancestry. The present-day Basque people represent a genetic amal-gam of the Cardial colonists with indigenous hunter-gatherers, but their Euskaro-Cauca-sian language is colonial, not indigenous, in origin. Basque is the sole remaining descendant of the Euskaro-Caucasian family in Western Europe, but there is evidence (in the form of substratum words) that this colonial language was formerly more widely spread in other nearby regions (Sardinia, parts of Iberia, France, the Alps, Italy, the Balkans, and perhaps beyond).