Other Languages of Europe: Otro idiomanan diEuropa

Summary

Abstract

While many languages of Europe belong to theIndo-European family, there are two other familiesrepresented on the continent (in addition to theSemitic language Maltese spoken in the Republic ofMalta): Finno-Ugric or Uralic and Basque. Thissection presents translations into theseadditional European language families.

Keywords: Folk Poetry, Literature,Ergative Language, Bilingual

The Finno-Ugric or Uralic family is presented in thisbook by Eesti Keel or Estonian, alanguage related to Finnish, spoken primarily in theRepublic of Estonia, where it is the officiallanguage. It has over 1,000,000 speakers. The firsttexts in Estonian date back to the sixteenthcentury; in earlier times German was used, alanguage from which Estonian borrowed many words.More recently, Russian became dominant and therestill is a Russianspeaking minority in Estonia. LikeFinnish, the language has a very rich case system,with fourteen case endings for each noun. Thus, “Putthe glass on the table” becomes Pane klaas lauale, and “Itook the glass from the table” Mavõtsin klaasi laualt. Theadjective generally agrees with the noun in case.From the sixteenth century onwards, there has beenwritten literature in Estonian, much of which tookthe form of folk poetry and later on also folksongs. Modern Estonian literature covers severalgenres.

Euskera or Basque is the well-knownlanguage of Basque country in part of northern Spainand southwestern France. It is not related to theother European languages, and there has beenconsiderable speculation about possible relatives ofthe language outside of Europe but without muchsuccess. Despite being declared as dying already inthe nineteenth century, it has survived andcurrently has around 700,000 speakers. In additionto the standard language, Euskera Batua, there arefive regional dialects. Euskera has undergoneinfluences from surrounding Spanish and Frenchvarieties, but it also may have influenced Spanishin the past. Basque is an ergative language, whichmeans that the subject of a transitive verb receivesa special marking, as in the following example:Ni-k liberu bateresten dut “I buy the book”.