Note 717 — Chapter X

Dr. Farrar, referring to the Basque, says: “What is certain about it is, that its structure is polysynthetic, like the language of America. Like them, and them only, it habitually forms its compounds by the elimination of certain radicals in the simple words; so that, e. g., ilhun, twilight, is contracted from hill, dead, and egun, day; and belhaun, the knee, from belhar, front, and oin, leg. It was this fact that made Larramendi give to his treatise on Basque grammar the title of ‘The Impossible Overcome.’ The most daring of all the hypotheses which have been suggested points to the conceivable existence of some great Atlantis; to the possibility of the ‘Basque area being the remains of a vast system, of which Madeira and the Azores are fragments belonging to the Miocene period.’ Be this as it may, the fact is indisputable and is eminently noteworthy that, while the affinities of the Basque roots have never been conclusively elucidated, there has never been any doubt that this isolated language, preserving its identity in a western corner of Europe between two mighty kingdoms, resembles in its grammatical structure the aboriginal languages of the vast opposite continent, and those alone.”—Families of Speech, pp. 132–3. Also see Alfred Maury in Nott and Gliddon’s Indigenous Races of the Earth, p. 48.