What does the Aragonese language look like?

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

I spend a lot of time watching the endless struggle online between atheists and the religious and everyone in between, and it turns out that in a city in Spain (I'll tell you which one later) some have put up an ad that says the same thing as the atheist bus ads in England and Canada and elsewhere: the one that says "God probably doesn't exist. Now go enjoy life" or something along those lines. Someone here took a picture of the same ad on a building under construction in Spain, and it looks like this:

I found the image on this site, where a commenter mentions that it's in both Spanish and "Catalan". But that's definitely not Catalan. Take a look:


Spanish: Probablemente dios no existe. Deja de preocuparte y disfruta la vida.
"Catalan": Probablemén dios no esiste. Deixa de alticamar-te y desfruta la bida.

What gives it away is that Catalan doesn't use -mén but rather -ment, and i for and instead of y. It also doesn't turn v into b like some Romance languages do. Using the translator here we can see that Catalan would look more like this (it's an automatic translator so it might be a bit off):
Probablement déu no existeix. Deixa de preocupar-te i gaudeix la vida.
That looks much better. The word for cross is also creu. Lots of words end in -eu in Catalan (deu, seu, lleu, creu, veu, europeu, extreu, podeu, etc.).

The ad is in the city of Zaragoza, which is the capital of Aragon.

To see more of what Aragonese looks like, just visit their Wikipedia.

8 comments:

Schall said...

Hey, I just found this site. Just to mention, Spain has known about those ads for a while: I remember 20 Minutos reporting that the ads were going to go up back in January.

I just started browsing your site but I was wondering if you've made any posts about Basque. I am a (struggling) speaker: it absolutely rapes the difficulty I have had back when I learned Spanish, Swedish and French.

Egun on eta agur.

Me said...

Yes, a few on Basque:

http://www.pagef30.com/search/label/basque

From what I can tell it seems to be similar to Turkish in a few ways - not necessarily related, but a lot of the aspects of the language remind me of it.

Basoko etxea (the house in the forest) for example is formed in much the same way:

ormandaki ev - orman is forest, da is in, and ki affixes it to the next noun, ev (house).

Schall said...

I read your Basque posts, quite informative from a geo-political perspective. As a note, I live in the Basque country in a dorm of students who attend Euskal Herriko Uniberstitatea. So if you ever want somethiing translated into Euskera, let me know, haha.

By my estimation, the Altaic languages are probably closer (by my estimation) to PIE and PFU. I don't believe Turkish to be related to Basque, even from the above example. I'll break down the Basque sentence Basoko etxea and several distinctions will be drawn out:

1. Basoko is etymologically linked to 'Bosque' in Spanish (sadly, a great number of words have been lost in Basque). Basok- is the forest part. -o is 'in'.

2. Etx(e)- is the house part. -a means 'the'.

3. So what we get is 'In forest' + 'the house.' Compared to Turkish you get 'In forest + (affix)' + 'house', it seems a bit different. Given how much slower grammar changes than words, I would imagine that no relation between the two is evident.

This is just my amateur opinion, of course. If anything, I would think Basque would be closer related to Caucasian - both of them are heavy Ergative case languages.

Me said...

No, I don't think they're related - I just mean that knowing Turkish seems to be helpful from the perspective of the student. When taking a look at Basque you can often find a corresponding Turkish suffix that often makes it easier to understand. Ergative-absolute is naturally quite different from Turkish though so it doesn't help out all the time.

I wasn't sure whether the original word was basok or basoko, but since it's basok it would look like this:

basok-o-ko etxa
Turkish:
orman-da-ki ev

Schall said...

Hold on, I messed up somewhere. I'm gonna ask my roommate instead of gaffing this one up any further.

Anonymous said...

Actually, it is in Catalan. Look in the lower right-hand corner of the billboard. The text is shaded and considerably smaller but it's there.

데이빛 / Mithridates said...

Yes, a few on Basque:

http://www.pagef30.com/search/label/basque

From what I can tell it seems to be similar to Turkish in a few ways - not necessarily related, but a lot of the aspects of the language remind me of it.

Basoko etxea (the house in the forest) for example is formed in much the same way:

ormandaki ev - orman is forest, da is in, and ki affixes it to the next noun, ev (house).

Schall said...

Hold on, I messed up somewhere. I'm gonna ask my roommate instead of gaffing this one up any further.

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