The Basque–Icelandic pidgin was a Basque-based pidgin spoken in Iceland during the 17th century. It consisted of Basque, Germanic, and Romance words. Basque whale hunters who sailed to the Icelandic Westfjords used the pidgin as a means of rudimentary communication with locals. It might have developed in Westfjords, where manuscripts were written in the language, but since it had influences from many other European languages, it is more likely that it was created elsewhere and brought to Iceland by Basque sailors. Basque entries are mixed with words from Dutch, English, French, German and Spanish. The Basque–Icelandic pidgin is therefore not a mixture of Basque and Icelandic, but between Basque and other languages. It was so named because it was written in Iceland and translated into Icelandic. Only a few manuscripts have been found containing Basque–Icelandic glossary, and knowledge of the pidgin is limited.

Basque whalers in Iceland

Basque whalers were among the first to catch whales commercially; they spread to the far parts of the North Atlantic and even reached Brazil. They started coming to Iceland about 1600. In 1615, after becoming shipwrecked and getting into a conflict with the locals, some Basque sailors were massacred in an event that would be known as the Slaying of the Spaniards. Basques continued to sail to Iceland, but for the second half of the 17th century French and Spanish whalers are more often mentioned in Icelandic sources.

History of the glossaries

Only a few anonymous glossaries have been found. Two of them were found among the documents of 18th century scholar Jón Ólafsson of Grunnavík, titled: These manuscripts were found in the mid-1920s by the Icelandic philologist Jón Helgason in the Arnamagnæan Collection at the University of Copenhagen. He copied the glossaries, translated the Icelandic words into German and sent the copies to professor C. C. Uhlenbeck at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Uhlenbeck had expertise in Basque, but since he retired from the university in 1926, he gave the glossaries to his post-graduate student Nicolaas Gerard Hendrik Deen. Deen consulted with the Basque scholar Julio de Urquijo, and in 1937, Deen published his doctoral thesis on the Basque–Icelandic glossaries. It was titled Glossaria duo vasco-islandica and written in Latin, though most of the phrases of the glossaries were also translated into German and Spanish. In 1986 Jón Ólafsson's manuscripts were brought back from Denmark to Iceland. The manuscript with the glossaries (University of Iceland): There is also evidence of a third contemporary Basque–Icelandic glossary. In a letter, the Icelandic linguist Sveinbjörn Egilsson mentioned a document with two pages containing "funny words and glosses" and he copied eleven examples of them. The glossary itself has been lost, but the letter is still preserved at the National Library of Iceland. There is no pidgin element in the examples he copies.

The fourth glossary

A fourth Basque–Icelandic glossary was found at the Houghton Library at Harvard University. It had been collected by the German historian Konrad von Maurer when he visited Iceland in 1858, the manuscript is from the late 18th century or the early 19th century. The glossary was discovered around 2008, the original owner had not identified the manuscript as containing Basque text. Only two of the pages contain Basque–Icelandic glossary; the material surrounding includes unrelated items such as instructions about magic and casting love spells. It is clear that the copyist was not aware that they were copying Basque glossary, as the text has the heading "A few Latin glosses". Many of the entries are corrupted or wrong, seemingly made by someone not used to writing. A large number of the entries are not a part of Deen's glossary, and so the manuscript is thought to be a copy of an unknown Basque–Icelandic glossary. A total of 68 words and phrases can be discerned, but with some uncertainty.

Pidgin phrases

The manuscript Vocabula Biscaica contains the following phrases which contain a pidgin element: A majority of these words are of Basque origin: Some of the words are of Germanic origin: And others come from the Romance languages: All nouns and adjectives in the pidgin are marked with Basque's definite article suffix -a, even in cases for which the suffix would be ungrammatical in Basque. The order of nouns and adjectives is also reversed. For example, pidgin berrua usnia ('warm milk-DET') versus Basque esne beroa ('milk warm-DET'). Although there are quite a few Spanish and French words listed in the glossaries, this is not a sign of the pidgin language, but rather a result of French and Spanish influence on the Basque language throughout the ages, since Basque has taken many loan words from its neighbouring languages. Furthermore, many of the people in the Basque crews that came to Iceland might have been multilingual, speaking French and/or Spanish as well. That would explain for example why the Icelandic ja 'yes' is translated with both Basque bai and French vÿ (modern spelling oui) at the end of Vocabula Biscaica.

Other examples

These examples are from the recently discovered Harvard manuscript: The first phrase, nola dai fussu ("What's your name?"), might be written with standardized (but ungrammatical) Basque as "Nola deitu zu?". That is a morphologically simplified construction of the correct Basque sentence "Nola deitzen zara zu?". A section in Vocabula Biscaica goes over a few obscenities:

Manuscripts