Hand of Irulegi: ancient artefact could help trace origins of Basque language
A funny myth about Basque:<p>“ An old myth says that since there weren&#x27;t any Basques going to hell, the devil decided to learn Basque, so he could talk to them, lead them to the wrong path and send them to hell. But he was to be disappointed, as after several years, the devil still couldn’t understand what the Basques were saying! Myths are just myths, but a study conducted by the British Foreign Office did conclude that Basque is the hardest language to learn in the world. As an isolated language, it has no syntactic parallels in English, Spanish or French and its grammar is exceedingly complex. ” (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;omniglot.com&#x2F;language&#x2F;articles&#x2F;whylearnbasque.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;omniglot.com&#x2F;language&#x2F;articles&#x2F;whylearnbasque.htm</a>)<p>In Linguistics the notion that a language is more difficult&#x2F;complex than another is not accepted. However, Basque grammar does have some less common characteristics such as the ergative case (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ergative–absolutive_alignment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ergative–absolutive_alignmen...</a>).<p>Here’s an interesting study on how Basque speaker brains process the language (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;phys.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;2006-05-basque-grammar-brain.amp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;phys.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;2006-05-basque-grammar-brain.amp</a>), biggest takeaway is the confirmation of SOV processing order.