Entwistle William J. The Spanish Language: together with Portuguese, Catalan and Basque

Faber & Faber, 1962. — 397 p. — (The Great Languages).The purpose of this book is to give an account of the Peninsular group of Great Languages. The epithet ‘great’ can have no purely linguistic meaning. To the philologist all languages are of equal interest; they all contribute to our knowledge of the great human fact of Language. What each has to display is not equally essential, since many belong to vast speech-families and so in the main repeat the same or similar phenomena. Outside these families there exist, however, some languages which are unique. They do not reiterate the experience of many others, but, in their independence, offer the student an unusual wealth of fresh facts. Such a language is Basque. For peers it does not admit the circumjacent Romance tongues, French and Spanish, which are comparatively recent immigrants into its neighbourhood. It is comparable, in its antiquity and originality, not even with Latin, but with primeval Indo-European and the ancestral stocks of the great speech-families. For these qualities Basque draws to itself the eyes of the most proficient and broad-minded students of language, who find in its structure alternative and original solutions for the problems of human expression. In respect of its uniqueness the Basque language merits the description ‘great’.