One of the first things that we have learned in the introductory course of linguistics was that there are very few known language isolates whose origins are impossible to define - the most famous of them are Korean and Basque (ethnonym: Euskara). The latter has always fascinated me since I started to discover the various cultures of Spain. Trapped by the Pyrenees, it remained hidden from the Roman influence and does not look like any other living European language.

Despite the obvious name of Basque Country in the north of Spain, where this language is spoken, Basque is also preserved in the western regions of France (Pyrenées-Atlantiques). It is the only living remnant of languages spoken in southwestern Europe before it was romanized in the 2nd century BCE and thus has nothing in common lexically or phonetically with any neighbors. Some possible extinct relatives of Basque can be Aquitanian, which is considered a direct ancestor; Northern Castilian Spanish or Occitan. Nevertheless, the exact origin remains unknown to this day. The leading hypotheses of Basque are the following:

1) Native origin theory - the most widely accepted theory, according to which Basque is a direct descendant of the language spoken by the inhabitants of the Basque country in prehistoric times.

2) Vasconic origin theory - proposed by a German linguist, Theo Venneman, who suggested that Basque is the last surviving remnant of a large family of related languages (Vasconic family) that were spoken before the arrival of Indo-Europeans approx. 5000 years ago. Basque remained intact due to the remoteness of the Pyrenees.

3) Iberian origin theory - the least probable theory. Attempts to link Basque with Iberian, an ancient language spoken on the Iberian Peninsula before the Romans. This theory is dismissed by linguists: though these languages were in close contact, they have no direct linguistic relationship.

Stepping aside from the historical aspect of Basque, I found a lot of interesting grammatical features in the language itself. One of them is the complete absence of grammatical gender, which is mostly present in European languages. Basque uses a unique number system that reminds me somehow of that in French, with the use of both decimal stems and base twenty for numbers.