Euskera Outline!!!!

I finally have an outline I can work with. It's a very informal outline, in four different stages at different places.

I have raw outline (talk about this) which is mostly for the background information and inferences that have already been drawn so many times that I can tell them through quotes.

I have expanded outline, where I talk in choppier sentences about details I want to be sure to include.

I have semi-finished English drafting for important turning points in the essay.

And I have first draft finished Spanish for the introduction. :D

From here on out I think I'll be trying to compose directly in Spanish. We'll see. :D

Oh, and I just realized that I'll need to go through and add more references to Catalan, since I make it obvious in the introduction that I'm going to use it as my control. :D

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El euskera, la lengua aislada de los vascos, y catalán, la lengua romance que hablan los catalanes, son ambas lenguas minoritarias de España. Pero sus situaciones actuales son muy diferentes. El prestigio y el reconocimiento del catalán siguen creciendo, mientras el euskera no ha sido capaz de superar su reputación como idioma rústico y primitivo, por lo que sigue perdiendo hablantes. Los destinos de estas lenguas son inextricables de los de sus movimientos nacionalistas adjuntos. Desde el siglo XVII, tanto los catalanes como los vascos han luchado para no perderse en la dominante cultura castellana. Aunque ambas regiones permanecen hoy como partes de España, los catalanes han tenido mucho más éxito en obtener una medida de autonomía e independencia cultural que es evidente por el uso general del idioma catalán en esa región, mientras que el euskera permanece en declive y el movimiento separatista de los vascos esta hoy en día asociado con la amenaza del terrorismo. ¿Por qué estos dos movimientos, que se parecían tanto, han tenido resultados tan diferentes?

Hay muchos factores que contribuyen a la explicación de esta dicotomía, entre ellos diferencias geográficas, históricas, y económicas. En este ensayo, sin embargo, voy a enfocarme en los aspectos lingüísticos de este movimiento. Hay un proverbio vasco que dice “Izena duen guztiak izatea ere badauke” – que todo lo que tiene un nombre, existe. Pero hay otro proverbio, que parece ser diametralmente opuesto al primero: “Izenak ez du egiten izana” – un nombre no hace a una cosa real. La conexión entre el euskera y el movimiento separatista de los vascos es muy complicado y a veces aparentemente contradictorio, pero es de una importancia inmensa para explicar cualquiera de los dos.

Talk about how interconnected Basque identity is with Euskera ------

Talk about the persecution of Euskera --------

Talk about the Euskera myths ------

The persecution of the Basques and Euskera gave the language an almost mythic element, as evidenced by some actual myths that depict Euskera as a god-given language mystically barred from foreigners. These attitudes were meant to protect Basque. However, as the persecution of Basque has waned, such ideas about the purity of the Basque people and the unbearableness of foreign influence have actually been to the detriment of the language´s survival.

Talk about how not wanting foreign influence has hurt Basque culture and Euskera -----

Present day situation: the threat is gone. How do people feel about Euskera today? It is their culture. They support it fully in theory. But now that it isn´t in danger of going extinct, they also see other possible ways that they can support their culture other than learning such a difficult language, and are increasingly going to these other ways. Talk about Basque music and Bertsolaritza.

Conclusion: Euskera has existed for a really long time, but throughout all of recorded history it has been a threatened language, which has had a profound effect on its development. In the most recent of years, the threat of forcible extinction has lifted, and it has become apparent that the former suppression itself was one of the factors that sustained interest in the language. And, in some ways, the old myths about the impregnability of Euskera has come back to haunt it, as this is no longer a preservative stance, but maybe a self-destructive one. Where does Euskera go from here?