Basque-Icelandic Pidgin - History of The Glossaries

History of The Glossaries

The copy which is preserved of Vocabula Biscaica was written by Jón Ólafsson from Grunnavík, who copied an older but now lost original. This copy was found, together with Vocabula Gallica, in the middle of the 1920s by the Icelandic philologist Jón Helgason at the Arnamagnæan Collection of the University of Copenhagen. He copied the glossaries, translated the Icelandic words into German and sent the copies to professor Christianus Cornelius Uhlenbeck at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Uhlenbeck had an 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 got advice from the Basque scholar Julio de Urquijo, and in 1937, he published his doctoral thesis on the Basque-Icelandic glossaries. It was called 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 the original manuscript was brought back from Denmark to Iceland.

There are 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. However, there is no pidgin element in this glossary

Recently, a fourth Basque-Icelandic glossary has been found at the Houghton Library at the Harvard University.