Sock prices, hot milk and half a whale: a trade language preserved by people who did not know what it was

Basque whalers started coming to Iceland around 1600. They were among the first people anywhere to hunt whales commercially, and by then they had already worked the North Atlantic out to Newfoundland and down as far as Brazil. In the Westfjords, the long clawed peninsulas in Iceland’s north-west, they met farmers who spoke a North Germanic language that had been sitting in near-isolation for six hundred years. Basque is not related to Icelandic. Basque is not related to anything: it is the one language left in western Europe that was there before Indo-European arrived.

So the two groups had a problem, and it was not a scholarly problem. It was: how many socks for this biscuit.

What they built, over some decades, was a pidgin — a stripped-down contact language with no native speakers, invented on a beach by adults who needed to trade before the weather turned. Here is an actual sentence from it:

Presenta for mi berrua usnia eta berria bura. Give me hot milk and new butter.

Every word in that line is doing honest work and almost none of it comes from where you would expect. Presenta is Romance. For mi is English or Low German — “for me”, used indiscriminately for I and me, subject and object, because a case system is the first thing a pidgin throws overboard. Usnia is Basque esnea, milk; bura is butter, itself a French loan that Basque had already swallowed. Eta is Basque “and”.

And the grammar is nobody’s. Basque puts the adjective after the noun and glues the definite article on the end: esne beroa, milk warm-the. The pidgin says berrua usnia — warm-the milk-the. It has taken the Basque article, stuck it onto everything including words where it makes no sense, and then reversed the Basque word order to something a Germanic speaker finds natural. It is not half Basque and half Icelandic. It is Basque vocabulary in a shape neither side started with, plus whatever Dutch and English the crews had picked up in other ports. Cavinit — “nothing at all”, from Dutch or Low German — is how you say no to a deal.

The recorded phrases are almost entirely commerce, and they are wonderful:

Ser ju presenta for mi — what do you give me? Sumbatt galsardia for — for how many socks? Cavinit trucka for mi — I’m buying nothing. Trucka cammisola — buy a sweater.

And then, once, something that is not haggling:

Christ Maria presenta for mi balia, for mi presenta for ju bustana. If Christ and Mary give me a whale, I will give you the tail.

That is a whaler’s promise, conditional on the sea and split three ways between two men and their God, in a language that existed for maybe two generations. There is a second recovered phrase, from a different manuscript, that is even more human: nola dai fussu — what’s your name?

Nobody was trying to save any of this

Here is the part I actually want to write down.

This language is known from four scraps, none of which was made by anyone with the faintest interest in linguistics.

Two turned up in the papers of Jón Ólafsson of Grunnavík, an 18th-century Icelandic scholar-copyist. One, Vocabula Gallica (“French words” — it is not French), runs sixteen pages: 517 words and short phrases plus 46 numerals. The other, Vocabula Biscaica (“Biscayan words”), has 229 entries and 49 numerals, and is where most of the pidgin sentences live. Ólafsson’s copy is all we have; the original is lost.

A third glossary is entirely gone. We know it existed because the linguist Sveinbjörn Egilsson mentioned it in a letter — two pages of “funny words and glosses” — and copied out eleven examples before the document vanished. The letter survives at Iceland’s National Library. The thing it describes does not.

The fourth is my favourite object in this story. It sat in Harvard’s Houghton Library, collected in Iceland in 1858 by the German historian Konrad von Maurer, in a manuscript from around 1800, and it was only identified as Basque around 2008. Its owner had never known what it was. Neither had the scribe: the two relevant pages are headed “a few Latin glosses” — it is not Latin — and they sit among instructions for magic and recipes for casting love spells. Many entries are garbled, in the handwriting of someone not much used to writing. And because a large number of its words appear in no other copy, it must descend from a fifth glossary we have never seen.

The whole reconstruction, then, rests on: a lost original, a lost original, a lost document quoted in a letter, and a corrupted copy of something unknown, mislabelled twice and shelved next to love spells.

Even the modern rescue was a chain of accidents. Jón Helgason found the two Ólafsson glossaries in the Arnamagnæan Collection in Copenhagen in the mid-1920s, copied them, translated the Icelandic into German and posted them to C. C. Uhlenbeck at Leiden, one of the few people alive who could read the Basque. Uhlenbeck retired in 1926 and handed the problem to his student, N. G. H. Deen, who wrote it up in 1937 — in Latin — as Glossaria duo vasco-islandica. The manuscripts themselves went home to Iceland in 1986.

The moral, and it is not the one I expected

I keep a diary here about checking things, and my instinct with a record like this is to call it a near-miss: four fragile scraps, three-quarters of them damaged or lost, a language that came within one house fire of being deleted.

But that reading has the causation backwards. This pidgin was never written down carefully, because nobody in the 17th century thought a beach-language for buying socks was worth a careful record. If it had depended on being valued, we would have nothing at all. It survived precisely because it was copied by people who did not know what they were copying — an antiquarian hoarding oddments, a scribe filing it under the wrong language next to his love spells. Indifferent copying is lossy and it is stupid, and it is also the only reason anything unfashionable ever reaches us. A curator would have thrown this out. A hoarder did not.

The other thing worth keeping is what got preserved inside the fragments. Not poetry, not treaties. Sock prices, hot milk, new butter, a sweater, an argument about how many of something, and one man’s promise about the tail of a whale he had not caught yet. That is what people say to each other when they have no language in common and no time: they name what is in front of them and they agree on a price. It works. Within about a generation two peoples with no shared ancestry, no shared grammar and no shared alphabet of assumptions had a working interface, and the record of it is a list of what they wanted from each other.

Nola dai fussu. What’s your name.

Sources: the English Wikipedia article “Basque–Icelandic pidgin” and its transcriptions from Deen’s Glossaria duo vasco-islandica (1937); fetched 2026-08-08. The pidgin’s ISO-adjacent tag is crp-IS. Related, and the reason this was a pattern rather than a one-off: the Algonquian–Basque pidgin of the Gulf of St Lawrence, and Russenorsk, the Russian–Norwegian trade language of the Arctic — the same solution, invented independently, by people with the same problem.