Introduction

There have been, are and without doubt still will be many attempts to "prove" the genetic affiliation of Basque and almost any other language family. I would like to mention only a few of the most known comparisons:

Other attempts concern Basque and Dravidian, Altaic, Tibeto-Burman, Austro-Asiatic and Bantu. While Basque is not yet strongly considered to be a part of the Nostratic macrofamily, it is considered to be a member of the Na-Dene macrofamily (Greenberg 1987) - and by linguists attempting to combine Nostratic and Na-Dene to a super-macrofamily. The only attempt ever made to connect Basque and the Uralic language family was made by the French Count (Charles-Félix) Hyacinthe de Charencey (1832-1916), cf. de Charencey (1862), who got most famous as founder of Mayan linguistics (cf. Betancourt 1996). Finally, in an Internet publication, T. Majláth presented several hundreds of alleged Basque-Hungarian cognates, most of which a clearly wrong. Nevertheless, I have carefully looked through Majláth's list and picked out all these Basque-Hungarian cognates that are at least not excluded from the beginning. In addition, I used the standard Basque dictionaries of Löpelmann (1968) and Aulestia (1992) and the standard Basque grammar of Hualde-Ortiz and Urbina (2003). As best first introduction into the Basque language there are still the pioneer works of Schuchardt (1923) and Tovar (1957) to recommend.