“Asked to name a linguist, most people come up with Chomsky or Pinker. But Larry Trask – an expert on Basque – deserves to be famous too.:

He’s working now on an etymological dictionary of Basque: his web page contains a trenchant denunciation of all the things that people believe about the language:

‘please note: I do not want to hear about the following: Your latest proof that Basque is related to Iberian/Etruscan/Pictish/Sumerian/ Minoan/Tibetan/Isthmus Zapotec/ Martian. Your discovery that Basque is the secret key to understanding the Ogam inscriptions/the Phaistos disc/ the Easter Island carvings/the Egyptian Book of the Dead/the Qabbala/the prophecies of Nostradamus/your PC manual/the movements of the New York Stock Exchange. Your belief that Basque is the ancestral language of all humankind/a remnant of the speech of lost Atlantis/the language of the vanished civilization of Antarctica/ evidence of visitors from Proxima Centauri. I definitely do not want to hear about these scholarly breakthroughs.’ “

Guardian/UK