Re: Basque & Katzner's Languages of the World

En réponse à Adam Walker <dreamertwo@...>:

> I was listening to a Basque radio station on the web the other day and
> was
> amazed at how close the *rythm* of Basque is to the rythm of Spanish.
> Of
> course it was completely unintelligible, but it was a very pleasant
> aural
> experience.
>
I've heard that Spanish owned a lot to Basque: its strange /s/ phoneme (apico-
alveolar instead of lamino-alveolar like other Romance languages. Basque
contrasts lamino-alveolar and apico-alveolar voiceless fricatives, and writes
the first one 'z' and the second one 's'), its diphtongues (OK, diphtongation
happened in all Romance languages, but its characteristics in Spanish would be
a lot influenced by Basque), the phonemic distinction between the flap and the
trill, and even the absence of voiced fricatives and its voice patterns.

Of course, I don't know whether this is true or not (English lacks a marker of
evidentiality that would show that we only present what we've heard or read,
but that it doesn't mandatorily reflects our own opinion - in this case, I
don't have information enough to have an opinion about those claims -).

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.