Incidentally, Larry Trask has an excellent page on the web. It's called
(drum roll for originality) Larry Trask's Basque Page, though I can't
remember the URL off the top of my head at the moment.
Mike
----- Original Message -----
From: "Roger Mills" <romilly@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2001 5:37 AM
Subject: Re: Basque & Katzner's Languages of the World
> Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> >>> . In particular, I wish his phonological descriptions (which are very
> >>> anglocentric, perhaps not surprisingly) had used IPA instead of fuzzy
> >>> things like "There is both a soft r and a hard r" in Basque. Which
> >>> brings
> >>> me to my question: for those who know (something about) Basque, what
the
> >>> heck is he talking about? Trilled and non-trilled? Trilled vs.
> >>> approximant? Meep?
>
> I just bought R.L.(Larry) Trask's "History of Basque" an incredibly
complete
> and as far as I can tell accurate work (a budget-buster, alas). Very
> conservative, no wild-blue-yonder stuff, in fact he demolishes most of
> everyone's speculations about the language. Apparently there is a tapped
r
> (written "r") and a trilled one "rr". The odd thing to me is that they
can
> contrast word-finally (I suspect it has to do with what happens when a
> suffix is added, since it seems they're written "-r" in both cases, unless
> I've misread.) They also contrast medially of course, but not initially;
in
> fact Basque dislikes initial r: Lat. rege- 'king' > errege. Modern
Spanish
> loans excepted.
> Fascinating book, TOTALLY fascinating language.