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Re: Questions and Impressions of Basque

From:John Cowan <jcowan@...>
Date:Tuesday, August 31, 2004, 16:45
Christophe Grandsire scripsit:

> >Interesting to note that, while Spanish transforms 'f' > >into 'h', Russian transforms 'h' into 'g' (gospital = > >[military] hospital). > > I thought they would rather transform it into [x], since that's what > they do when trying to learn a language containing [h]...
Older borrowings show h > g, more recent ones h > x.
> We don't really know whether they even exist ;) . But I've always heard > that Gascon was Ibero-Romance rather than Gallo-Romance...
Well, Ethnologue (which is the ultimate splitter taxonomy) divides Ibero-Romance into Catalan, Occitan (which they reckon a taxon of six languages), and "West Iberian", which last is divided into Asturian, Castilian and four close relatives, and Portuguese-Galician. So they agree with you, but of course they don't provide the evidence.
> It seems the three groups Ibero-Romance, Gallo-Romance and Italo-Romance > are just one big continuum ;) .
In fact yes. After all, you can walk from Gibraltar to Brussels to the southernmost tip of Italy without ever crossing a "hard" language barrier, at least in terms of traditional dialect. (But take your mountain boots.) -- "How they ever reached any conclusion at all jcowan@reutershealth.com> is starkly unknowable to the human mind." http://www.reutershealth.com --"Backstage Lensman", Randall Garrett http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

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Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>