Re: Questions and Impressions of Basque

Christophe Grandsire scripsit:

> My book says that no Basque dialect (not even Souletin with its /y/,
> voiced fricatives and phonemic stress) has /f/ as a true phoneme. A few
> loanwords have introduced f, but it doesn't have it in native words.
Fair enough.

> >As for the f > h story, in Ibero-Romance all inherited /f/ went to
> >/h/ and then zero (this was long after inherited /h/ went to zero)
> >except /fw/ which remained unchanged.
>
> Incorrect: some Ibero-Romance languages went all the way. Gascon has
> "huek" for "fire" (Spanish fuego).
I should have said "Iberian Romance"; that is, Romance languages
spoken on the Iberian peninsula.  What are the isoglosses that
have Iberian Romance and Catalan-Occitan on one side and the
Gallo-Romance languages on the other, anyway?

> But it sure looks like a great coincidence that unlike any other Romance
> language, the Spanish "s" is identical to the Basque "s"
As spoken in the North, anyhow.  Andalusia (and consequently the
Islands and America) have always had ordinary s.

> Now, "Castillan is essentially Latin as spoken by Basques" is certainly
> going too far, but I do think that some amount of influence or parallel
> evolution has taken place. Basque was in the past spoken in a much wider
> area than it is now, and a certain amount of contact has certainly taken
> place, influencing both languages.
Again, fair enough.

--
John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan
[R]eversing the apostolic precept to be all things to all men, I usually [before
Darwin] defended the tenability of the received doctrines, when I had to do
with the [evolution]ists; and stood up for the possibility of [evolution] among
the orthodox -- thereby, no doubt, increasing an already current, but quite
undeserved, reputation for needless combativeness.  --T. H. Huxley