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Re: Questions and Impressions of Basque

From:John Cowan <jcowan@...>
Date:Monday, August 30, 2004, 20:23
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