Re: Questions and Impressions of Basque

En réponse à John Cowan :


>Well, Larry Trask (who certainly ought to know) says that Basque
>orthographic "f" represents a labio-dental voiceless fricative, so in
>what sense does Basque lack f?  It's true that most, though not all AFAIK,
>of the Basque words beginning with F in Wiktionary are borrowings.
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.

>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).


>Trask also says that the "Castilian is essentially Latin as spoken by
>Basques" theory doesn't hold up, though he doesn't give the details on
>his Basque page at http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/larryt/basque.html .
>I have read parts of his 1996 book in preprint, though not the whole
>thing, and have no trouble recommending it.  The list of "Basque is
>related to X" debunkings is particularly hilarious.
But it sure looks like a great coincidence that unlike any other Romance 
language, the Spanish "s" is identical to the Basque "s" (while in other 
Romance languages the "s" is always identical to the Basque "z"), or that 
it lacks voiced fricatives when they (nearly?) all have them ;) . 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.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

Reply