Linguoboy wrote: ↑Tue Jul 20, 2021 1:13 pmAgain, I'm not really sure what you're saying here. Yes, there are multiple strata of loanwords from multiple forms of Romance, most of them later than the Proto-Basque period. (Standard German also has very few pre-Second Consonant Shift loans from Latin and Romance compared to the number which arrive afterwards.)
Not only that, but even native lexicon shows an astouding range of internal variations, as in the example I quoted of
betagin, where some variants (e.g.
letagin) have got a (seemingly prosthetic)
l- in the place of an initial labial, an irregular but by no means infrequent phenomenon in Basque.
Linguoboy wrote: ↑Tue Jul 20, 2021 1:13 pmSo you have to be careful about identifying a particular word's provenance when reconstructing the changes and their chronology, but this doesn't mean that you can't use, say, 9th-century loanwords to reconstruct sound changes from the 9th century onwards and earlier loanwords to reconstruct sounds changes earlier than that, as Vascologists like Mitxelena and Trask have done.
Really? I'm afraid Trask didn't tell between genuine Latin/Early Romance and later loanwords, as e.g.
liburu.
Linguoboy wrote: ↑Tue Jul 20, 2021 1:13 pmI just don't see this leading to the reconstruction of "some kind of Vasco-Romance language" unless you can find some solid ground for arguing that all Romance loanwords were treated differently from native vocabulary with respect to sound changes.
As a matter of fact, except possibly the merger of intervocalic liquids /
l,ɾ/ into /
ɾ/ and palatalization of nasal codas (incorrectly identified by Mitxelena-Trask, who associated it with a Romance
yod), most changes aren't exclusive of Basque but are shared with other languages. My own impression is that the great bulk of loanwords was adapted into Basque with few or no changes at all, so this would imply it was thoroughly Romanized.
On the other hand, the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula at the 8th century and the subsequent "Reconquista" (the expansion of northern Christian feuds into southern Al-Andalus) caused the extinction of most indigenous Romance varieties, collectively called "Mozarabic" (or more idiosyncratically "Romano-Andalusi" by the Spanish Arabist Federico Corriente), replaced by the northern ones (roughly Galego-Portuguese, Asturian, Aragonese, Catalan) and to a smaller extent, also by Basque itself.
It seems as if both T. and I feel as if there was a stratum of extinct IE languages, later clobbered by the expansion of Italic, Celtic and Germanic, in much of Western Europe, but we have different ideas about what those lost IE languages were like. T. apparently calls this stratum "Baltoid" (which perhaps is a designation he did not coin himself but picked up somewhere) and sees it as a language broadly similar to Baltic (i.e., a satem language with *D-Dh and *a-o mergers), while I call it "Southern IE" and suspect a relationship to the Anatolian languages such as Hittite, while not making any predicament about its phonological developments. (Obviously, these two hypotheses do not even contradict each other - why couldn't a branch of Southern IE - independently from Baltic, though - show such sound developments, which are commonplace enough in the IE family? In my opinion, the phonologies of Northern and Southern IE were probably mostly isomorphic - not necessarily the same, but each phoneme in one corresponding to one phoneme in the other - as the Late PIE phonology, which would be that of Northern IE, does a fairly good job accounting for Anatolian, the sole attested Southern IE branch, while the differences between Northern and Southern IE lay in morphology, syntax and maybe lexicon.) Such a stratum was already proposed in the middle of the 20th century (see Hans Krahe's "Old European Hydronymy" which, however, is not without flaws; some of the names on Krahe's list, such as Brigantia, are patently Celtic or from other known languages), and it seems to me as if the Bell Beaker culture was a good candidate for the speaker community of these languages.
