The oddities of Basque

[Talskubilos]

I'm sure some of you've read Trask's book about Basque, and possibly also.his unfinished etymological dictionary (posthumously published on the web) However, there're many facts he didn't know about or got them wrong. This is why I've opened this thread.

For example, many Basque words have a prosthetic l- replacing the original initial consonant, usually a labial one. Some examples:
letagin < betagin
lezoin < pezoin
laino < Hispano-Romance paño
lanka < Hispano-Romance banca
lerma < Hispano-Romance merma

[Frislander]

For example, many Basque words have a prosthetic l- replacing the original initial consonant, usually a labial one. Some examples:
letagin < betagin
lezoin < pezoin
laino < Hispano-Romance paño
lanka < Hispano-Romance banca
lerma < Hispano-Romance merma

Meanings please (we're not all fluent in Basque here)? Also consider there may be morphological shenanigans going on here (both b- and l- are verb prefixes in Basque after all). And at least for laino, which dictionaries tell me means "fog" seems entirely coincidental with paño,which dictionaries tell me means "cloth, rag" or similar.

Also the word it "prothetic" btw, and in any case that doesn't seem quite the right term here, as "prothesis" is the addition of a sound to the beginning of a word, whereas this is the replacement of a previous consonant.

[Frislander]

In fact, for betagin → letagin, The Basque Language Academy gives a fairly solid etymological explanation as original *betagin assimilating to *detagin before lateralisation. So it looks like you've pulled a bunch of different words which appear to present a regular correspondence but actually seem to have a bunch of different explanations/origins.

Also digging further into Euskaltaindia I'm reminded there's a bunch of dialectal variation in Basque, so it's very hard to say that "Basque did this or that thing", because oftentimes there's a bunch of varieties which didn't do it, or it's only found in one variety that's convenient for the comparator, e.g. for banka → lanka the dialect list shows loads of banka forms (on top of a large number of seemingly Basque-internal formations) but only a couple of solitary lanka forms in the far west.

[Pabappa]

There's definitely a word like paño or paña that means fog, although maybe it isnt Spanish .... I only know this because of reading somewhere on Wikipedia that the often-heard hyperforeignism empañada "would properly mean it was either fogged up, or clothed in a diaper".

[Linguoboy]

There's definitely a word like paño or paña that means fog, although maybe it isnt Spanish .... I only know this because of reading somewhere on Wikipedia that the often-heard hyperforeignism empañada "would properly mean it was either fogged up, or clothed in a diaper".

Empañada would mean "fogged up" in the sense that a mirror fogs up, i.e. covered with a thin layer of condensation. This in turn derives from a metaphorical extension of paño. (Quoth the DRAE: "Excrecencia membranosa que desde el ángulo interno del ojo se extiende a la córnea, interrumpiendo la vista." I don't know what term we would use for this in English; it sounds similar to a cataract but not quite the same.)

Laino means "fog" in the sense of "visible condensation in the air". It can also mean "cloud". I don't see any reason to link it with a metaphorical extension of the meaning of Spanish paño. (Semantically, lanbro which can mean "fog" but also "cataract" and "nearsightedness" would seem like a better match.)

This is a problem you frequently run into when people without any real knowledge of the varieties involved do cross-linguistic comparisons based solely on dictionary entries.

[Kuchigakatai]

Also the word it "prothetic" btw

I think both "prosthetic" and "prothetic" are correct, both in terms of real-world English usage (there is even a book entitled "Vowel Prosthesis in Romance" published in 2010), and of etymology looking back at Ancient Greek... The LSJ dictionary at least reports a use of πρόσθεσις for the addition of a letter or syllable in a grammarian, and of πρόθεσις to mean both 'preposition' and the 'prefixing' of something...

[Rounin Ryuuji]

There's definitely a word like paño or paña that means fog, although maybe it isnt Spanish .... I only know this because of reading somewhere on Wikipedia that the often-heard hyperforeignism empañada "would properly mean it was either fogged up, or clothed in a diaper".

Empañada would mean "fogged up" in the sense that a mirror fogs up, i.e. covered with a thin layer of condensation. This in turn derives from a metaphorical extension of paño. (Quoth the DRAE: "Excrecencia membranosa que desde el ángulo interno del ojo se extiende a la córnea, interrumpiendo la vista." I don't know what term we would use for this in English; it sounds similar to a cataract but not quite the same.)

Going on a Google scavenger hunt, it seems to be called a pterygium in English. Apparently Spanish also has the Latinate word pterigión for it.

[Talskubilos]

In fact, for betagin → letagin, The Basque Language Academy gives a fairly solid etymological explanation as original *betagin assimilating to *detagin before lateralisation. So it looks like you've pulled a bunch of different words which appear to present a regular correspondence but actually seem to have a bunch of different explanations/origins.

Not really. Euskaltzandia's etymology is outdated and probably wrong, because it isn't restricted to coronal consonants (see below).

As a matter of fact, the Real Academia Española's etymologies are worse yet.

Also digging further into Euskaltaindia I'm reminded there's a bunch of dialectal variation in Basque, so it's very hard to say that "Basque did this or that thing", because oftentimes there's a bunch of varieties which didn't do it, or it's only found in one variety that's convenient for the comparator, e.g. for banka → lanka, the dialect list shows loads of banka forms (on top of a large number of seemingly Basque-internal formations) but only a couple of solitary lanka forms in the far west[/url].

It's true some of these words are dialectal, but this doesn't mean the phenomenon doesn't exist.

Some more examples:
lanjer (L, LN, Z) 'danger' < French danger
lizifrina, lizprina (LN) 'discipline' < Church Latin disciplina
lizifru (G) 'manger' < Romance *pisipru, but also trisipu, lisipu < *prisipu < Latin prasepe (cfr. Spanish pesebre, a metathesized form).

[Talskubilos]

Laino means "fog" in the sense of "visible condensation in the air". It can also mean "cloud". I don't see any reason to link it with a metaphorical extension of the meaning of Spanish paño. (Semantically, lanbro which can mean "fog" but also "cataract" and "nearsightedness" would seem like a better match.)

There's also the Western dialectal variant año, aino 'blight', corresponding to the meaning 'mancha oscura que varía el color natural del cuerpo, especialmente del rostro' ('itchy discoloration of the skin caused by a fungus') of Spanish paño. My guess is the word was first borrowed like this and later the initial l- was added in the more generalized variant.

This is a problem you frequently run into when people without any real knowledge of the varieties involved do cross-linguistic comparisons based solely on dictionary entries.

[Linguoboy]

Laino means "fog" in the sense of "visible condensation in the air". It can also mean "cloud". I don't see any reason to link it with a metaphorical extension of the meaning of Spanish paño. (Semantically, lanbro which can mean "fog" but also "cataract" and "nearsightedness" would seem like a better match.)

There's also the Western dialectal variant año, aino 'blight', corresponding to the meaning 'mancha oscura que varía el color natural del cuerpo, especialmente del rostro' ('itchy discoloration of the skin caused by a fungus') of Spanish paño. My guess is the word was first borrowed like this and later the initial l- was added in the more generalized variant.

Why assume it's borrowed at all though? Not all instances of /ɲ/ in Basque are.

[Nortaneous]

In fact, for betagin → letagin, The Basque Language Academy gives a fairly solid etymological explanation as original *betagin assimilating to *detagin before lateralisation.

If I'm reading this correctly and *detagin isn't attested, that seems bad. Why would b- assimilate? Maybe there's reason to think Basque prefers such structures, but cross-linguistically one would expect *detagin to be dispreferred.

[Talskubilos]

Why assume it's borrowed at all though? Not all instances of /ɲ/ in Basque are.

Good point! This would be the case of arrain 'fish', presumably native, vs larrain 'threshing floor', from Romance farrag(i)ne 'mixed fodder'.

[Frislander]

In fact, for betagin → letagin, The Basque Language Academy gives a fairly solid etymological explanation as original *betagin assimilating to *detagin before lateralisation.

If I'm reading this correctly and *detagin isn't attested, that seems bad. Why would b- assimilate? Maybe there's reason to think Basque prefers such structures, but cross-linguistically one would expect *detagin to be dispreferred.

Good point. I do recall Basque seemingly having a few odd-seeming phonotactic preferences mind and I belive *d > l is relatively well-attested in Basuqe, so it might not be out of the question, but still.

It perhaps might be remembered that proto-Basque seems to have been relatively "labial poor", I recall at least from Trask Historical Linguistics discussing an example of how internal reconstruction suggests that proto-Basque had no *m at least (it being largely confined to loanwords, absent from morphology and the relatively few native instances can generally be shown to be products of nasal assimilation of *b, e.g. mihi "tongue" from *bini (the *n being lost by the regular deletion process found elsewhere in Basque)). In that case then one might suppose that perhaps *b might not actually have been a stop in proto-Basque and it might have perhaps instead been a glide *w or similar and underwent fortition to a stop in common with the same process in Spanish. I'm also curious as to the status of *p in proto-Basque, are we sure it was even present? In which case then, you could well have a proto-Basque that has no actual bilabials to speak of, and therefore the question arises of how such a language would adapt loanwords containing such consonants. If we assume that *b was in fact perhaps a glide and there was already idiosyncratic dialectal substitution of this *w with *l (which I think isn't phonetically unreasonable), then it stands to reason that some dialects might extend this pattern to the bilabial stops when they came into the language. This is purely speculation on my part though, I don't have any definitive evidence for proto-Basque being a bilabial-less language à la Na-Dené or Iroquoian, but it's at least a scenario where I can see this kind of odd substitution pattern arising.

[Nortaneous]

It perhaps might be remembered that proto-Basque seems to have been relatively "labial poor", I recall at least from Trask Historical Linguistics discussing an example of how internal reconstruction suggests that proto-Basque had no *m at least (it being largely confined to loanwords, absent from morphology and the relatively few native instances can generally be shown to be products of nasal assimilation of *b, e.g. mihi "tongue" from *bini (the *n being lost by the regular deletion process found elsewhere in Basque)).

The inventory Trask reconstructs is lenis */b d g z s n l r/ vs. fortis */(p) t k tz ts N L R/, plus a suprasegmental aspiration feature.

In that case then one might suppose that perhaps *b might not actually have been a stop in proto-Basque and it might have perhaps instead been a glide *w or similar and underwent fortition to a stop in common with the same process in Spanish.

There could be phonotactic evidence one way or the other. My impression is that there's no reason to suspect this. Unless *d and *l can be unified, in which case the natural thing to do would be to posit /β l ɣ/, but that seems difficult since there was also *L.

Trask says the typical root had the structure C1VC2C3VC4, with heavy restrictions on the permissible consonants in each position:
- C1 could only be /b g z s l n/
- Permissible medial clusters were {r n l}{p t k b d g z s tz ts} and {z s}{p t k}
- C3 could be any consonant if C2 was absent
- C4 could only be /tz ts L N R/ or possibly {n l r}{tz}

I'm also curious as to the status of *p in proto-Basque, are we sure it was even present?

No.

[Pabappa]

I've always preferred to analyze that inventory as consisting of just the nine consonants /b d g s z n l r/ + /h/, perhaps with the assumption that the stops were originally voiceless .... since it seems that the only places where a lenis/fortis minimal pair can be found are 1) intervocalically, and 2) after one of /l n r/. And if we assume coda /l n r/ behave as sonorant diphthongs like in Lithuanian and arguably Finnish (see words like /kunkku/, /vartta/, /helppi/, etc), then 2) is just a subset of 1) and the only contrast is intervocalically. Which means that the contrast can be rewritten as gemination and Old Basque had a mere nine consonants.

Highly unusual for Europe.

But it's possible that there was palatalization even then, or that other consonants existed that ended up merging unconditionally, and so on ... things like that happen when you have only one daughter language to work back from ("internal reconstruction").

[Nortaneous]

I've always preferred to analyze that inventory as consisting of just the nine consonants /b d g s z n l r/ + /h/, perhaps with the assumption that the stops were originally voiceless .... since it seems that the only places where a lenis/fortis minimal pair can be found are 1) intervocalically, and 2) after one of /l n r/. And if we assume coda /l n r/ behave as sonorant diphthongs like in Lithuanian and arguably Finnish (see words like /kunkku/, /vartta/, /helppi/, etc), then 2) is just a subset of 1) and the only contrast is intervocalically. Which means that the contrast can be rewritten as gemination and Old Basque had a mere nine consonants.

Except then you have to explain why /b/ is the only consonant other than /h/ that can't be geminated.

[Pabappa]

I've always preferred to analyze that inventory as consisting of just the nine consonants /b d g s z n l r/ + /h/, perhaps with the assumption that the stops were originally voiceless .... since it seems that the only places where a lenis/fortis minimal pair can be found are 1) intervocalically, and 2) after one of /l n r/. And if we assume coda /l n r/ behave as sonorant diphthongs like in Lithuanian and arguably Finnish (see words like /kunkku/, /vartta/, /helppi/, etc), then 2) is just a subset of 1) and the only contrast is intervocalically. Which means that the contrast can be rewritten as gemination and Old Basque had a mere nine consonants.

Except then you have to explain why /b/ is the only consonant other than /h/ that can't be geminated.

not really ... if /lb/ and /lp/ are contrastive under the Trask analysis you detailed, than /b/ can be geminated, and there we go.

But even if not ... gaps like that are pretty common. Just off the top of my head, we have proto-Germanic, where /z/ is the only consonant that cannot be geminated. If we didnt have proto-Indo-European to look back on, the gap of *zz would have no obvious explanation, and we'd be in the same situation as we are with Basque.

[WeepingElf]

Highly unusual for Europe.

Well, Basque appears to be the last survivor of a lost linguistic landscape which existed in Europe before it all was overrun by the Indo-Europeans. It is as if just one indigenous language had survived European colonization of North America.

[Talskubilos]

lizifrina, lizprina (LN) 'discipline' < Church Latin disciplina
lizifru (G) 'manger' < Romance *pisipru, but also trisipu, lisipu < *prisipu < Latin prasepe (cfr. Spanish pesebre, a metathesized form).

The fr cluster is a rendering of Romance br [βɾ] and it's also found in e.g. Asturian zofre 'copper' (cfr. Spanish cobre).

Well, Basque appears to be the last survivor of a lost linguistic landscape which existed in Europe before it all was overrun by the Indo-Europeans. It is as if just one indigenous language had survived European colonization of North America.

I'm afraid this is an old clissé repeated ad nauseam, but this doesn't make it true. In fact, in his last book (aimed to the general public and thus less technical than its other works) the late Rodríguez Adrados suggested the ancestor of Basque could have been brought by the Steppe People along with IE.

IMHO, there're two linguistic facts which would support this:
1) the *e- prefix found in non-finite verb forms could be related to the so-called "augment" in Eastern IE languages (Greek, Indo-Iranian).
2) The verb edan 'to drink' could be related to Iranian dānu- 'river', found as a toponymic element.

[WeepingElf]

Well, Basque appears to be the last survivor of a lost linguistic landscape which existed in Europe before it all was overrun by the Indo-Europeans. It is as if just one indigenous language had survived European colonization of North America.

I'm afraid this is an old clissé repeated ad nauseam, but this doesn't make it true. In fact, in his last book (aimed to the general public and thus less technical than its other works) the late Rodríguez Adrados suggested the ancestor of Basque could have been brought by the Steppe People along with IE.

Rodríguez Adrados was IMHO misguided (and he also was a Neo-Franquist, which not necessarily confounded his linguistic reasoning, but makes him even less likable to me, and people with such objectionable political positions usually also maintain objectionable positions somewhere else). Yet, I don't know his argument in this particular case, and the notion that what I called (in the Paleo-European languages thread) the "R1b people" spoke an ancestor of Basque rather than my hypothetical "Southern IE" cannot be safely dismissed, though it leaves, as I wrote, Anatolian unaccounted-for. BTW, the French word you were looking for is cliché.

IMHO, there're two linguistic facts which would support this:
1) the *e- prefix found in non-finite verb forms could be related to the so-called "augment" in Eastern IE languages (Greek, Indo-Iranian).
2) The verb edan 'to drink' could be related to Iranian dānu- 'river', found as a toponymic element.

Chance resemblances, nothing else. Try harder.