IE-Semitic connections

[manaster at umich.edu]

Indeed, the  Basque word cannot come from Romance, but
I don't think there has been any serious work claiming
that it does.

On Sat, 6 Feb 1999, Larry Trask wrote:

> On Fri, 5 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote:

> > Basque <z> is /s/, so the idea that it may have come from Romance
> > *septe > *sepce, *sepci; *sepse, *sepsi and then metathesized to
> > /saspi/ sounds sounds interesting. The problem is that [afaik] none
> > of those forms are documented in Ibero-Romance --I don't know about
> > S. Gallo-Romance. There is also the question of whether open /E/
> > would go to /a/ in Basque. Larry Trask would know that.

> Both Romance high-mid /e/ and low-mid /E/ are borrowed into Basque as
> /e/ at all periods.  (Basque has only a e i o u/.)  After Romance /E/
> and /O/ were diphthongized to /ie/ and /ue/, these too were generally
> taken into Basque as /e/, as in <leku> `place', from some Romance reflex
> of Latin LOCU of the approximate form *<lueco>.

> Latin /pt/ was assimilated to */tt/ very early in Iberian Romance, and
> there was no */ps/ stage.  The same thing happened in the ancestors of
> French and of Italian.  I have no data for southern Gallo-Romance, but I
> would be surprised if anything different happened here, since this kind
> of cluster assimilation seems to have been a very widespread feature of
> spoken Latin (Vulgar Latin).