Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE?

[Larry Trask]

On Mon, 17 May 1999, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

> Miguel,

> I don't know if you noticed that in the first of these two web
> pages, the Aragonese-Castilian dictionary mentions Ar. MUGA - Cast.
> LIMITE.  This is unmistakably pure Basque! So, a Basque origin for
> CHANDRO wouldn't be improbable at all.

With respect, I think it is most unlikely that Basque <muga> `boundary,
frontier' is native in that language.

First, it has a seemingly impossible form for a native word of any
antiquity.  Pre-Basque apparently had no */m/ at all, and word-initial
/m/ in native words derives from no source other then */b/ in the
configuration */bVn-/ -- not possible with <muga>.

Second, the word occurs very widely in western Romance.  According to my
sources, we find <muga> not only in Aragonese but also in Old Catalan,
and we have <mougue> in Bearnais.  Similar and apparently cognate nouns
and derived verbs occur in most of Ibero-Romance and in much of
Gallo-Romance, with a possible but uncertain outlier in Sardinian.
These various Romance forms sometimes have /b/ in place of /m/, and /o/
or /ue/ in place of /u/.  One source also reports a similar word in
Breton.

The word has been intensively studied by Vasconists and Romanists for
generations.  There is something of a consensus that the source is an
item of the variable form *<muga> ~ *<moga> ~ *<buga> ~ *<boga>.  But
the origin of this item is much debated.  Some Romanists label it
"pre-Roman", which is Romanist code for "we haven't a clue where it
comes from".  Inevitably, several people have tried to see it as of
Celtic origin, though more than one Celtic source has been proposed, all
of them with conspicuous asterisks.  At least one person has tried to
trace it back to an IE root.  But nobody seems to want to see the word
as being of Basque origin: the form is wrong, and there is no parallel
for such widespread diffusion of a Basque loan into western European
languages.

Finally, I might note that, while Basque <muga> means `limit, frontier'
today, as its apparent cognates commonly do in neighboring languages, in
our earliest Basque texts the word more usually means `boundary-stone'
-- that is, a stone marker set up to mark a boundary.  This sense is
usually rendered today by the compound <mugarri> `boundary-stone', with
<harri> `stone'.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk