Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE?

[Eduard Selleslagh]

-----Original Message-----
From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Date: Thursday, May 20, 1999 7:42 AM

[ moderator snip ]

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

[ moderator snip of long post ]

>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'.

[Ed Selleslagh]

Thanks for the information; I should have consulted Agud & Tovar's
'Diccionario etimológico vasco' first.

Even though I completely agree that the word 'muga' does not fit well in
(Proto-) Basque, I would like to point out that all the Romance dialects you
cite either have or may have been in contact with Basque, its precursors or
related languages.

If it is of IE origin (e.g. Celtic), does anyone on this list have a clue?
(Visi)Gothic is probably too late (and anyway, all I found [in
Wulfila-Gothic] that could be remotely related by form or meaning was:
<bugjan>, 'to buy', and <mota>, 'toll'). In Latin there is <mucro, -onis>,
'1.point of the sword, 2.endpoint, limit', which may be the origin of
Sardinian 'mógoro', and related to Pokorny's celt. *mrogi- (mod. breton.
'moger').

Ed.