Basque 'sei'

Larry Trask larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
Sun Oct 3 16:09:14 UTC 1999


On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:

[LT]

>> Second, there's the problem of the sibilant.  Basque has two contrasting
>> voiceless alveolar sibilants: a laminal, notated <z>, and an apical,
>> notated <s>.  Now, in early loans from Latin, Latin /s/ is almost always
>> rendered as the laminal <z>.  The same is true at all periods of loans
>> from Gallo-Romance: the laminal /s/ of Occitan and French is rather
>> consistently rendered by the Basque laminal <z>, not by the apical <s>.
>> In contrast, the apical /s/ of Ibero-Romance is equally consistently
>> rendered by the Basque apical <s>.

> But Gascon-Be'arnais is Ibero-Romance in many ways, including
> it's apical <s>.

Very interesting.  I didn't know that.

But how old is this apical /s/ in Gascon?  In his inadequately
celebrated article `Lat. S: el testimonio vasco', Michelena points out
that the ending <-os> ~ <-osse>, so common in Gascon place names,
corresponds regularly to Basque <-otz> ~ <-oze>, just as the related
Aragonese <-ue's> does.  This suggests strongly that the laminal <z> was
the ordinary equivalent of Gascon and Aragonese /s/ at an early stage,
and hence that the apical pronunciation of /s/ in modern Gascon must be
a later development there, just as it appears to be in Ibero-Romance.
So, any attempt at deriving Basque <sei> `six' from Gascon would have to
see the borrowing as rather late.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk



More information about the Indo-european mailing list