Basque 'sei'

Larry Trask larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
Mon Oct 4 07:53:36 UTC 1999


On Thu, 30 Sep 1999 s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca wrote:

> I remain agnostic regarding whether SEI is a Romance loanword or not, but
> I stand by my earlier statement: there is no phonological reason why /sei/
> couldn't be a Romance, or more specifically, Gascon loanword. See below.

> I refer you to Rohlfs again: he clearly states, a few paragraphs
> before mentionning the shift of final -s to -j, that Gascon /s/ is
> apical, and is realized just as /s/ in Ibero-Romance is. Hence we
> would indeed expect it to be borrowed as /s/ and not /z/ in Basque.
> (This fact is confirmed by the ALF, where the transcription is
> phonetic rather than phonemic: Gascon (s) is almost always apical).
> Basque /sei/ is therefore what would be expected if we were dealing
> with a loanword from Gascon.

Perhaps, but how old is the Gascon phonology?  As I've pointed out
elsewhere, place names appear to show Gascon /s/ corresponding to Basque
laminal <z>, not to apical <s>.  Recall that Latin /s/ was almost
invariably borrowed as Basque <z>, and so it appears that the apical /s/
of Ibero-Romance and Gascon is at least a post-Roman development.
But just how late could a Gascon word for `six' be borrowed into Basque?
After all, the Basque names for `7, 8, 9, 10' and so on are decidedly
non-Romance.

With respect, I don't think the facts of modern Gascon are necessarily
relevant, since the Basque word is certainly not borrowed from modern
Gascon.  Is there any possibility of dating any of the relevant Gascon
phonological developments?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk



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