Azkue's dictionary

[Larry Trask]

Lloyd Anderson writes:

>  Thanks to Larry Trask for the very informative review
>  of two Basque dictionaries.  I am printing a copy to keep on
>  permanent file.

>  I would only have one caveat, which is that the paragraph
>  quoted below is listed as a "major drawback" of Azkue's dictionary.
>  Many dictionary users who are interested in the vocabulary of
>  the language might consider it an advantage,
>  that one can find a word under whatever dialect variant
>  the dictionary maker had evidence for.

This is convenient for practical everyday use, certainly, but it's far less
convenient for scholarly work, since Azkue does not, in general, provide
cross-references.

>  (The lack of cross-references to eymologically related items
>  is a drawback for anyone interested in etymologies, it is true.
>  Perhaps a list of cross-references and
>  dates of attestation could be prepared by someone
>  as a supplement to Azkue's dictionary,
>  since it is in Spanish and French and otherwise provides
>  the best information on dialectal provenience?)

This work is being done, though not all in one place.

Agud and Tovar's etymological dictionary (still incomplete) gathers all
regional variants under a single headword, but provides no dates.  Sarasola's
(monoglot Basque) dictionary provides dates of first attestation, but is not
comprehensive.  The Academy's new dictionary, which is meant to be
comprehensive, also provides dates, but is far from complete.

Some day -- probably after I retire -- I plan to compile an etymological
dictionary which will incorporate all of the useful information in one place.

>  Rather this quoted paragraph should be part of indications
>  on how one uses Azkue's dictionary,
>  not under a list of supposed drawbacks of Azkue's dictionary.

The difficulty here is that knowing Azkue's policy does not help the reader
in locating the attested variant forms.  Given any one variant form of the
Basque word for, say, 'wine' or 'strawberry', there is no way of locating the
others except by guessing possible forms and then trawling through the
dictionary.  Even putting the dictionary on line, as Jon Patrick has done,
will not help if you cannot guess the possible forms to be examined --
unless, of course, you simply search for all the entries with a given gloss,
which will work in the simplest cases but not in the cases in which the
variant forms also have somewhat different meanings.

[on the problem of duplicating entries]

>  Of course one would edit these, and any linguist would recognize
>  many or most etymologically related words with the same meanings.

Well, I wish I could share this optimism, but I can't.

I get to read a whole lot of hopeful long-range comparative work involving
Basque.  And I'm afraid it is commonplace for comparativists to cite variant
forms of a Basque word as though they were unrelated and to compare them
separately with words in the other language(s) which they happen to resemble.
Only a couple of weeks ago, I chided one such comparativist for citing
eastern <hertsi> 'narrow' and its western variant <estu> 'narrow' as two
unrelated items and comparing each with a different item in the language
being compared.

A related issue is identifying transparent derivatives.  For example, Basque
<egun> 'day' has a transparent derivative <eguzki> 'sun', which in turn has a
localized eastern variant <ekhi>.  I have been astonished to see one
comparativist cite *all three* of these on the same page as though they were
unrelated and to compare each of them with a *different* word in the other
language under discussion.

>  On the whole, it seems from Larry Trask's review of it that Jon Patrick is
>  on very solid ground in using Azkue's dictionary as a basis for
>  analytical studies.

But only, I think, if a detailed knowledge of Basque linguistics is first
superimposed on the raw data.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk