Basque 'sei'

[Roslyn M. Frank]

Four items.

1) Larry Trask has brought into play  what appears to be compelling toponymic
evidence in order to refute the claim that <sei> might have been copied into
Euskera from Gascon. Yet Seguy (1951) whose research is discussed in Ruffie and
Bernard (1976)  indicates that the final element of such the place names was
rendered variously as <-os>, <-osse>, <-ons> <-ost> and <-oz>. If one assumes
that the original suffixing element was in all cases <-otz> "cold" (which is
not entirely clear),  there seems to be a certain ambivalence concerning which
sibilant was chosen to represent the original Basque suffix in Gascon. The
relevant map with the isoglosses is reproduced in Trask 1996: 41). It also
indicates attestations of corresponding Aragonese endings in <ues> and <ueste>.


2) Larry Trask hasn't mentioned (with respect to this item) that in Euskera,
/z/ regularly undergoes palatalization, e.g., in the case of the pronoun <zu>
"you" which commonly becomes <xu> (palatalized) in northern dialects, and that
Azkue and others write or represent that sound as <s> with a "tilde."
Furthermore, palatalization of sibilants in Basque creates a situation in which
both the letter <z> and the letter <s> can become conflated and represented by
the same letter, e.g., as <s> although at times with a "tilde" (cf. the dozens
of examples of this in Azkue's dictionary).

Among the commonplace palatalizations in northern dialects we have the case of
<sei> (Azkue II: 247).  This permutation is so common in other dialects of
Euskera that when I learned Basque, primarily through contacts with native
speakers of the language from Goierri in Gipuzkoa (a southern dialect), I
thought that it always had a palatalized sibilant. Interestingly, this
palatalization was commented upon recently by Max Wheeler with respect to
Gascon:

[snip]
<Luchaire (1879) on Pyrenean Gascon has abundant cases of
<final /-s/ maintained, in dialect transcriptions. The only item I can <see
with s-vocalization in any of his transcribed dialect texts is <mais> 'more' in
proclitic contexts before /j/ or /dZ/. Nothing similar in the documents he
cites. And <seis>, he notes, is often pronounced with an initial pal.-alv
fricative.

3) Furthermore, in reference to whether <sei> was copied at some time in the
past from some non-Basque language, one could construct the following argument.
In the case of the numbers 5, 7, 8 and 9, if one were to assume that they were
all indigenous to Euskera (that none of them are "loans" not even ancient ones,
(cf. Miguel C.'s contribution suggesting the contrary) we would find that we
could argue that earlier all of them ended in a consonant cluster that had /z/
as an element: <bortz> (*<bortzi> 5, <zazpi> (*<zatzi> or *<zaptzi>) 7,
<zortzi> 8, and <bederatzi> 9. Such a reconstruction would make <sei> an
anomaly in the series and, hence, suggest that it was copied from some
non-Basque language, e.g., perhaps an IE language, which was in contact with it
at some time in the past. The past 2500 years would have brought it into close
contact with Celtic, Latin/Romance, Germanic (Visogoths) speaking peoples. As a
result, there would have been a number of  opportunities for this IE item to
have entered the language.

4) I believe that Larry Trast argued that in the case of words copied (early?)
from Latin and ending in <x> (sorry I can't find the exact email), the Basque
word never drops the final sibilant complex, i.e., it is copied into Euskera as
/tz/ (again forgive me if I"m misquoting). However, there would seem to be a
few words that don't follow this rule, e.g., Basque <trebe> which I was once
told comes from Latin <trebax>. Are there others?

Conclusion: things are somewhat more complicated than they might appear to be
at first glance. Although I don't believe we are any closer to a definitive
solution to the problem, there does seem to be evidence that could be mustered
for several different scenarios. The four points above are meant only to
provide a bit of additional data for the analysis, not necessarily to suppport
one position or another.  I leave it to the experts to figure out whether any
of the above information helps one cause over the other.

Izan untsa,
Roz