Pre-Basque lexical items

[Roslyn M. Frank]

At 04:25 PM 9/10/99 -0500, Rick Mc Callister wrote:

>	Is this possibly a loan from Latin related to Spanish <saldo>?
>or perhaps from some hypothetical Celtic cognate to English <sale, sell>?
>or [stretching things a bit] even from Frankish or Gethic?

Isn't there any category at all for lexical items that were in the pre-IE
languages of Europe and ended up surviving in Basque and one or more of the
IE languages?  What is said about the old verb form or primitive verb
/ekarri/ "to carry"? It is primitive, as Larry has explained, because of
the final /i/ as opposed to verbal constructions that create the infinitive
by adding /-tu/, e.g., as in the case of /saldu/. However, /sal/ is not
anymore of a free-standing morpheme in Euskera than /ekarr/ is. They differ
in that the former carries /-i/ which is an infinitive marker that is no
longer productive in the language.

Back to the problems of this category: in most cases it is easier simply to
say that Basque borrowed the word from one of its IE neighbors.
Nonetheless, a form like /ekarri/ is more convincing morphologically than
/saldu/ because of its more ancient suffixing element. It would suggest
that if it is a loan, then it was loaned when /i/ was still a productive
suffixing element in the language. And I have no idea how one would date
that time-depth. On the other hand Larry's suggestion below is not devoid
of merit.

>[snip]

>[LT]

>>Possible evidence is <saldu> `sell', which may very well derive from
>>*<sali>, the ancestor of modern <sari> `price' (the change /l/ > /r/
>>between vowels is regular), as is the loss of /i/ before a suffix).

On that note, I remember that Larry mentioned once on this list that
/ikasi/ "to learn" was a loan word. I meant to follow that up. Can you
explain to us the reasoning there? Thanks.

Bye,
Roz Frank
*******************************************************************************
Roslyn M. Frank
Professor
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Department of Spanish & Portuguese	
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242
email: <roz-frank at uiowa.edu>
fax: (319)-335-2270