Pre-Basque phonology (PS)

[Larry Trask]

On Sat, 11 Sep 1999, roslyn frank wrote:

[on Basque <beltz> `black']

> An anecdotal and not very scientific piece of evidence (or
> counter-evidence depending on your point of view) is the following
> from a late 19th century interview conducted by an Englishmen with
> two (apparently) Basque-speaking bear-trainers from Biarritz. The
> conversation itself took place in what looks like a mixture of
> French and Spanish. At one point the Englishman records that they
> called their bear by the name "Belis" which I assume was the
> Englishman's rendition of "Beltz" (Black).  The question is how
> faithful should we consider the Englishman's rendition to be of the
> phonology of the original utterance.

It is impossible to judge how accurate the Englishman's rendering might
have been.  Moreover, we can't be sure that the bear's name was <Beltz>,
and in fact I doubt it.  It would be most unusual to give an animal the
name <Beltz>: in my experience, the form would be <Beltza>, with the
article, and in fact I have encountered exactly this name given to at
least one dog.

> Similarly, from my point of view there are problems in interpreting
> Aquitanian inscriptions that read BELEX(-), occasionally BELEXS- or
> BELS-, and concluding that *<beletz> was the original form (without
> bringing in other evidence),

Indeed, and the identification of the Aquitanian item with <beltz> is by
no means certain, though it is plausible.  Anyway, we do have a modest
amount of further evidence favoring the reconstruction of <beltz> as
*<beletz> -- not least the observation that perhaps no other word in the
language ends in the cluster <-ltz>.

> keeping in mind that at that time -the time when the incriptions
> were produced- we have no evidence for a written tradition in
> Euskera, i.e., there was no standardized form of
> writing/transcribing Euskera -something that only came into being in
> the XXth century.

Agreed, of course, since Aquitanian itself was apparently never written
at all.  All we have is Aquitanian names embedded in Latin texts, and
written, as far as possible, with Latin spelling conventions.  In most
respects, those conventions appear to have been broadly adequate, but
the big exception was the sibilants: Pre-Basque (and therefore
presumably Aquitanian) was rich in contrasting sibilants, while Latin
had only the single sibilant /s/ and only the single character <S> for
writing sibilants.  It appears that the otherwise unneeded Latin <X> was
pressed into service to write some of the sibilants, probably especially
the affricates, but that no consistent system of transcription was
achieved.  It is quite noticeable that, in Aquitanian, the graphs <S>,
<SS>, <X> and <XS> are used in a somewhat haphazard way, with the same
morpheme being variously spelled.

> Nor is there any particular reason to think that the individuals who
> carved the stones were copying from designs written by monolingual
> Basque speakers. Stated differently, one would assume that the
> stone-smiths who carved the Latin/Vulgar Latin texts which have
> Basque names interspersed (is that the right way to phrase it?)

Yes, except that the Latin is generally classical in form.

> were probably copying their letters from a document
> prepared by someone familiar with Latin/Vulgar Latin.

It is not known whether the carvers were copying anything, though it is
clear that the texts were written by someone who knew Latin.  The
funerary stelae were probably carved by professionals, but the votive
inscriptions, which are generally just scrawled on bits of slate or
similar material, were very likely made by the donors themselves.
Note that we sometimes find Aquitanian case-endings in place of the
expected Latin ones, suggesting that the inscriptions were made by
native speakers of Aquitanian.

> It is not clear whether that person was a Basque speaker or whether,
> what happened was more similar to the case cited above in which an
> Englishman tried to render his "impression" of what he "heard", i.e,
> a Basque word that he transliterated into English phonology. (And,
> yes, Larry, we've gone around on this one before in a different
> venue.)

Apart from the sibilants, the transcriptions of the Aquitanian names are
generally highly consistent.  This could mean either that the
inscriptions were made by native Aquitanian speakers, or that the
Aquitanian names were easily and accurately heard by the carvers, who
had no trouble in putting them into Latin spelling.  In either case, we
can have some confidence in the accuracy of the transcriptions.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk