Pre-Basque phonology (PS)

[Roslyn M. Frank]

At 09:21 AM 9/16/99 +0100, you wrote:

>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.

True. There isn't much way to determine what exactly the speaker's said,
whether it was <Beltz> or <Beltza> only the Englishman rendered what he
heard as <belis>. However I'm not so certain that I agree with you that one
would expect to encounter <Beltza> as the nickname for the animal. I think
things may be a bit more complicated. Whereas today if a Basque speaker is
asked to translate a word from English to Basque, s/he will normally do so
by attaching the former distal demonstrative to the item, i.e., the word
appears with the suffixing element <-a>. However, does it follow that this
"pseudo" definite article is used by Basque speakers when creating
nicknames for animals and people? And it is commonplace for last names
ending in <beltz> to appear as <beltz>, e.g., Urbeltz, not *Urbeltza. In
the same way <maite> "love" is a commonplace first name, not <maitea>. Or,
for example, we find <txiki> "little" often used as a nickname, not <txikia>.

>From a cognitive perspective, does the creation of nicknames of this type
tend [in all languages] to respond to the vocative usage? If they do, then
it would be logical (I think) for the item not to carry the <-a> suffix in
Euskera. On that note, although the terms "lord, sir" will be translated as
<jauna>, my friends' mastiff still responds to <Jaun>.

>> 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>.

Agreed.

>> 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.

Further proof that they were attempting to render sounds that were foreign
to the language they were writing in, although after reading recent
mailings to the list, I wonder just how many alphabets are as faithful to
the phonology of the language as in the case of Latin or Spanish. I'm also
curious whether in IE studies similar data of the presence/influence of
non-IE languages have been detected through the analysis of such anomalies
in texts written in IE languages. In other words, if we assume that
alphabets are unstable in terms of their power of referentiality, i.e.,
their ability to reflect way the language in question is/was actually
spoken, what does that mean in terms of level accuracy of linguistic data
derived from early IE inscriptions?

[snip]
>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.

Interesting. Isn't there also the fact that Basque last names often include
case-endings in them and perhaps more so at that time when the notion of a
"last name" was far less stable and/or formalized? I refer to the fact that
"last names" frequently refer(red) to geographical locations where the
Stammhaus was located, i.e., the <baserri>, and as a result the individual
was identified with the site or location and, hence, the need for a
genitive ending, although I assume you are talking about other kinds of
examples where the donor really appears to have been bilingual (not just
repeating the genitive ending on an already existing name), a bit like the
trilingual author of the _Glosas Emilienses_ (a source of very early
examples of Castillian) who wrote notes to himself in the margins in his
native tongue, Euskera, while translating the Latin text into Castillian.
It's interesting how many times this document is discussed in canonical
histories of the Spanish language but without any mention of the marginal
notes that are clearly visible in reproductions of the manuscript. H'mmmmm.

Agur t'erdi,
Roz

************************************************************************
Roslyn M. Frank
Professor
************************************************************************
Department of Spanish & Portuguese	
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242
email: <roz-frank at uiowa.edu>
fax: (319)-335-2990