Excluding data

[Larry Trask]

On Sun, 26 Sep 1999, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote:

[LT]

>> Take any decent dictionary of English published around 1900.  How many
>> of the words entered in it existed in Old English, only about 1000 years
>> ago?  Not many.  Why should Basque be different?  (And the Pre-Basque
>> I'm interested in dates back to about 2000 years ago.)

> But take any dictionary of Icelandic and ask how many of its words
> existed in Old Norse. The answer is, practically all! And it is
> probably a fair statement that, adding proper sound changes, you may
> even push that back to Proto-Germanic. I guess English and Icelandic
> are both relatively extreme cases. Where Basque stands between the
> two poles must be looked into with an open mind, as I suppose you
> have already done.

Indeed, though not just me.

Icelandic is beyond question a special case.  English is arguably
another, though not so clearly as Icelandic.  But, in the Basque case,
there is no doubt at all: the overwhelming majority of the words in any
modern Basque dictionary did not exist 2000 years ago.  In a modern
Basque dictionary, we can find not just whole pages, but lengthy
sequences of pages, containing not a single lexical item that can
plausibly be projected back to Pre-Basque.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK
	
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk