Basque 'sei'

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk> wrote:

>First, the suggested scenario is rather convoluted, and it requires a
>very particular sequence of events: the borrowing, not of the counting
>numeral, as is most usual in borrowing numeral-names, but of a specific
>expression which is nowhere attested in Basque, followed by an
>extraction within Basque of a conditioned variant of the numeral-name
>not found in isolation in the source language.  Not impossible, I guess,
>but not exactly a straightforward analysis, either.

Quite.

>Second, there's the problem of the sibilant.  Basque has two contrasting
>voiceless alveolar sibilants: a laminal, notated <z>, and an apical,
>notated <s>.  Now, in early loans from Latin, Latin /s/ is almost always
>rendered as the laminal <z>.  The same is true at all periods of loans
>from Gallo-Romance: the laminal /s/ of Occitan and French is rather
>consistently rendered by the Basque laminal <z>, not by the apical <s>.
>In contrast, the apical /s/ of Ibero-Romance is equally consistently
>rendered by the Basque apical <s>.

But Gascon-Be'arnais is Ibero-Romance in many ways, including
it's apical <s>.

>I don't suppose any of this is impossible, but, taken together, it
>appears to me to constitute a very dubious case -- especially since all
>the other Basque names of lower numerals are native.  I still think the
>Basque-Romance resemblance here is best regarded as being on a par with
>cases like English `much' and Spanish <mucho> `much', English `bad' and
>Persian <bad> `bad', and English `him' and Laz (Kartvelian) <him> `him'.

I don't think it's a Gascon borrowing, but surely there's more
than just chance resemblance between the numeral names for "6"
and "7" as found all over the Mediterranean:

Egyptian:       sjsw (*sds-)            sfxw (*sp'3-)
Berber:         sd.is                   sa (*sab-)
Akkadian:       s^is^s^et (*s^id_s^-)   sebet (*sab3-)
Indo-European:  swek^s ~ s^wek^s        sep(h3)tm
Georgian:       ekwsi                   s^vidi
Etruscan:       s^a                     semph
Basque:         sei (*s^ei)             zazpi (*sasbi)

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl