Basque 'sei'

[Stephane Goyette]

I remain agnostic regarding whether SEI is a Romance loanword or not, but
I stand by my earlier statement: there is no phonological reason why /sei/
couldn't be a Romance, or more specifically, Gascon loanword. See below.

On Mon, 27 Sep 1999, Larry Trask 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.

Yes, but let us bear in mind that the 'conditioned variant' (SEI) was
frequent in Gascon, making it quite possible for Basque-Gascon bilinguals
to have perceived it to be the unmarked form, rather than SES.

A personal anecdote illustrating this phenomenon, if I may: I once knew a
speaker of (Irish) English in Montreal, who had learned her French there
and who was quite fluent...except that she used the weak forms of certain
words in strong position: I remember that she always realized PLUS as
/ply/, never /plyz/ or /plys/, even though the latter is the normal,
unmarked form.

> 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>.

> We therefore have a problem: a Gascon */sej-X/ should have come into
> Basque as, at best, *<zei>, and not *<sei>.  But no such form as the
> expected *<zei> is recorded anywhere: <sei> is the only form attested in
> Basque.

> Hence the scenario described above further requires that, in this case,
> instead of the normal treatment of Occitan /s/ as Basque <z>, /s/ was
> exceptionally borrowed as <s>.

I refer you to Rohlfs again: he clearly states, a few paragraphs before
mentionning the shift of final -s to -j, that Gascon /s/ is apical, and is
realized just as /s/ in Ibero-Romance is. Hence we would indeed expect it
to be borrowed as /s/ and not /z/ in Basque. (This fact is confirmed by
the ALF, where the transcription is phonetic rather than phonemic: Gascon
(s) is almost always apical). Basque /sei/ is therefore what would be
expected if we were dealing with a loanword from Gascon.

Stephane Goyette.
University of Ottawa.
stephane at Goyette.com