Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate?

[Rick Mc Callister]

[ moderator edited ]

>[PR]

>What would really be interesting is for Larry Trask to show statistically
>how likely his immense group of unattested proto-Romance etyma are as a
>source for Basque, which, evidently never met a foreign word it did not
>like --- while tenaciously preserving a most usual morphological system.

	If you've read most histories of the Spanish language, you come
across a couple of pages on pre-Roman Iberia and a list of words and an
ascription that amounts to "I don't know where it comes from so it must be
from Basque."
	Most of the histories focus on the development of Latin to Spanish.
And if the authors know any non-Romance languages, those will be generally
limited to Greek, German and Arabic.
	When Basque or Celtic are mentioned, it tends to be via a
dictionary of modern Basque or a modern Celtic language, often without any
input vis-a-vis what Basque or Hispano-Celtic must have looked like when
the loan word in question entered Ibero-Romance.
	A lot of what is writen about pre-Romance substrate in Spanish [in
general histories of the language] also tends to be received information
with little or no attempt to verify, update or revise it.
	Keep in mind that non-specialists tend to read only these general
histories and not the specialized research publications, which [from what I
perceive] began to flourish after the death of Franco.

	To give an example of what I'm talking about.
Spanish <minio> "cinnabar" < Hispano-Latin <minium>
[and also the Min~o/Minho River]
is often ascribed to Basque based on Basque <min> "shiny, lit up, sparkling"
Larry Trask has explained on the list [many times]
that Basque had no /m/ at that period
so the logical assumption would be to look elsewhere
and so I looked at the on-line MacBain's Gaelic Etymological Dictionary
and found

mèin, mèinn "ore, mine"
	Irish méin, mianach, Early Irish míanach, Welsh mwyn:
	< *meini-, meinni-, < root mei, smei, smi;
	see Old Slavonic mêdi, aes; OHG smîda, metal, English smith
	(Schräder)

	Now, I would be hypocritical if I stopped there and said it must be
from Celtic, since I don't know exactly what the word would like like in
Hispano-Celtic and I don't know the phonetic differences among Celtiberian,
SW & NW Hispano-Celtic and Gaulish. Also, keep in mind that MacBain's is
about 100 years old.
	And, mnore importantly, Celtic was not the only pre-Roman IE
language spoken in Iberia. There was also Lusitanian/Sorotaptic.
	I'd also want to check a Basque etymological dictionary to see
about a possible *bin, etc.
	But, I think there's enough information there to hypothesize that
<minio> likely came from IE

	If you want to see a language that is even more skewed than Basque
in terms of Spanish vocabulary, look at some on-line pages for Chamorro
	The lexicon seems to be about 90-95% Spanish yet the language by
and large maintains its original morphology. Other than a knowledge of
topics, it is not comprehensible to Spanish speakers.

	I imagine that part of the answer for Basque goes beyond just being
surrounded by IE languages for the last 2-3,000 years. As hill people, the
Basque acquired new technology, fashions, ideologies, etc. from
IE-speakers. I suppose they also needed a rudimentary knowledge of IE
languages for doing business at IE-speaking market towns and dealing with
IE-speaking political and religious functionaries. The language has many
dialects and I imagine that speakers just used the IE word they heard for
new-fangled things and concepts
	This process may predate the Romans. Roz Frank once mentioned an
idea that the Celts may have had the same relationship with the Basques.
I've also seen some articles that talk about a similar but reversed
relationship between Celts and Tartessians.

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701