Etruscan / Pelasgian

[Larry Trask]

--On Tuesday, May 1, 2001 6:39 pm +0200 Eduard Selleslagh <edsel at glo.be>
wrote:

> 3. About -assos/-assa: In Basque there is a "complex" of suffixes
> composed of parts of -(a)tz(a/e).  The meanings can be pretty diverse,
> but an important one is something like 'place of (many/a lot of) ....'
> and the like (also: a plant, tree producing fruit xxx). It looks like if
> the core meaning was a 'genitive', 'of', 'belonging to' (non existant in
> modern Basque case endings).  I am not pretending that this is the origin
> of -assos/-assa, but rather wondering if the Basque form might have a
> common Mediterranean origin, with or without Greek or Iberian (or
> whatever) mediation. It could be an indication that this suffix was
> wandering around the Mediterranean at an early date.

The Basque suffix is <-tza> ~ <-tze>.  The central and earliest recoverable
function of this suffix appears to be collectivity, as in <area> 'sand',
<areatza> 'beach'.  But it has acquired other functions, most notably
'abstract action', as in <jaio> 'be born', <jaiotza> 'birth', and
'profession', as in <artzain> 'shepherd', <artzantza> 'sheepherding'.

The suffix is common in place names, where the collective sense is probably
present.  However, in the 10th-13th centuries, the suffix is regularly
written as <-zaha>, as in <Artazaha>, <Otazaha>, and others.  The origin of
modern <-tza> in an earlier *<-tzaa> is confirmed by the observation that,
in the Bizkaian dialect, the addition of the article <-a> to a noun ending
in <-tza> produces <-tzaia>, with the usual Bizkaian treatment of */aaa/.
The suffix <-tze> is *probably* a variant of <-tza>, since <-tze> too has
chiefly collective functions, but I won't swear to this.  In the modern
language, <-tze> retains its collective function in cases like <jende>
'people', <jendetze> 'crowd, multitude' (alongside <jendetza>), but its
chief function today is to serve as one of the two suffixes forming gerunds
of verbs, as in <etor-> 'come', <etortze> 'coming' (gerund).

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

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