6.1175, Sum: Latin and romance

Tue Aug 29 21:05:13 UTC 1995

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-6-1175. Tue Aug 29 1995. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines:  152

Subject: 6.1175, Sum: Latin and romance

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---------------------------------Directory-----------------------------------
1)
Date:  Tue, 29 Aug 1995 14:22:23 BST
From:  larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk ("Larry Trask")
Subject:  Sum: Latin and Romance

---------------------------------Messages------------------------------------
1)
Date:  Tue, 29 Aug 1995 14:22:23 BST
From:  larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk ("Larry Trask")
Subject:  Sum: Latin and Romance

A couple of weeks ago I posted a somewhat peculiar question about
Latin and Romance.  What I asked was this.  If only a single Romance
language had survived into modern times, say Gascon or Galician, if we
had no records for it older than 400 years ago, if the very existence
of Latin were completely unknown to linguists, and if a few Latin
texts of up to fifty words or so were then dug up for the first time,
would specialists in that surviving Romance language be able to
recognize the Latin texts as written in an ancestral form of their
language, and would they be able to make any progress in interpreting
the Latin texts?  (I further assume that no assistance is available
from other IE languages.)

I received a modest number of responses, some of them quite long.
Naturally, most respondents were cautious and some asked for more
information.  Nonetheless, it does appear that there is a consensus
view to which all those who expressed a view would broadly subscribe.
It's this:

Providing the Latin texts consisted of complete sentences, and were
not (say) merely lists, and

Providing the Latin texts contained a respectable amount of verbal
morphology, then

It SHOULD be possible to recognize the texts as representing an
ancestral form of the modern language, but

It might not be possible to get very far with interpreting the Latin
texts, depending on the degree of lexical replacement in the surviving
language.

There was some disagreement on the importance of lexical replacement:
some people thought that a 90% lexical replacement would be a serious
obstacle, while others considered that it would be only a minor
problem.

One respondent added the further proviso that the degree of
phonological change should not have been too dramatic, but a couple of
others were very optimistic that even substantial phonological changes
would only constitute a delay, and not an insurmountable obstacle.

So that's the answer I got.

Now, the reason for this strange question.  It was suspected for
centuries that the undeciphered Iberian texts of Spain and southern
France might represent an ancestral form of Basque, but no progress
could be made until the Iberian script was deciphered.  That
decipherment was completed more than half a century ago, and since
then we have been able to read the Iberian texts at the phonological
level.

In the 1950s, Antonio Tovar and Luis Michelena independently
scrutinized the Iberian texts to see if there was evidence of a
genetic link with Basque.  There were a few encouraging facts: Iberian
is phonologically very similar to the standard reconstruction of
pre-Basque phonology for about 2000 years ago; it shares an ethnonymic
suffix with Basque, and it has two other apparent suffixes that at
least look like common Basque suffixes; word-structure, so far as we
can identify it, looks very much like Basque; a few morphs of unknown
meaning are more or less identical to common Basque words.

However, what both scholars found was that Basque was of precisely
zero assistance in interpreting the Iberian texts: it is of no more
assistance than Eskimo or English.  Apart from the fragments just
mentioned, no trace of Basque nominal or verbal morphology can be
identified, nor can any pronouns, demonstratives or numerals, nor any
sequence of two items that might make sense in Basque.  Consequently,
the Basque-Iberian thesis has for decades been generally dismissed by
vasconists as a dead letter.

Recently, however, two or three people have been trying to revive the
view that Iberian might be an ancestral form of Basque or at least a
close relative of an ancestral form.  These people attempt to explain
our failure to find any recognizable Basque in the Iberian texts as
merely the result of 2000 years of accumulated changes, changes which
have presumably involved the replacement of the entire ancient
morphology.  I find this hard to believe, and I suspect it is no more
than wishful thinking, but I can't be certain.  Hence my query, to
which the answers I've received would seem to support my skepticism.

A further point is Aquitanian.  We have no texts in this language, but
we do have about 470 personal and divine names recorded in Latin
texts, and a number of these are so transparently Basque that most
specialists have been satisfied for years that Aquitanian must be an
ancestral form of Basque.  This makes a striking contrast to our
failure to find any Basque in the far more substantial Iberian
materials.  Just to complicate things, however, Iberian personal names
are often remarkably similar to Aquitanian ones and appear to
incorporate some of the same elements.

One respondent asked me to comment on how thoroughly vasconists have
extracted the available information on the prehistory of Basque by
means of dialect comparison and internal reconstruction.  Briefly, the
phonological system has been reconstructed in great detail to a time
of around 2000 years ago, the period when Basque started borrowing
Latin words, and the subsequent phonological history is very well
understood.  It seems unlikely that there is much still to be done
with the phonology.  On the lexical side, in most cases we can
distinguish genuinely ancient native words from loan words and later
formations, and probably little remains to be done except for finding
a few more individual etymologies.  On the grammatical side, however,
in spite of a few striking successes with particular points, we have
so far made little progress beyond some plausible speculations.  This
last is a very lively area at present, though, and very significant
progress is now being made; I expect to see a good deal of further
progress in the next few years.

All this will be spelled out in my forthcoming book _The History of
Basque_ (provisional title), from Routledge some time in 1996.

My thanks to Allen Wechsler, Leo Connolly, Peter Daniels, Olav Hammer,
Andrew Spencer, Anton Sherwood, Leslie Barrett, Theo Vennemann, and
Jose' Ignacio Hualde.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
England

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
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