8.1641, Sum: Linguistic affinities of Basque

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List:  Vol-8-1641. Sun Nov 16 1997. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 8.1641, Sum: Linguistic affinities of Basque

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1)
Date:  Sat, 15 Nov 1997 14:17:41 -0500 (EST)
From:  Ernest McCarus <enm at umich.edu>
Subject:   Basque

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Sat, 15 Nov 1997 14:17:41 -0500 (EST)
From:  Ernest McCarus <enm at umich.edu>
Subject:   Basque

The following were kind enough to respond to my query on the linguistic
affinities of Basque:

John Atkinson       johna at mech.eng.usyd.edu.au
E. Bashir           ebashir at umich.edu
Antony Dubach Green green at fas.ag-berlin.mpg.de
Martin Haase        martin.haase at cl-ki.uni-osnabrueck.de
Jose Ignatio Hualde j-hualde at uiuc.edu
Bernard Hurch       bernard.hurch at kfunigraz.ac.at
Rick McCallister    rmccalli at MUW.Edu
Gonzalo Rubio       gonzalor at jhu.edu
Patrick C. Ryan     PROTO-LANGUAGE at WorldNet.att.net

The following books were cited:

Jose I. Hualde, J. Lakarra, and R.L. Trask, TOWARDS A HISTORY OF THE
BASQUE LANGUAGE (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1995)

Luis Michelena, SOBRE EL PASADO DE LA LENGUA VASCA (San Sebastian:
Aunamendi, 1964)

Larry Trask, THE HISTORY OF BASQUE (London: Routledge, 1997; this is
reviewed in the current issue of Anthropological Linguistics, Vol. 39 No.
3)

The majority of the respondents agreed with the items above, most of them
mentioning Trask's History of Basque, with the consensus that Basque has
no known linguistic relatives.  One person mentioned that "ONLY the old
AQUITANIAN inscriptions seem to provide us with an ancestor" of Basque.

Two respondents give credence to an affinity with I-E or Nostratic, with a
reference to the huge, recent literature on this in "Mother Tongue", the
newsletter/journal of the Association for the Study of Language in
Prehistory.

I heartily thank the respondents for the references above and to the web
sites mentioned.

Ernest McCarus

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