Sum: Basque <lanabes>

[Larry Trask]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
About a month ago I posted a query about a possible Romance
source for Basque <lanabes> ~ <lanabasa> (and several other variants)
'tools', 'tool set', 'toolkit'.  Nothing has ever been established
about the origin of this word.  It is first recorded in 1627
(early by Basque standards), in the French Basque writer
Etxeberri of Ziburu, and it is mainly recorded since then on
the French side, though it is also attested on the Spanish side.

The only etymology ever proposed is a compound of native <lan>
'work' and <beso> 'arm'.  But this is phonologically terrible
and semantically unpersuasive.  The word just does not look
native, but no obvious Romance source presents itself --
hence my query.

I received responses from six people.  These, while not decisive,
were very helpful, and I think we're probably closing in on a
good Romance source.

I mentioned Castilian <la navaja> 'the knife'.  Roger Wright
points out that the Old Castilian pronunciation of this would
not be a phonologically bad source at all -- though the singular
sense of the Castilian word sits awkwardly with the collective
sense of the Basque word.  Then again, Lyle Campbell notes that
the Castilian word is also recorded as labeling one of the components
of a crossbow, so perhaps we shouldn't confine ourselves to the
sense of 'knife'.

In fact, cognates of the Castilian word are fairly widely recorded
in Ibero-Romance, according to Corominas, though usually in the
sense of 'pocketknife' or 'razor', all of these deriving from
Latin <novacula>, or perhaps better from an unrecorded variant
*<navacula>, 'small knife', with a diminutive suffix.

But Thomas Field has tracked down a possible Occitan source.
This is what I was hoping for, since the distribution of the
word in Basque is most consistent with an Occitan origin, if
the word is borrowed.  He reports a hapax <naves>, glossed as <couteau>
'knife', in Old Bearnese, in the Judyats de la Cort de Morlaas,
one of the texts of the fors of Bearn.  The word is used for a knife
used in killing a man, suggesting perhaps something larger and
more businesslike than a pocketknife.  This appears to be a
back-formation, with the diminutive suffix removed.  Now, something like

*<las naves> would be a phonologically excellent source for the Basque
word.  Oddly, though, Field reports that the editors of the dictionary
listing it give the word as masculine, even though the text containing
it gives no clue as to its gender.  And, since the Latin source is
feminine, we might have expected this word to be feminine.

Field adds another form, <naue>, in the FEW, listed as a feminine noun,
and glossed as <poignard> 'dagger', from a 1345 document in Dax.
And Stefan Georg finds a Bearnese <nabe> in Meyer-Lübke (3rd ed.,
1935), glossed as 'shaving knife', but provided with no source.
Oddly, no such forms as these appear to be attested anywhere in
Occitan except in the region bordering the Basque Country.

Not sure just what all this adds up to, but a plural of one of
these truncated Occitan words, with the article incorporated, looks
an excellent source on the phonological side.  And taking over
a Romance plural as a Basque collective seems reasonable enough.
Of course, the semantics is still awkward, unless there are good
reasons -- unknown to me -- for taking knives as prototypical tools.
Certainly beats the hell out of *'work-hand', anyway.

My thanks to Lyle Campbell, Thomas Field, Stefan Georg, Brian Mott, Max
Wheeler, and Roger Wright.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk