Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk> wrote:

>> aecse [OE] > ax, axe
>> [< ?Vasconic"; see Basque aizkora "axe, hatchet"] [tv95, tv97]

>I think everyone agrees that Basque <haizkora> `ax' is a loan from Latin
><asciola> `hatchet'.  The Latin word would have been borrowed as
>*<azkola>; the [h] is a suprasegmental feature in Basque; the */l/ would
>have undergone the categorical early medieval change of intervocalic /l/
>to /r/; and the diphthongization of /a/ to /ai/ in an initial syllable
>is a familiar though sporadic in Basque: compare <saindu> `sacred,
>holy', from some Romance development of Latin <sanctu>.

Might the word not have been borrowed directly as <aizkola>, with
metathesis of the /i/ (especially if Latin <sci> already had a
degree of allophonic palatalization)?  That, or analogy with the
other tool words in (h)ai(t)z-.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam