Basque 'sei'

[Stephane Goyette]

On Mon, 4 Oct 1999, Larry Trask wrote:

> Perhaps, but how old is the Gascon phonology?  As I've pointed out
> elsewhere, place names appear to show Gascon /s/ corresponding to Basque
> laminal <z>, not to apical <s>.

I'm not sure I follow. In the case of these place names, one is dealing
with Basque (or 'Aquitanian') names borrowed into Late Latin/Early
Romance, which only had one sibilant: laminal and apical /s/ would both be
borrowed as Latin/Romance /s/, whatever its exact point of articulation
was.

> Recall that Latin /s/ was almost
> invariably borrowed as Basque <z>, and so it appears that the apical /s/
> of Ibero-Romance and Gascon is at least a post-Roman development.

Agreed. However, it is almost certainly not recent: Gascon is basically a
highly Ibero-Romance-like language which, since the earliest Middle Ages,
has been increasingly influenced by Provencal, meaning that
Gascon/Ibero-Romance isoglosses are as a rule ancient (as opposed to
Gascon/Provencal isoglosses). Considering that apical /s/ is universal in
the more isolated mountain dialects of Gascon, and becomes increasingly
rare as one moves North and East, my impression is of an older feature
which has been receding in the face of Provencal influence.

> But just how late could a Gascon word for `six' be borrowed into Basque?
> After all, the Basque names for `7, 8, 9, 10' and so on are decidedly
> non-Romance.

If there is no known case of a word for "six" alone being borrowed,
leaving the rest of the numeral system intact, then of course /sei/ must
be assumed to be a native Basque word.

> With respect, I don't think the facts of modern Gascon are necessarily
> relevant, since the Basque word is certainly not borrowed from modern
> Gascon.  Is there any possibility of dating any of the relevant Gascon
> phonological developments?

Regarding apical /s/, see above. Regarding final /s/ to /j/:
Unfortunately, Gascons used Provencal (and Latin, of course) as their
written language for most of the Middle Ages; Old Provencal was itself a
highly standardized language, which was later replaced by another highly
standardized written language, French, meaning that dating this change
with any precision is well-nigh impossible.

HOWEVER...the fact that this change, far from being confined to Gascony,
is widespread in Southern France (where, by the way, it often applies
across the board, i.e. final /s/ shifts to /j/ whatever the position of
the word) does suggest it could go back to Medieval times: this is plainly
not a recent, strictly local change in Gascon.

Stephane Goyette
University of Ottawa
stephane at Goyette.com