Pre-Basque phonology (fwd)

[Larry Trask]

Roz Frank has asked me to forward this posting to the list, since she is
unable to post at present.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 04 Sep 1999 17:32:14 CDT
From: roslyn frank <rozfrank at hotmail.com>
To: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
Subject: Re: your mail

[RF]
>> I am writing to make a couple of brief comments on the monosyllabic
>> project that Jon Patrick has mentioned on the list. I've beenout of
>> the country for a while so I haven't been able to follow all the
>> discussion of late.  Hopefully I won't be repeating to many things
>> that have already been said.

>> First, I would like to point out an aspect of the project that I
>> find particularly interesting, although I don't think it has been
>> mentioned on the list. As I understand the monosyllabic project, at
>> least as it was conceptualized a year or so ago, it can be
>> characterized as having two stages. The first stage is that of
>> coming up with an agreed upon description of the phonological
>> constraints of pre-Basque, i.e., its phonology prior to contact with
>> the Romance languages. That stage requires developing a uniform
>> description.

[LT]
>Well, *fairly* uniform, that's all.  Even the phonology of PIE is not at
>present agreed upon by all specialists in all details -- far from it.
>But the main lines are clear enough.

[RF]
>> However, as I understand the present situation in Basque there is
>> not total agreement concerning this stage of the reconstruction of
>> Euskera. Stated differently there are disagreements among Basque
>> linguists.  That fact would seem to call for more than one set of
>> "rules" to be developed and applied to the data. Or at least in the
>> case of the elements in question, there would need to be two
>> different renditions of the data provided, one that modelled it
>> according to one paradigm and another simulation that would result
>> from the alternate set of premises concerning this pre-Basque
>> phonology.

[LT]
>No, this is too pessimistic.

>At present, our reconstruction of the segmental phonology of the
>Pre-Basque of 2000 years ago is agreed upon by everybody in all its main
>lines.  The same is not true of the suprasegmental phonology, which is
>being vigorously debated, but that is not much of a problem for our
>purposes here.  There are a few debates about the phonetic details of
>our phonological reconstruction, but these are parochial and have no
>consequences for the system.

[RF]
As I recall in the exchanges that took place a couple of years ago in the
issues of _Mother Tongue_ , there was a rather lively debate about several
aspects of the phonological reconstruction. I refer specifically to the
differences of opinion expressed by Bill Jacobsen, Jose Ignacio Hualde and
yourself. Again I don't have the journal issues in front of me, but I do
remember that there were several points of dispute which I don't think were
over "phonetic details" but rather more substantive issues, e.g., the
presence or absence of /m/ and/or /k/ in Pre-Basque as well as a couple of
other items that escape me right now.

Also, I've always wondered about the p/b, k/g, t/d alternations in
pre-Basque (and/or their *aspirated counterparts). Perhaps you could comment
a bit on the distribution of these in modern Basque. It's an intriguing
problem.

[LT]
It is perfectly possible to present
>reconstructed Pre-Basque words in a uniform transcription -- say, in
>Michelena's transcription -- without causing any difficulties.
>I myself might prefer */ll/ and */nn/ to M's */L/ and */N/, but this
>makes no difference.

[RF]
I don't know how Jon is dealing with this kind of transcription problem.

[LT]
>Potentially the most serious problem is the /h/, but I know of no one at
>present who disputes M's conclusion that *most* instances of /h/ are of
>suprasegmental origin.  However, it remains possible to disagree about
>whether *some* /h/s are of segmental origin.  In practice, though, this
>isn't much of an issue, and we can readily dispose of any difficulties
>by reconstructing Pre-Basque -- contra M -- with a *phonetic* [h] in our
>transcriptions, allowing users to draw their own conclusions.

[RF]
Examples?

[RF]
>> Secondly, as I understand it, once these rules are developed
>> (whether they result in two or more simulations is not the issue),
>> they can be applied to generate the total picture of what
>> monosyllabic root-stems the phonological system in question would
>> have supported/permitted.

[LT]
>This is a hope, no more.  Monomorphemic Basque lexical items which are
>native and ancient (and not verbs) are usually bisyllabic.  There are
>perhaps no more than fifty monosyllabic words, and this may not be
>enough to provide a clear picture of the structure of monosyllables in
>Pre-Basque.

[RF]
Have you checked Jon's draft listing of these items? To tell you the truth I
really don't remember how many monosyllabic items he listed.
Again the model would indicate which slots are filled and which are empty
sinc the entire ranges of possibilities would be generated by the computer
program.

[LT]
>I'll give you one oddity for free: while word-initial */b/ is
>*exceedingly* common in bisyllabic words, it is all but unknown in
>monosyllables.  This is curious, and I have no explanation.  It may be
>no more than an accident of survival.

[RF]
Does that mean that you would argue that /be/ "beneath" is really /pe/
rather than seeing /pe/ as the allophonic representation of /be/? Or do you
count /behe/ as two syllables? What about /bal/, bart/ bat/ /behi/
/bein/behin, /beltz/, /bihi/, /bihur/, /bost/, etc. It strikes me that the
kind of study that Jon is undertaking would allow us to determine more
accurately the distribution of such items. My impression (and it is merely
that) is that in the case of relative frequency of monosyllables and
bisyllables with word-initial /b/ we would find a higher number of
bisyllabic roots, perhaps 3 to 1. However, certainly there are a significant
number of monosyllabic parent stems also, particularly when they are
compared to certain other monosyllabic parent stems with word-initial
consonants.

[RF]
[snip]
[RF]
>> At the same time, as Jon knows, in my opinion some of the
>> (apparently) monosyllabic root-stems may, indeed, be composed of a
>> root and a suffixing element.  These patterns, of course, can be
>> readily detected by examining the data, e.g., the percentage of
>> root-stems that show the same final elements.

[LT]
>Again, this is a hope, no more.

[RF]
>> For those familiar with the suffixing processes in Euskera, I'm
>> particularly interested in the way that the <-tz> suffixing element
>> may be coming into play in the case of certain examples.

[LT]
>Well, I'm pretty familiar with the Basque word-forming suffixes, but I
>don't know what you have in mind here.  Normally, a word-forming suffix
>in Basque always contains at least one vowel.  Can you cite some
>examples of what you have in mind?

[RF]
I don't know exactly what you mean by "word-forming suffix", but the example
that I had in mind was a simple and well documented one, that of /bel/ and
/beltz/ where /-tz/ has been proposed, I believe by Lakarra (or maybe
earlier by Michelena) as a suffixing element. We find /bel/ in composition,
e.g., as /goibel/ "sad, dark (as the sky)" which is transparent in terms of
its two elements: <goi> "high" and <bel> "dark". Although today /bel/ is not
considered a free-standing morpheme, we do have /beltz/ "black". I have seen
/bel/ used by a native speaker in one of the Auspoa series books (sorry,
don't have the book with me).  My suspicion is that we will discover other
potential examples of this consonant cluster (understood as a fossilized/old
suffix) in what appear to be non-compositional/primitives that are
monosyllables.

Agur t'erdi,
Roz