Pre-Basque phonology (PS)

[roslyn frank]

>On Thus, 9 Sep 1999, Larry Trask wrote:

>I've already addressed <beltz> in an earlier posting.  There is no doubt
>of the former existence of *<bel> `dark', though I am astonished to be
>told that a modern speaker is on record as using it, since it is nowhere
>recorded in the literature as a free form.

>It is clear that certain recurrent Basque morphs are ancient
>monosyllables.  Apart from *<bel>, we have *<bil> `round' for sure, and
>several other candidates of varying degrees of plausibility.

>And I myself suspect that Basque words with final clusters generally
>result from some kind of vowel loss, though I lack the evidence to make
>a strong case.

I tend to agree with you here and would say that other examples ending in
*<-etz> (such as *<beletz>) might eventually be identified which would
reinforce your case.

An anecdotal and not very scientific piece of evidence (or counter-evidence
depending on your point of view) is the following from a late 19th century
interview conducted by an Englishmen with two (apparently) Basque-speaking
bear-trainers from Biarritz. The conversation itself took place in what
looks like a mixture of French and Spanish. At one point the Englishman
records that they called their bear by the name "Belis" which I assume was
the Englishman's rendition of "Beltz" (Black).  The question is how faithful
should we consider the Englishman's rendition to be of the phonology of the
original utterance.

Similarly, from my point of view there are problems in interpreting
Aquitanian inscriptions that read BELEX(-), occasionally BELEXS- or BELS-,
and concluding that *<beletz> was the original form (without bringing in
other evidence), keeping in mind that at that time -the time when the
incriptions were produced- we have no evidence for a written tradition in
Euskera, i.e., there was no standardized form of writing/transcribing
Euskera -something that only came into being in the XXth century. Nor is
there any particular reason to think that the individuals who carved the
stones were copying from designs written by monolingual Basque speakers.
Stated differently, one would assume that the stone-smiths who carved the
Latin/Vulgar Latin texts which have Basque names interspersed (is that the
right way to phrase it?) were probably copying their letters from a document
prepared by someone familiar with Latin/Vulgar Latin. It is not clear
whether that person was a Basque speaker or whether, what happened was more
similar to the case cited above in which an Englishman tried to render his
"impression" of what he "heard", i.e, a Basque word that he transliterated
into English phonology. (And, yes, Larry, we've gone around on this one
before in a different venue.)

[LT]
/beltz/,

Well, <beltz> `black' is a very interesting case.  Native words rarely
end in consonant clusters, and this is just about the only word I can
think of ending in the unusual cluster <-ltz>.  The word is surely built
upon the ancient element *<bel> `dark', not recorded as such but present
in numerous compounds and easily reconstructible.  In all likelihood,
the earlier form was *<beletz>, as proposed by Michelena.  An item
BELEX(-), occasionally BELEXS- or BELS-, is frequent in the Aquitanian
names and appears to represent the same word, with the last (and rarest)
variant seemingly already showing the contraction.  Michelena proposes
that the contraction took place because the adjective was regularly
postposed (as is normal in Basque), and because postposed items in
Basque frequently undergo otherwise irregular reductions.  (By the way,
note also that <beltz> is a moderately frequent element also in medieval
Basque personal names.)

[RF]
And apparently in those of bears.

Bye,
Roz Frank
Department of Spanish & Portuguese
University of Iowa