Pre-Basque lexical items

[Larry Trask]

On Fri, 10 Sep 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote:

> 	Is this possibly a loan from Latin related to Spanish <saldo>?
> or perhaps from some hypothetical Celtic cognate to English <sale, sell>?
> or [stretching things a bit] even from Frankish or Gethic?

> [snip]

>> Possible evidence is <saldu> `sell', which may very well derive from
>> *<sali>, the ancestor of modern <sari> `price' (the change /l/ > /r/
>> between vowels is regular), as is the loss of /i/ before a suffix).

Exactly this has been proposed several times.  But there is no certain
instance of a Germanic loan into Basque, and it is not clear that Basque
has ever been in direct contact with a Germanic language.  The Visigoths
were there for a while, but it is far from certain that the Visigoths
were still speaking Gothic by the time the Basques met them.  Frankish
loans into Basque exist, but seem always to enter via Gallo-Romance, and
not directly.

No decent Celtic source appears to be available.

So, maybe, but there exists no supporting evidence.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk