Basque <ibili>

[Ante Aikio]

On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Larry Trask wrote:

> The big problem here is the seemingly great difficulty of borrowing verbs.
> Edith Moravcsik, in her universals of borrowing, goes so far as to declare
> that verbs cannot be borrowed at all.  This is probably going too far --
> after all, English did borrow verbs from Norman French (didn't it?).

> But, as a rule, when verbs are borrowed at all, they are borrowed only as
> non-finite forms -- participles or verbal nouns -- which are then inflected
> periphrastically in the borrowing language, with finite auxiliaries carrying
> all tense, agreement, and other verbal categories.

> This is how Basque borrowed verbs from Latin, and how it borrows verbs from
> Romance.  It is how Turkish borrowed verbs from Arabic and Persian, and how
> it borrows verbs from French and English today.  It is how Old Japanese
> borrowed verbs from Chinese, and how modern Japanese borrows verbs from
> English.

This may be true in the cases you mention above, but the generalization is
incorrect. To name just one counterexample: Saami has a huge amount of
verbs borrowed from both Finnish and Scandinavian, and most of these are
quite recent borrowings. They are without exception inflected according to
the normal Saami inflectional paradigm. This even holds for new
borrowings: a borrowed verb root that has not even been phonologically
nativized gets Saami mood, tense, number and person suffixes attached to
it quite regularly.

 Ante Aikio