Basque <ibili>

[Larry Trask]

Roz Frank writes:

>  Moreover in the case of <ibili>, <ekarri> and other Class I non-finite
>  verbs, there is another factor that needs to be taken into consideration,
>  although what weight it should be given when modeling the time depth of the
>  artifact is not clear. I refer to the fact that Basque is a suffixing
>  language. There is no trace of prefixing in the language except in the case
>  of Class I verbs (I'm excluding a few lexical calques that have entered the
>  language relatively recently and which are obviously based on Romance
>  formations).

OK.  The Basque of the historical period does indeed exhibit a few word-
forming prefixes which are borrowed from, or calqued on, Romance.  To these
no antiquity can be imputed.

Otherwise, the language has the following prefixes.

Personal-agreement prefixes in finite verb-forms.  These are all related
in form to the corresponding free pronouns, and they must surely result
from the incorporation of pronouns into the verb at some ancient date.
Such prefixes exist only for the first two persons, since Basque has no
third-person pronouns.

Tense-mood prefixes in finite verb-forms.  Though the original functions
of these things are still moderately clear, their origin is completely
unknown.  Curiously, they are overtly present only when no personal-
agreement prefix is present.

The prefix *<e-> in all non-finite forms of ancient verbs based on verbal
roots (but not in ancient verbs derived from nominal roots).  The original
function of this is unknown, though in my 1990 TPhS paper I presented a
case that it was a nominalizing prefix.  I think my evidence is moderately
persuasive, but probably not strong enough to be unanswerable.

The ancient causative prefix <-ra->, which precedes the verbal root it is
added to but follows *<e-> in non-finite forms and all other prefixes
in finite forms.  Example: <egin> 'do'; <eragin> 'make (somebody) do'.

The prefix *<e->, which derives negative-polarity indefinites from
interrogatives.  Example: <zer> 'what?'; <ezer> 'anything'.

A curious apparent prefix <-i->, which sometimes surfaces to the left
of the verbal root in finite verb-forms marked for indirect-object
agreement.  Example: <diakarkiot> for usual <dakarkiot> 'I bring it
to him'.

Several other prefixes attached to finite verb-forms: <ba-> 'if', <ba->
affirmative (whose prefixal status is debatable), <bait-> (hard to translate),
<ai-> optative (archaic).

And that, I think, is it.  The personal prefixes are easy to explain, and one
or two of the others are perhaps not really prefixes at all.  But the rest
are rather mysterious.  It is far from clear what these prefixes are doing
at all in a language which is otherwise strictly (and luxuriantly)
suffixing.  It may be that we are looking at here at the fossilized relics
of a very ancient period when Basque was typologically different.
But who knows?

>  Hence, the root-stem <-bil-> in <ibili> or that of <-karr-> in
>  <ekarri> is encountered wrapped up in material that has every sign of
>  belonging to the most archaic strata that can be detected in the
>  morphosyntactic structure of the linguistic system of Euskera. We are
>  talking about typological issues where the artifact's morphosyntactic
>  packaging provides the researcher with a certain type of information that
>  in turn permits a tentative assignment of the artifact to a given layer, to
>  a given morphosyntactic strata: the artifact ends up being situated at a
>  certain level because of the way that the morphosyntactic data. lends
>  itself to typological stratification.

Indeed.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk