Basque <ibili>

[Larry Trask]

Ante Aikio writes:

[on borrowing verbs]

>  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.

Very interesting, and I thank you for the information.

I presume, though, that the inflectional pattern of Saami is such that a
foreign verb-stem can be readily absorbed and inflected.  In many other cases,
the two languages involved have such different verbal morphologies that there
is no way the borrowing language can inflect the borrowed verb-stem.  Arabic
loans into Turkish are a good case in point: there is no earthly way that an
internally inflected Arabic verbal root can be handled within the purely
suffixing Turkish verbal morphology, which requires verb-stems to contain
vowels.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk