Basque butterflies again

[Larry Trask]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Rick Mc Callister writes:

[LT]

>> Take the mainly Lapurdian forms <pinpirin(a)> ~ <pinpilinpauxa>.
>> Lapurdian, almost alone among the varieties of Basque, is very fond of
>> expressive formations in <pinp->, <panp-> and <punp->.  Here are some
>> examples of such expressive forms:

> Not all of these seem expressive, some seem to be modified
> loanwords from Romance with assimilated consonants; perhaps "expressive"
> forms of loanwords

> I don't know the Gascon, Aragonese, Catalan or Occitan cognates to
> the French and Spanish forms [nor do I have access to dictionaries of those
> languages. But these may offer better matches

Yes.  A few of the Basque words cited bear some kind of resemblance to words in
Romance, and especially in Occitan.  I omitted from my list a couple of cases
that looked like obvious loans, but several of the others are possible loans,
though, if so, they have been substantially altered within Basque.

However, given the restriction of the <pVnp-> expressives to French Basque, and
largely to Lapurdian, an economical view might be that <pVnp-> is an expressive
pattern in Occitan which has been borrowed into neighboring varieties of Basque
and used there to coin new formations.  I don't know enough Occitan to say if
this is plausible, but it can't be ruled out *a priori*.

[on <bitxi> 'pretty' possibly from <bizi> 'alive']

> Is it possible that <bizi> < ? IE *wiwos "live" ?

> [ Moderator's note:
> The IE etymon of Latin _vivo-_, Greek _bio-_, Sanskrit _jiva-_, clearly has
> an initial labiovelar; other bits of evidence lead us to reconstruct an "o-
> coloring" laryngeal in the root, so *g{^w}iH{_3}-.  Whether or not the Basque
> form can be derived thereform must be answered by someone else.
> --rma ]

The IE source has been proposed by several specialists, but there appears to be
no way of investigating this.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk