Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate?

[Larry Trask]

Patrick Ryan writes:

> What would really be interesting is for Larry Trask to show statistically
> how likely his immense group of unattested proto-Romance etyma are as a
> source for Basque, which, evidently never met a foreign word it did not
> like --- while tenaciously preserving a most usual morphological system.

Well, a most engaging challenge, but, I'm afraid, an incomprehensible one.
I confess I have not the faintest idea what "[my] immense group of
unattested proto-Romance etyma" might be, or how such a thing, whatever
it is, might be "a source for Basque".

The source of Basque is not in doubt.  That source is a language spoken in
Gaul before the IE languages -- first Celtic, then Latin -- arrived there.

As for the curious remark about borrowing words, it is true that Basque
has borrowed heavily from Latino-Romance.  But this observation is
anything but surprising.

Compare English after the Norman Conquest.  The Normans were always
a tiny minority in England, and most people in England never learned
Norman French.  Moreover, Norman French survived as a spoken language
in England only for a couple of centuries, after which it died out.

Nevertheless, the Norman French impact on the English vocabulary was
colossal.  Virtually the *entire* abstract, elevated and technical
vocabulary of English was obliterated, and replaced by French words.
The proportion of the attested Old English vocabulary which was lost
is variously estimated at anything from 60% to 85%.  Even such everyday
words as the native equivalents of 'river', 'mountain', 'face', 'picture',
'army' and 'language' were lost in favor of French words.

In great contrast, Basque has been surrounded by a sea of IE speech
for around 2500 years, and it still is today.  At least after the
Roman conquest of the area, that surrounding speech was always
immensely more prestigious than was Basque.

In the circumstances, the enormous impact of Latin and Romance on the
Basque vocabulary is not even slightly surprising.  What is surprising
is that the language has survived at all.  All of the other pre-Latin
languages of Italy, Gaul, Spain and Portugal -- including even Celtic --
were blatted long ago.

Nevertheless, it is not true that we Vasconists routinely assign every
vaguely troublesome word we come across to a Latino-Romance source.
We do this only when we have good evidence for such a source.  And
nobody in the field takes seriously such vaporings as the ignorant
old proposal to derive Basque <seme> 'son' from Latin <semen> 'seed'.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)