Proto-Basque language

Proto-Basque (Basque: aitzineuskara; Spanish: protoeuskera, protovasco; French: proto-basque), or incorrectly Pre-Basque,^[a] is the reconstructed predecessor of the Basque language before the Roman conquests in the Western Pyrenees. A small sample of what is thought to be close to Proto-Basque has been discovered on the Hand of Irulegi, an inscribed bronze artifact in the shape of a right hand dated to the 1st century BCE.^[1] True proto-languages are constructs only. If it can be read it isn't proto-.

The two prefixes, proto- and pre-, imply totally different stages of development. The language in question is either proto-or pre-, but not both; moreover, if it is pre-, it is not even the same language. The problem is the rapid state of development of Basque studies. It is changing so fast that multiple and often contradictory linguistic terms have come into use. Much of the theory is hypothetical or speculative. The non-linguist reader is apt to be confused by a to him incomprehensible muddle of linguistic terms.

A second problem is the increase in original source material, the inscriptions written in paleohispanic scripts. New possibilities continue to open up.

The initial linguistic view of Basque tended to close out all further possibilities. It was deemed a Language isolate, one of a kind. If that was the case, no comparative studies could be done on it. It was not, and never would be, a member of a family of languages, nor would it ever be like any other languages. It stood alone. A large share of the general resources still describe it as an isolate, while others speak of a family. The two terms are mutually incompatible. It can't be both or part-way one and part-way the other.

The prefix proto- has a very precise meaning in historical linguistics. It is not ambiguous. It does not have one meaning in one context and another in another. It always means the same thing. It is intrinsic to the comparative method. To compare two languages to see if they are similar, one first defines an inventory of features for each language; for example, an inventory of phonemes, morphemes or other. Usually quite a few can be found. The linguist must decide which one are most important. In the past only one might suffice, but nowadays it is usually many.

If common inventory features can be found and they can be compared according to lingistic rules the two languages are said to have descended from a proto-language. The shared features are shared retentions. Features that are different are called shared innovations. The languages are said to be related. The linguistics of Basque is only an instance of the same linguistics used everywhere else. The Basque linguists are not going off on their own. If there was a proto-Basque then there must have been daughter languages that were compared. One cannot compare an isolate; there is nothing to compare it with. One cannot compare a language to itself. If there was a proto-Basque, then there was a Basque family, and Basque was not an isolate. The problem was to find it.

Background

The first linguist who scientifically approached the question of the historical changes that Basque had undergone over the centuries was Koldo Mitxelena. His work on Proto-Basque focused mainly on between the 5th century BCE and the 1st century CE, just before and after initial contact with the Romans. By comparing variants of the same word in modern dialects and the changes that Latin loanwords had undergone, he deduced the ancestral forms and the rules for historical sound changes. His groundbreaking work, which culminated with the publication of his book Fonética histórica vasca (1961), was carried out mostly before the Aquitanian inscriptions were found, but they fully backed up Mitxelena's proposed Proto-Basque forms.^[2]

Since then, a number of other prominent linguists, such as Larry Trask, Alfonso Irigoien, Henri Gavel and most recently Joseba Lakarra, Joaquín Gorrotxategi and Ricardo Gómez, have made further contributions to the field. Some of them, such as Lakarra, have focused their attention on even older layers of the language (Pre-Proto-Basque) that preceded the Celtic invasion of Iberia.

Vocabulary

Studying the behaviour of Latin and early Romance loanwords in Basque, Koldo Mitxelena discovered that Proto-Basque *n was lost between vowels and that Proto-Basque had no *m. Both are relatively unusual cross-linguistically, but /n/ was also partially deleted between vowels during the history of the nearby Gascon and Galician-Portuguese.

One of the puzzles of Basque is the large number of words that begin with vowels in which the initial and second vowels are the same. Joseba Lakarra proposes that in Pre-Proto-Basque there was extensive reduplication^[3] and that later, certain initial consonants were deleted, leaving the VCV pattern of Proto-Basque:

See also

• Vasconic languages
• Proto-Basque Swadesh list (Wiktionary)

Further reading

• Blevins, Juliette (2018). "Advances in Proto-Basque Reconstruction with Evidence for the Proto-Indo-European-Euskarian Hypothesis". Routledge & CRC Press. Retrieved 2024-03-27.

Notes

References

External links

• Trask, R. L. (2008), Wheeler, Max W. (ed.), Etymological Dictionary of Basque (PDF), Falmer, UK: University of Sussex
• Joseba Lakarra (2006), "Protovasco, munda y otros: Reconstrucción interna y tipología holística diacrónica", in "Oihenart. Cuadernos de Lengua y Literatura". Archived 2007-09-29 at the Wayback Machine (in Spanish)
• Ricardo Gómez, "De re etymologica: vasc. -(r)antz 'hacia'", UPV/EHU / "Julio Urkixo" Euskal Filologia Mintegia (in Spanish)