Read Trask, Mitxelena and the reputable voices on
Basque.
There are a lot of lunatics who think they know
something about Basque --beware.
Learn how Basque evolved --keep in mind that
phnologically it seems to have dropped quite a few
initial stops, etc. Miguel did some interesting work
on that a few years back.
Learn how to distinguish words from the various
dialects. Trask knew all the details. That's why he
was able to speak authoritatively.
There are glossaries of Aragonese, Catalan, Gascón and
Spanish on line. Get them because you will need them
so you don't make obvious errors like Bengtson does.
If a Basque word looks like a Romance word and a
proposed Dené-Caucasian root, chances are greater that
it's borrowed from Latin or Romance.
Before you work on Basque you will need to be able to
read Spanish well because a lot, if not most of the
literature on Basque is written in Spanish. It should
be easy since you're French. The on-line Diccionario
de la Real Academia Española will help too.
You also want critical people you can trust to call
you on every possible error. I don't anyone of the
stature of Trask but you need somone like that.
Basque is not like Burushaski, Ket and Caucasian where
you can pretty much say whatever you want and almost
no one knows enough to call you on it. In the case of
Basque, there are enough people who know Ibero-Romance
languages to see obviously howlers like Bengsten's
mistakes with eme and ondo. Lists of Aquitanian are on
the web, so people can see that the ancestor of Basque
had no /m/.
One thing you will have to take into consideration is
the possibility that cognates between, say, Basque,
Caucasian and Burushaski MAY (or may not) be due to
the fact that they were all borrowed from IE
languages. You will have to figure that out. There is
a word for "pig" in Basque urde that is linked to a
Caucasian language but both could possibly be from an
IE word linked to Latin verre, etc.
--- Max Dashu <
maxdashu@...> wrote:
> Listen then, and learn.
>
> Max
>
> >I agree that my command of Basque and IBero-Romance
> >is deficient.
> >But experience is a sum of errors...
> >The surest way You make no errors
> >is when you keep on doing nothing at all.
>
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