Re: Is Basque IE?

From: oalexandre
Message: 71311
Date: 2013-09-15

[DGK]
5. 
Bq. _ar_ 'male'; PIE *h2/4nĂ©:r 'man, hero'.  If _ar_ indeed reflected *anar as you claim, the northern form would be *ahar, and in fact under #166 you refer northern _zahar_ 'old' (southern _zar_) to *zanar.  But then you say *-ar in *zanar may be identical to _ar_ 'man, male', whose protoform you insist is *anar, so the REAL protoform of _zahar_ must be *zananar.
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[Tavi]
Actually, Basque zahar 'old' does NOT have a medial nasal nor it contains ar 'male', whose Iberian counterparts are respectively sakar, tar. The protoform *anar actually corresponds to Basque ar, a~ar 'worm'.
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[DGK]
That means BOTH Gianfranco's #5 and #166 are unjustifiable on the Basque side.
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Gianfranco already knows my opinion about his theory. :-)
 
[Tavi]
Please notice /r/ is these words is a trill rhotic, which is a different phoneme than the tap rhotic /R/ in e.g. bero /beRo/.
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[DGK]
In my personal notes I follow Alessio and a few others in writing such words with -r' when they show the trill with vocalic suffixes, like _arra_ 'the male'.  The handbooks cite only pronouns, some recently borrowed nouns, and the native nouns _hor_ 'dog', _ur_ 'water', and _zur_ 'wood' as Basque words ending in weak -r (i.e. an underlying tap rhotic).
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In the past, this convention was in use among Basque writers but it was abolished by the Basque Academy (Euskaltzaindia).
and it's still employed in Iberian transcriptions, but I think it's preferrable the other way around, because (apart from loanwords) the tap is *secondary* in Basque, the trill being the genuine rhotic as in Iberian.