From: dgkilday57
Message: 68027
Date: 2011-09-09
>That makes it difficult to understand why Biscayan has <e-> as the preterital prefix for finite verbal forms while the other dialects have <ze->. Schuchardt argued that <e-> was more archaic than <ze->, and there is some evidence that Iberian used <e-> the same way. It seems to me that while Souletin is the most conservative dialect overall, Biscayan at the other end has preserved a few archaisms of its own, including <e->. I cannot reconcile this with a relatively late (high medieval) spread of Basque to the West.
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@> wrote:
> >
> > [...]
> > I suspect that <malmutz> 'sly' was similarly borrowed from the
> cognomen <Balbus>, during the time when Late Latin /b/ was approximated
> by Old Basque /mb/, later reduced to /mm/ and then /m/.
> >
> Possibly, but this can hardly be a native Basque word, but rather a
> borrowing from an extinct variety. There're hints that Basque was
> firstly spoken in the Pyrenees and was brought comparative late (in the
> High Middle Ages) to the Western part of the Basque Country.
> > Unlike some scholars, I do not regard this as a Whalenesque "optionalPerhaps we can agree that a given isogloss requires a particular window of both space and time.
> soundlaw". I regard the Basque borrowings with /m/ from Latin /b/ as
> characterizing a particular temporal stratum.
> >
> IMHO, this is a diatopical (i.e. dialectal) rather than a diachronical
> (i.e. temporal) isogloss. See my above remark.
> > I provided some details in discussion with Tavi, who refuses to lookThe discussion was on Nostratic-L, and if memory serves, you could not find Basque <maku> 'pig-trough' in your sources, so you rejected the word. But the REW cites it as derived from Gallo-Latin *baccum (acc. sg., again if memory serves). If you can convince me that no Basque-speaker ever used <maku>, I would be willing to admit a citation error in the REW.
> at the REW.
> >
> Please explain.