Re: floor

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@...> wrote:

>
> > 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.
>
> 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.
>

AFAIK, Iberian used t-e- much in the same way than z-e-.

> 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'm afraid this is overly simplying and I can't agree.

> I cannot reconcile this with a relatively late (high medieval) spread of Basque to the West.
>

I also think modern dialectal fragmentation doesn't reflect the ancient one. From the available evidence, it looks like there were an old dialectal continuum around the Pyrenaic area, one of whose varieties was the one labelled "Pre-Basque" by Mitxelena (I'd prefer "Paleo-Basque" instead).

A major isogloss which differentiated Paleo-Basque from its neighbours was what I call "Marinet's Law" by which fortis plosives (mostly k-, -kk-) became aspirated as /h/ and eventually lost.

> The 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.
>

As I said before, this word can't be found in Basque dictionaries (even old ones such as Azkue's and Lhande's), so in absence of further evidence it can't be accepted as a valid word. I'm afraid the REW isn't the Bible.