Re: Stacking up on standard works

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <bm.brian@...> wrote:

>
> Trask's Etymological Dictionary of Basque, left
> incomplete at his death, makes Basque <mintz> 'membrane;
> hymen; skin' a borrowing from Romance, probably from
> Aragonese <binça> 'membrane'. That rather tends to cast
> doubt on a pre-Basque *bints.
>
> > Actually it's the Romance word which was borrowed from
> > Paleo-Basque and not other way around. Trask was wrong
> > about this.
>
> I know that Larry Trask was (a) one of the foremost experts
> on Basque and (b) a competent historical linguist. If you
> have any competence as a historical linguist, you're going
> out of your way to hide it in your posts here. I have no
> reason whatsoever to prefer your unsupported assertion to
> his.
>

Although authority arguments don't appeal to me, I'd say that although Basque has many Latin and Romance loanwords, there's a number of genuine Basque words wrongly attributed to these sources by academic Vascologists.

In this case, the Romance words have no Latin etymology, so the most parsimonious hypothesis is they were borrowed from Paleo-Basque rather than the other way around.

> > Basque <z, tz> respectively denote the lamino-alveolar

> > fricative and affricate, which contrast with the
> > apico-alveolar <s, ts>.
>
> Exactly. So why does <ontzi> have the laminal affricate, if
> you're postulating the apical affricate for pre-Basque?
>
I'm afraid I was a bit sleepy this morning, but now I understand your point. This is about my own convention for noting Paleo-Basque (IMHO a better designation than Mitxelena's "Pre-Basque") sibilants, where I respectively use /s, ts/ and /s´, ts´/ for the laminal and apical sibilants. And although this usage differs from *modern* Basque ortography, it's motivated by the convention used in the transcription of Iberian texts.