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.

***R

If you wish to make a living doing anything, then authority is very important. Although my work in Central American literature is mainly against the grain, I try to take the effort to explain exactly why I offer counter-readings. But I'm in the humanities. In a quasi-science such as linguistics, authority is much more important. If you reject authority, you wind up reinventing the wheel everyday and having to prove yourself to every peer. But in your work, I don't see anything systematic, just random objections based on singularities. If you really want to change a discipline, you must --to paraphrase Gilles Deleuze-- "make it your bitch"; i.e. master it and use it systematically to your own ends, making systematic changes. Unless you do that, you'll just be another crackpot, knocking at the door of ignominy.

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.