From: stlatos
Message: 69337
Date: 2012-04-16
>I've never read his work, but nothing I've heard about his ideas makes me think that that statement was true or that he was always correct. For ex.:
> What do you have against Trask? He was a scholar who never made a pronouncement that he couldn't back up 100%.
--- In Nostratic-L@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 18 Aug 2003 22:31:38 -0400, rmccalli@... wrote:
>
> >There is also a lot of lexicon in Basque that looks IE and is not from
> >Romance. While some of it may conceivably be from Celtic or some non-Celtic
> >IE language, I don't think all of it is. Miguel has hashed out some of this
> >etyma already and has also shown some etyma that look Nostratic but non are
> >non-IE. I'm sure there's more that can be done by knowledgeable people.
> >Someone with a good background in Celtic could really help sort some of it
> >out by showing what's definitely not Celtic.
>
> Larry Trask's "The History of Basque" discusses a number of words for which
> possible IE connections exist:
>
> angi(o) "fenced-off pasture" ~ OIr. aingid "protect"
>
> Dismissed by Trask, correctly.
>
> aran ~ Aragonese arañón ~ Ir. áirne "plum"
>
> Trask objects that the Romance forms are from *agranio:, while the Irish
> word points to *agrinja.
>
> argi "light, bright" ~ PIE *h2arg- "to shine"
>
> Trask's objection that no IE form shows *h2argi- with final -i is incorrect
> (*h2argi- is the Caland variant found in compositis for this word, e.g.
> Grk. argi-, Skt. r.ji-).
>
> arto "maize" (< "millet") ~ Grk. artos "bread"
>
> Unlikely.
>
> bost "five" ~ Celtic *bost- "palm of the hand"
>
> Trask rejects this: the Basque word is bortz (> bost in the W. dialects).
> I don't know the Celtic word.
>
> izoki(n) "salmon" ~ OIr. éo, Gallo-Latin esox
>
> Trask prefers a borrowing from Latin/Romance ESOCINA.
>
A lot here looks less like scholarly consideration and more like Trask dismissing obvious connections for no apparent reason (leaving open the pos. he did have an agenda or was less competent than you say).
In addition to getting the pos. of IE -i- in argi "light, bright" : Grk. argi- wrong, it's foolish to not connect 2 words w the same meaning because one begins w *agriny- vs. *agrany- (plenty of IE words show alt. in the middle syl., or much greater variation w/o any dispute about connection).
The connection of bost "five" ~ Celtic *bost- "palm of the hand" being denied because of dif. in Basque dialects is ridiculous; he has no way of knowing how far back such alt. goes or even what the (more) original form or C-order was.
Especially odd is his supposed esox >> izoki(n) borrowing. The word has no known IE et., was borrowed from Celtic into Latin, and all ev. makes it likely it was borrowed into Celtic from another unknown language, most likely Basque or a relative. At the very least, it would look like an unknown language >> both Basque and Celtic; def. not L >> Bq.