Re: bidet

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

>
> > This submerged Pyrenaic language, whose remains can be found in the
> > Aragonese and Bearnese Romances, as well as in Basque itself, has
> > been studied by linguists such as Elcock and García de Diego.
>
> Obviously I have nothing against "submerged languages" (i.e.
> substrates), but [borondate (dropped by the interface - DGK] is not some oddity in Basque. Its importance in
> ordinary speech suggests that it was adapted directly from Latin by
> bilingual speakers.
>
> > But the suffix -itate was also appended to non-Latin lexemes such as
> > pegor (LN) 'sterile, poor' (cfr. leihor, legor 'dry') in pegorritate
> > (LN) 'extreme misery'. As this is extremely rare within Basque (I know
> > no other examples), I must conclude the source language must be Romance.
>
> What about a Latin homily, acc. sg. 'the state of being worse'?
>

Not impossible, but highly unlikely IMHO. As I said elsewhere, I regard pegor as a cognate of leihor, legor which retained the initial labial. These words belong to a lexical family derived from a root *Forr ~ *korr which would also include agor, idor, elkor, malkor.

> Aragonese forms with -k- not -g- appear to delineate territory that
> was still Basque-speaking when the local Romance intervocalic stops became
> voiced. The same goes for Bearnais -k- against -g-. When these chunks
> of territory became Romance-speaking, they borrowed the Basque term
> for 'wart', itself of Latin origin.
>
> > I disagree, as the word isn't attested at all in Basque outside
> > Roncalese. The source must be an extinct language, which García
> > de Diego (following Elcock) named "Pyrenaic". Other Basque words with
> > intervocalic voiceless stops might also have been borrowed from
> > Pyrenaic.
>
> Or "Pyrenaic" may be nothing more than a collection of extinct Basque dialects in present-day Romance-speaking zones, with phonology similar to Roncalo-Souletin (e.g. -nt- retained, not softened to -nd-).
>

Not exactly, as -nt- > -nd- is also found in Pyrenaic. Actually, the two isoglosses which characterize Pyrenaic, the keeping of intervocalic voiceless stops and voicing of voiceless stops after resonants (especially /n/), partially overlap.

> > For example, in addition to its native form fuen 'source; basin, font',
> > Aragonese has also fuente, fuande from Pyrenaic. The corresponding
> > Basque forms are ponte (G), ponde (G, HN) 'baptismal font' and the
> > derivative *ponteko 'god-' in aita-ponteko (B, G), aita-punteko (G),
> > aita-pundako (B) 'godfather', ama ponteko (G) 'godmother', semeponteko
> > (G) 'godchild', whose semantics suggests it entered into Basque along
> > Christianization.
>
> And during Christianization, the Basque-speaking area was larger than today, so again "Pyrenaic" could simply be extinct Basque dialects.
>

But the thing is Pyrenaic was a *Romance* language, although possibly with one or more substrates related to Basque. So calling it "Basque" as you do is inappropriate.