From: giaforni
Message: 71313
Date: 2013-09-17
Dear group members,
let me try and summarize what's been going on with this topic so far. Since I posted my first message over two weeks ago, I received few replies. The most frequent ones are fairly weak criticisms, by D. G. Kilday, mostly based on:
- a rejection of key parts of Michelena's and Trask's commonly accepted internal reconstruction of Pre-Basque (it would be interesting to be pointed to some published material where such rejection is supported by some systematic evidence);
- an analysis of a very small percentage of my etymologies, which are either refuted on various grounds (incl. the critic's unorthodox reconstruction of Pre-Basque), or dismissed as "loans" when the similarity with other IE terms is too evident to be otherwise dismissed.
Comments by other fellow linguists would be very welcome.
Gianfranco Forni
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, <cybalist@yahoogroups.com> wrote:[DGK]
5. Bq. _ar_ 'male'; PIE *h2/4né:r 'man, hero'. If _ar_ indeed reflected *anar as you claim, the northern form would be *ahar, and in fact under #166 you refer northern _zahar_ 'old' (southern _zar_) to *zanar. But then you say *-ar in *zanar may be identical to _ar_ 'man, male', whose protoform you insist is *anar, so the REAL protoform of _zahar_ must be *zananar.>
[Tavi]
Actually, Basque zahar 'old' does NOT have a medial nasal nor it contains ar 'male', whose Iberian counterparts are respectively sakar, tar. The protoform *anar actually corresponds to Basque ar, a~ar 'worm'.
>
[DGK]
That means BOTH Gianfranco's #5 and #166 are unjustifiable on the Basque side.
>
Gianfranco already knows my opinion about his theory. :-)
[Tavi]
Please notice /r/ is these words is a trill rhotic, which is a different phoneme than the tap rhotic /R/ in e.g. bero /beRo/.
>
[DGK]
In my personal notes I follow Alessio and a few others in writing such words with -r' when they show the trill with vocalic suffixes, like _arra_ 'the male'. The handbooks cite only pronouns, some recently borrowed nouns, and the native nouns _hor_ 'dog', _ur_ 'water', and _zur_ 'wood' as Basque words ending in weak -r (i.e. an underlying tap rhotic).
>
In the past, this convention was in use among Basque writers but it was abolished by the Basque Academy (Euskaltzaindia).
and it's still employed in Iberian transcriptions, but I think it's preferrable the other way around, because (apart from loanwords) the tap is *secondary* in Basque, the trill being the genuine rhotic as in Iberian.