Re: Is Basque IE?

[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).

>

[Tavi]
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.

>

In other words, Paleo-Basque/Iberian /r/ wasn't part of a strong/weak pair and it's reflected as a trill in modern Basque and Romance. However, there're some reare cases of Basque /r/ arising from gemination of /R/, as in larre 'meadow; heath; uncultivated land, desert', a loanword from Celtic (Gaulish) *landa: 'heath, moor' > *lanna > larra > larre.

[DGK]
But _landa_ 'campo, pieza de terreno' occurs widely in Basque (Bisc., Guip., Aezc., Lab., High & Low Nav., Ronc.) and appears to continue Gaul. *landa: directly. Moreover a Late Gaul. *lanna would have given Bq. *lana, since Latin _anno:na_ gives Bq. _anoa_. If _larra-_, _larre_ is borrowed from Gaulish, it probably continues a collective *la:rja: (or *larja: by Osthoff's shortening) 'flat area' from *la:ro- 'flat surface, floor', PIE *pl.h2-ró- or *pléh2-ro-. (Latin _pla:nus_ can represent *pl.h2-nó- and provides no evidence for a heteroclite, pace Matasovic', only for different suffixes.)