From: oalexandre
Message: 71315
Date: 2013-09-18
> 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.
>
It's rather obvious (Paleo-Basque) has a Celtic *substrate* as well as other IE adstrates, namely Italoid (aka "Sorothaptic" and "Illyrio-Lusitanian"). I consider the Celtic layer to be a substrate rather than an adstrate, not only on the evidence of loanwords such as gizon 'man' but mainly from the toponyms in -otz (Basque) / -os (Gascon) / -ués (Aragonese) mentioned by e.g. Rohlfs and deriving from Celtic *uxsV- 'high', whose femenine superlative *uxs-ama: is found in Gaulish Uxama, Celtiberian Usama.
--- 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.