Re: Is Basque IE?

[Tavi]
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.

>

Actually, this is Gallo-Latin, because the word is found in several Romance languages.

> Moreover a Late Gaul. *lanna would have given Bq. *lana, since Latin _anno:na_ gives Bq. _anoa_.
>

But -nn- > -n- happened in Vasco-Romance, not Paleo-Basque. There're several examples of an alternation n/r such as egun, egur- 'day', jaun, jaur- 'sir' which suggest denasalization could happen in Paleo-Basque.

As I said before, Paleo-Basque was far from being a homogeneous language, and it's imperative to identify the varieties involved. Mitxelena's "Proto-Basque" (he used the term "Pre-Basque") is more a kind of Vasco-Romance creole spoken in the Visigothic period than the actual Paleo-Basque, of a deeper chronology (Late Iron Age).

> 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.)
>

I formerly thought larre was a straightforward derivation of
*la:ro-, with /R/ adapted as /r/, but now I know this didn't happen in IE loanwords.