From: oalexandre
Message: 71345
Date: 2013-09-26
My detailed criticism of your individual etymologies does not depend on my theory of the prehistory of Basque, which is no more unorthodox than those of Menéndez Pidal or Tovar; at worst it is an "idiosyncratic" theory. I have used this theory only on occasion to suggest simple alternatives to your etymologies. My linguistic views are far more orthodox than Larry Trask's, who imagined not only words but whole languages as arising spontaneously ex nihilo.
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Fantastic! There're hundreds of Basque words labelled as "expressive" by Trask, but what about those languages? I suppose you refer to his expression "from some Romance reflex of Lat. X", where the language is unspecified.
As I told you before, and unlike other Romance-speaking areas, most of the Romance varieties formerly spoken in the Iberian Peninsula were replaced due to the expansion of the northern dialects (including Paleo-Basque) along with the Reconquista. Thus Basque has early Romance loanwords from some of these extinct varieties.