Re: Is Basque IE?
From: oalexandre
Message: 71353
Date: 2013-09-30
[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.
>
In these cases, we've got /RR/ = /r/ as in Romance, but as a member of a contrasting pair, /R/ is the weak counterpart of /l/, as shown by the alternation -r- ~ -l in combinatory forms, where the strong member of the pair appears in word-final.
In Mitxelena's system the /R/ ~ /l/ pair is reflected as /l/ ~ /ll/ (/L/ in his own nomenclature), as he modelled it after Romance loanwords. Actually, his "Proto-Basque" is more like a Vasco-Romance hybrid, although this doesn't mean it reflects a creole as I wrongly suggested in a former message.
On the other hand, /R/ *does* appear at word-final in a comparatively few number of words (also including combinatory forms), as e.g. ur 'water', zur 'wood', often alternating with /n/ or zero. This suggests the weak rhotic can be the product of denasalization in Paleo-Basque, although there's no fixed rule about this, as the cases where the nasal survived coexist with those where it didn't, even within the same word. Furthermore, at word-final the nasal can be *secondary* to a labial (forbidden there by phonotaxis), as in the case of the forementioned exampled, which would be respectively reconstructed as *ub-, *sub-.
Between vowels, the weak rhotic can also derive from a voiced dental aproximant /D/. Summing up, in most cases Basque /R/ does NOT continue a former rhotic.