This volume is an attempt to expound the current state of research into the past of the Basque language. The research has experienced that more evidence have been discovered, and what we already knew has been more deeply studied. Since the 70s cross-linguistic typology has made huge progress in our knowledge of linguistic universals and grammaticalization paths.
This book presents a new reconstruction of Proto-Basque, the mother language of modern Basque varieties, historical Basque, and Aquitanian, grounded in traditional methods of historical linguistics. Building on a long tradition of Basque scholarship, the comparative method and internal reconstruction, informed by the phonetic bases of sound change and phonological typology, are used to explain previously underappreciated alternations and asymmetries in Basque sound patterns, resulting in a radically new view of the proto-language. The comparative method is then used to compare this new Proto-Basque with Proto-Indo-European, revealing regular sound correspondences in basic vocabulary and grammatical formatives. Evaluation of these results supports a distant genetic relationship between Proto-Basque and Proto-Indo-European, and offers new insights into specific linguistic properties of these two ancient languages. This comprehensive volume, which includes a detailed appendix including Proto-Basque/Proto-Indo-European cognate sets, will be of general interest to linguists, archeologists, historians, and geneticists, and of particular interest to scholars in historical linguistics, phonetics and phonology, language change, and Basque and Indo-European studies. Errata for the book can be found at: https://julietteblevins.ws.gc.cuny.edu/proto-basque/
Questions related to the origin and history of the Basque language spark considerable interest, since it is the only surviving pre-Indo-European language in western Europe. However, until now, there was no readily available source in English providing answers to these questions or giving an overview of past and current research in this area. This book is intended to partly fill this void. The book contains both state-of-the-art papers which summarize our knowledge about particular areas of Basque historical linguistics, and articles presenting new hypotheses and points of view based on hard evidence and careful analysis. All contributors to this volume have demonstrated expertise in the topic within Basque historical linguistics that their chapter addresses. Two classical articles by the late Luis Michelena are included in English translation. In addition, the book includes studies on diachronic phonology, morphology and syntax. The relation of Basque to other languages is also investigated in a couple of chapters.
Basque is the sole survivor of the very ancient languages of Western Europe. This book, written by an internationally renowned specialist in Basque, provides a comprehensive survey of all that is known about the prehistory of the language, including pronunciation, the grammar and the vocabulary. It also provides a long critical evaluation of the search for its relatives, as well as a thumbnail sketch of the language, a summary of its typological features, an external history and an extensive bibliography.
A state-of-the-art survey of complex words, this volume brings together a team of leading international morphologists to demonstrate the wealth and breadth of the study of word-formation. Encompassing methodological, empirical and theoretical approaches, each chapter presents the results of cutting-edge research into linguistic complexity, including lexico-semantic aspects of complex words, the structure of complex words, and corpus-based case studies. Drawing on examples from a wide range of languages, it covers both general aspects of word-formation, and aspects specific to particular languages, such as English, French, Greek, Basque, Spanish, German and Slovak. Theoretical considerations are supported by a number of in-depth case studies focusing on the role of affixes, as well as word-formation processes such as compounding, affixation and conversion. Attention is also devoted to typological issues in word-formation. The book will be an invaluable resource for academic researchers and graduate students interested in morphology, linguistic typology and corpus linguistics.
Basque-Armenian language parallels are undeniable, statistically significant, and suspiciously absent in the mainstream academia. This manuscript brings forth the works of many who have examined the Basque language and most particularly, Vahan Sarkisian (1954-2011), a Basqologist, professor and world-renowned academician, who served as a Director of the Chair of Romance Philology at the University of Yerevan, President of the International Association of Hispanics, Director of the Basque-Armenian International Journal - Araxes, and an honorary academician of Euskaltzaindia (1919), the official institution, which is responsible for the Basque language, its corpus and its status in society. He saw the obvious link between two ancient language branches, but left this world too soon. This manuscript is aimed to resurrect his research and revitalize this topic for a serious consideration across all scientific disciplines.
The symposium "Prehistoric Iberia: genetics, anthropology and linguistics" was held in the Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid on 16th -17th November 1998. The idea was bringing together specialists who could address not clearly resolved historic and prehistoric issues regarding ancient Iberian and Mediterranean populations, following a multidisciplinary approach. This was necessary in the light of the new bulk of genetic, archeological and linguistic data obtained with the new DNA technology and the recent discoverings in the other fields. Genes may now be easily studied in populations, particularly HLA genes and markers of the mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome. Basques, Iberians, North Africans, Berbers (Imazighen) and Mediterraneans have presently been widely studied. The genetic emerging picture is that Mediterraneans are closely related from West (Basque, Iberians, Berbers) to East (Jews, Lebanese, Cretans); however, Greeks are outliers in all the analyses done by using HLA genes. Anthropologists and archeologists showed how there was no people substitution during the revolutionary Mesolithic-Neolithic transition; in addition, cultural relationships were found between Iberia and predinastic Egypt (EI Badari culture). Basque language translation into Spanish has been the key for relating most Mediterranean extinct languages. The Usko-Mediterranean languages were once spoken in a wide African and European area, which also included parts of Asia. This was the "old language" that was slowly substituted by Eurasian languages starting approximately after the Bronze Age (or 2,000 years BC).
In 2013, a detailed research paper by Gianfranco Forni appeared in The Journal of Indo-European Studies, describing a breakthrough finding: the Basque language, whose origins had so far remained obscure, actually is an Indo-European language. The main reason why this fact had escaped previous researchers is that Basque underwent a long chain of phonetic changes, which obscured its ultimate origin. This dictionary is designed to make the origin of Basque easy to understand for a wider audience. The main sound laws linking Proto-Indo-European to Basque are explained in a simple, terse way. Each etymology of Basque basic, native lexicon is accompanied by intermediate reconstructions, an extensive list of cognates, and detailed references to sources. Several indices make this dictionary easy to use as a reference tool. If you are eager to understand how the mystery of the origins of Basque can now be unraveled, this dictionary will guide you through this exciting discovery.
This book is the first comprehensive treatment of the phonological system of Basque available in English. Basque is a morphologically rich and fairly regular language with a number of active phonological rules that are limited to certain morphological environments. In addition, it has a high degree of dialectical fragmentation. These characteristics of Basque make this language a good test ground to investigate the interaction of phonological rules both with each other and with morphological processes, which the author does within the Lexical Phonology framework. The effects of rule interaction on feature geometry are a major concern - how phonological operations modify underlying structures and how the structures created by one phonological rule can serve as input to other rules. These effects are examined in a study of the rather peculiar behaviour of Basque affricates. Another area which requires particular attention, and in which Basque dialects differ widely, is prosody. Along with stress-accent systems of different types, Basque also possesses pitch-accent or restricted tonal systems in some of its western dialects. This book should be of interest to advanced students and teachers of linguistics, especially Romance linguistics and lexical phonology.
