Proto-Basque ( eu, aitzineuskara; es, protoeuskera, protovasco; french: proto-basque), or Pre-Basque, is the reconstructed predecessor of the Basque language before the Roman conquests in the Western

Pyrenees The Pyrenees (; es, Pirineos ; french: Pyrénées ; ca, Pirineu ; eu, Pirinioak ; oc, Pirenèus ; an, Pirineus) is a mountain range straddling the border of France and Spain. It extends nearly from its union with the Cantabrian Mountains to ...

Background

The first linguist who scientifically approached the question of the historical changes that Basque had undergone over the centuries was

Koldo Mitxelena Koldo Mitxelena Elissalt () (also known as ''Luis Michelena''; 1915, Errenteria, Gipuzkoa – 11 October 1987, San Sebastián) was an eminent Basque linguist. He taught in the Department of Philology at the University of the Basque Country, ...

. His work on Proto-Basque focused mainly on between the 5th century BCE and the 1st century CE, just before and after initial contact with the

Romans Roman or Romans most often refers to: *Rome, the capital city of Italy * Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD *Roman people, the people of ancient Rome *''Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a lette ...

. The main method that he used was

internal reconstruction Internal reconstruction is a method of reconstructing an earlier state in a language's history using only language-internal evidence of the language in question. The comparative method compares variations between languages, such as in sets of c ...

since Basque has no known genetic relatives, preventing the use of the

comparative method In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards t ...

. By comparing variants of the same word in modern dialects and the changes that

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

loanwords had undergone, he deduced the ancestral forms and the rules for historical sound changes. His groundbreaking work, which culminated with the publication of his book ''Fonética histórica vasca'' (1961), was carried out mostly before the Aquitanian inscriptions were found, but they fully backed up Mitxelena's proposed Proto-Basque forms. Trask, L. ''The History of Basque'' Routledge: 1997 Since then, a number of other prominent linguists, such as

Larry Trask Robert Lawrence Trask (10 November 1944 – 27 March 2004) was an American–British professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex, and an authority on the Basque language and the field of historical linguistics. Biography Born in Ole ...

, Alfonso Irigoien, Henri Gavel and most recently Joseba Lakarra, Joaquín Gorrotxategi and Ricardo Gómez, have made further contributions to the field. Some of them, such as Lakarra, have focused their attention on even older layers of the language (Pre-Proto-Basque) that preceded the Celtic invasion of

Iberia The Iberian Peninsula (), ** * Aragonese and Occitan: ''Peninsula Iberica'' ** ** * french: Péninsule Ibérique * mwl, Península Eibérica * eu, Iberiar penintsula also known as Iberia, is a peninsula in southwestern Europe, defi ...

Vocabulary

Studying the behaviour of Latin and early Romance loanwords in Basque,

discovered that Proto-Basque *n was lost between vowels and that Proto-Basque had no *m. Both changes are relatively unusual cross-linguistically, but /n/ was also partially deleted between vowels during the history of the nearby Gascon and

Galician-Portuguese Galician-Portuguese ( gl, galego-portugués or ', pt, galego-português or ), also known as Old Portuguese or as Medieval Galician when referring to the history of each modern language, was a West Iberian Romance language spoken in the Middle ...

. One of the puzzles of Basque is the large number of words that begin with vowels in which the initial and second vowels are the same. Joseba Lakarra proposes that in Pre-Proto-Basque there was extensive reduplication and that later, certain initial consonants were deleted, leaving the VCV pattern of Proto-Basque:

Notes

References

External links

*
Joseba Lakarra (2006), "Protovasco, munda y otros: Reconstrucción interna y tipología holística diacrónica", in "Oihenart. Cuadernos de Lengua y Literatura".

Ricardo Gómez, "De re etymologica: vasc. -(r)antz 'hacia'", UPV/EHU / "Julio Urkixo" Euskal Filologia Mintegia
{{in lang, es Proto-Basque

Basque Basque may refer to: * Basques, an ethnic group of Spain and France * Basque language, their language Places * Basque Country (greater region), the homeland of the Basque people with parts in both Spain and France * Basque Country (autonomous co ...

Pre-Indo-Europeans

Background

Vocabulary

See also

Notes

References

External links