LINGUIST List 8.1641

Sun Nov 16 1997

Sum: Linguistic affinities of Basque

Editor for this issue: Brett Churchill <brettlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Ernest McCarus, Basque

The following were kind enough to respond to my query on the linguistic
affinities of Basque:

John Atkinson johnamech.eng.usyd.edu.au
E. Bashir ebashirumich.edu
Antony Dubach Green greenfas.ag-berlin.mpg.de
Martin Haase martin.haasecl-ki.uni-osnabrueck.de
Jose Ignatio Hualde j-hualdeuiuc.edu
Bernard Hurch bernard.hurchkfunigraz.ac.at
Rick McCallister rmccalliMUW.Edu
Gonzalo Rubio gonzalorjhu.edu
Patrick C. Ryan PROTO-LANGUAGEWorldNet.att.net

The following books were cited:

Jose I. Hualde, J. Lakarra, and R.L. Trask, TOWARDS A HISTORY OF THE
BASQUE LANGUAGE (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1995) 

Luis Michelena, SOBRE EL PASADO DE LA LENGUA VASCA (San Sebastian:
Aunamendi, 1964)

Larry Trask, THE HISTORY OF BASQUE (London: Routledge, 1997; this is
reviewed in the current issue of Anthropological Linguistics, Vol. 39 No.
3)

The majority of the respondents agreed with the items above, most of them
mentioning Trask's History of Basque, with the consensus that Basque has
no known linguistic relatives. One person mentioned that "ONLY the old
AQUITANIAN inscriptions seem to provide us with an ancestor" of Basque.

Two respondents give credence to an affinity with I-E or Nostratic, with a
reference to the huge, recent literature on this in "Mother Tongue", the
newsletter/journal of the Association for the Study of Language in
Prehistory.

I heartily thank the respondents for the references above and to the web
sites mentioned. 

Ernest McCarus