Etymological Dictionary of Basque - Cryptm.org

10 R. L. Trask
Michelena who finally demonstrated, in 1954, that the ancient and sparsely recorded
Aquitanian language was an ancestral form of Basque. This idea had in fact been put forward
in the 1870s by the French historian Achille Luchaire, but it had languished in obscurity
before Michelena’s work, while most scholars pursued the ultimately fruitless goal of trying
to establish the better-recorded Iberian as an ancestor or relative of Basque.
Also making important contributions to the subject from the late 1940s onward were three
Spanish linguists: Antonio Tovar, Juan Corominas and Manuel Agud. The Catalan
Corominas made especially important contributions to unravelling the prehistories of words
shared between Basque and Romance.
In 1988, Tovar and Agud began the publication, in fascicles, of what was meant to be the first
serious etymological dictionary of Basque (an earlier effort, Löpelmann 1968, is best passed
over in silence). But Tovar’s death interrupted the work, and as a result the dictionary ceased
publication in 1995 after covering only A-orloi. It is far from clear that this work will ever be
completed. In any case, it is quite different in nature from the present book: it omits words
for which the editors could find no useful discussion in the literature; it omits bound
morphemes; it omits compounds and derivatives whose formation the editors consider
obvious to specialists; it provides no phonological or morphological background for a nonspecialist
reader; it has little to say about the numerous expressive formations; it devotes an
enormous amount of space to reporting pointless resemblances between Basque words and
miscellaneous look-alikes in implausible languages; and it provides thin coverage of work
done since the early 1960s – though its coverage of earlier work is magisterial.
This more recent work is of some consequence. Michelena’s younger contemporary, the late
philologist Alfonso Irigoyen, produced a large number of superb etymological proposals,
many of them for ordinary words, though his main emphasis was on proper names, not
covered in this dictionary. Further important contributions to Basque prehistory have been
made by the Basque linguists Joaquín Gorrochategui, Henrike Knörr, Joseba Lakarra, J. I.
Hualde, Ricardo Gómez, Koldo Sainz, Jabier Alberdi, María Teresa Echenique and Gontzal
Aldai, by the Dutch linguist Rudolf de Rijk, by the French linguist Georges Rebuschi, and by
the Americans William H. Jacobsen, Jr., and R. L. Trask, among others too numerous to
mention.
Today Basque historical linguistics is flourishing. Even though many younger Basque
linguists have been seduced into following the Chomskyan theoretical programme, and even
though a number of others have chosen to pursue descriptive, dialectological or
sociolinguistic work, there remains a secure core of philologists and historical linguists.
The state of play is as follows. The phonological history of the language during the last 2000
years or so is immensely well understood, except for the ancient word-accent, which remains
a lively topic of investigation, and except to some extent for the aspiration, whose origins are
only partly understood. The phonotactics and the morpheme-structure rules of the early
language are tolerably well understood, though more work remains to be done. A hard core
of some hundreds of seemingly native and ancient Basque words of unknown origin has been
identified; these are marked in this dictionary as ‘OUO’. Earlier patterns of word-formation
are clearly understood. Alongside the thousands of utterly transparent compounds and
derivatives, we have identified many more whose origins are superficially opaque but still
recoverable. Almost all of the vast number of borrowings from Latin and Romance have
been identified as such, and for most of these (not all) a specific source has been found. We
have securely identified a tiny number of borrowings from Celtic and from Arabic, but other
cases of possible borrowings from Celtic remain controversial. We have something
interesting to say about the origins of most of the bound morphemes occurring in word-