Etymological Dictionary of Basque - Cryptm.org

50 R. L. Trask
sure, though, Basque relations with Franks and Visigoths were uniformly hostile, and anyway
it is far from clear that the Franks, and more especially the Visigoths, continued to speak their
Germanic languages for any great length of time after settling in France and Spain. In any
case, Basque words of undoubted Germanic origin, like hanka ‘haunch’, have all entered the
language directly from Romance.
In contrast, the Arab conquest of most of Spain produced a handful of Basque words of
Arabic origin. Some of these, like azoka ‘market’ 1 and gutun ‘letter’ (epistle) (and other
senses) are not attested in Romance, and may have entered Basque directly. Others, like
azenario ‘carrot’, are shared with Romance, and may or may not have entered via Romance.
With the eventual break-up of spoken Latin into a number of divergent local varieties,
Basque found itself in contact with the following: the Gascon and Bearnese {and other
Gascon} varieties of Occitan to the north, Aragonese (particularly its Navarrese sub-variety)
to the east, Castilian to the south, and Asturian to the west. But the ensuing flood of
Romance words into Basque was rather unevenly distributed: Gascon, {or specifically}
Bearnese, and Castilian contributed huge numbers of words, Aragonese a much smaller
number, and Asturian perhaps none at all. (This generalization is based on the clear cases,
but of course there are many Romance words in Basque whose precise source cannot be
identified with confidence.)
Before the French Revolution, Basque was scarcely in contact with French, and early
borrowings from French are rare to non-existent. Since the Revolution, borrowings from
French have become steadily more numerous, and the modern French Basque varieties
contain many hundreds of French words, but hardly any of these have penetrated south of the
Pyrenees. In the south, of course, the steadily growing prominence of Castilian has meant
that practically all newer borrowings are taken from this variety.
There appears to be no other language which has contributed directly to the Basque lexicon.
Words originating in other languages, such as antxoa ‘anchovy’, of Italian origin, and the
recent gay ‘gay’ (homosexual), of English origin, have entered via one of the neighbouring
Romance varieties. A rare exception, though, appears to be the word porlan ‘cement’, from
English Portland; this word is unrecorded in Spanish and appears to be a direct borrowing. 2
Naturally, Basque writers have never hesitated to coin neologisms whenever they saw fit to
do so, and those neologisms which have found a place in the language are entered normally
in the dictionary. But there are two large groups of proposed neologisms which require
special attention.
In 1745, the Basque grammarian Larramendi published one of the first Basque dictionaries,
but one with a curious feature. Whenever Larramendi found no native Basque equivalent for
a Spanish word, he invented one, with no clue to the reader that he was doing so. Some of
these neologisms were constructed according to the ordinary patterns of the language, like
sudur-hauts ‘nose-powder’, for ‘snuff’, while others seem to have been coined out of thin air,
like godaria ‘chocolate’. Though some of Larramendi’s inventions were occasionally picked
up and used by later writers of puristic bent, hardly any of them have found a secure place in
the language, and his coinages are accordingly omitted from this dictionary.
A second large-scale intervention was made in the 1890s by the Basque nationalist Sabino
Arana, who proposed a large number of neologisms, all but a few of them intended to
1 {NB however OCast. azogue (1279), Old Cat. açoc (1315).}
2 {Though it is not in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Espanola, porlan ‘concrete’ is, in fact, attested in
Spanish since 1942 (Camilo José Cela, La familia de Pascual Duarte). Spanish Porlan ‘(the isle of) Portland’ is
attested since 1449.}