Etymological Dictionary of Basque - Cryptm.org

6 R. L. Trask
Guide to the dictionary
1. General introduction
1a. The language and its external history
Basque is spoken today by about 660,000 people at the western end of the Pyrenees, along
the Bay of Biscay. The Basque-speaking region extends for about 160 kilometres from east
to west, and for about 50 kilometres from north to south. It now excludes the cities of Bilbao
(Basque Bilbo), Bayonne (Baiona) and Pamplona (Iruñea), all formerly Basque-speaking, but
it includes the city of San Sebastián (Donostia). South of the Pyrenees, this region covers
most of the Spanish province of Vizcaya (Basque Bizkaia), all of the province of Guipúzcoa
(Gipuzkoa), the northern part of Navarra (Nafarroa), and a small northern corner of Alava
(Araba). To the north, it covers most of the historical French territory of Labourd (Lapurdi),
all of Basse-Navarre (Nafarroa Beherea), and all of Soule (Zuberoa); these territories lost
their separate existence after the French Revolution, when they were combined with non-
Basque-speaking Béarn into a new department now called Pyrenées-Atlantiques. The number
of speakers on the French side was estimated at 80,000 in 1991, but is declining rapidly, and
is now perhaps closer to 50,000. In the south, speaker numbers are remaining stable for the
present.
History in this part of the world begins with the Roman conquest of Spain and Gaul in the
first century BC and the first century AD. The Romans reported the presence of a number of
named peoples occupying the area of the historical Basque Country. North of the Pyrenees,
they found the entire southwest of Gaul, from the Garonne to the Pyrenees, occupied by a
non-Celtic people who they called the Aquitani, or Aquitanians, with several sub-tribes. By
good luck, we possess about 400 Aquitanian personal names and about 70 divine names
embedded in brief Latin texts, most of them votive or funerary, and in most cases the sex of
the name-bearer is noted.
The phonological structure of Aquitanian, so far as we can recover this from the slightly
defective Roman orthography, is remarkably similar to the phonology reconstructed
independently for the Pre-Basque of around 2000 years ago by Luis Michelena (Michelena
1961a) (Michelena did not use the Aquitanian materials in his reconstruction). Moreover,
there are quite a few recurrent morphs in the Aquitanian names which can be readily
identified with known Basque words. Examples include the female name NESKATO (Basque
neskato ‘girl’), the female name ANDERE (andere ‘lady’), the male element CISSON- (gizon
‘man’), the male element OSSO- ~ OXSO- (otso ‘wolf’), the male element HERAUS- (herauts
‘boar’), the second element -CORRI (gorri ‘red’), the second element -BERRI (berri ‘new’),
and the second element -BELEX (beltz ‘black’), though there are many others. Just such
personal names are known to have been used in Basque in the early medieval period.
Moreover, the patterns of formation and the order of elements are identical to what we find in
Basque. Accordingly, since the publication of Michelena (1954**{a}), summarizing this
evidence, it has been generally accepted that Aquitanian represents an ancestral form of
Basque.
South of the Pyrenees, evidence for Basque speech in Roman times is confined to only three
inscriptions, all of them found in eastern Navarra. One of these, the famous Lerga stele,
contains the striking male name VMME SAHAR, which is clearly Basque ume ‘child’ plus
zahar ‘old’. These inscriptions were found in territory assigned by the Romans to a people