Old Basque had */χ/, not /h/
Medieval data, implications for reconstruction and Basque-Romance contact effects
The sound change from Latin /f/ to Old Spanish and Gascon /h/ has often been attributed to stratal influence from
Basque. The motivation would be that Old Basque lacked /f/, and instead had a phoneme /h/, with which bilingual speakers replaced
it when speaking in Romance. However, this hypothesis presents several difficulties. Most importantly, Navarrese Romance preserves
Latin /f/, and in Basque itself, /f/ is adapted as /b/ in loanwords from Latin and Romance, not as /h/. Here we will argue that
Old Basque had neither /f/ nor /h/. Instead, modern Basque /h/ derives from older */χ/. Medieval data will play an important role
in establishing this. This hypothesis explains a number of morphophonological alternations, as well as some puzzling aspects in
the treatment of aspiration in Romance borrowings, and it also makes it more difficult to hold to the stratal hypothesis for the
Romance change /f/ > /h/.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.A note on our definition of “Old Basque”
- 3./h/ in Basque: Phonological status and distribution
- 3.1On the native and ancient character of the Basque back fricative phoneme
- 3.2The phonetic nature of /h/ and its distribution in modern dialects
- 3.3Our proposal: Modern Bq /h/ derives from older /χ/
- 4./h/ ~ velar stop ~ zero alternations
- 4.1-hari ~ -kari ~ -ari ‘mealtime’
- 4.2Superlative -en ~ -hen ~ -ken
- 4.3Plural, abundantial -(h)eta/-keta
- 4.4Etymological insights into the Basque lexicon: ezkur ‘acorn’ and askazi ‘breed’
- 4.5Beyond derivational suffixes: Person agreement inflection
- 4.5.1The second person singular affixes
- 4.5.2A note on the vowel quality of reconstructed */-χa-/
- 4.6Beyond derivational suffixes: h- ~ g- in demonstratives
- 5.Graphemic alternations in medieval texts
- 5.1Alternation <h> ~ <k, c>
- 5.2Alternation <h> ~ <g>
- 6./h-/ in borrowings from Gascon
- 7.The phenomena and their chronology
- 8.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References