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Towards a History of the Basque Language
Questions related to the origin and history of the Basque language spark considerable interest, since it is the only surviving pre-Indo-European language in western Europe. However, until now, there was no readily available source in English providing answers to these questions or giving an overview of past and current research in this area. This book is intended to partly fill this void.The book contains both state-of-the-art papers which summarize our knowledge about particular areas of Basque historical linguistics, and articles presenting new hypotheses and points of view based on hard evidence and careful analysis.All contributors to this volume have demonstrated expertise in the topic within Basque historical linguistics that their chapter addresses. Two classical articles by the late Luis Michelena are included in English translation. In addition, the book includes studies on diachronic phonology, morphology and syntax. The relation of Basque to other languages is also investigated in a couple of chapters.
- GenresLinguistics
365 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 18, 2024
Informative and thorough but often felt like drudgery while reading..
August 7, 2023
Was gonna give this four stars, but honestly it’s a great assemblage of articles on Basque language history, no real reason to deduct a full star
September 14, 2020
This book is the reason I wanted to get into Basque to begin with. Towards a History of the Basque Language presents a survey of the state of historical linguistics of Basque, as of 1995.
Because it is a language isolate—which the one vasconist I could have named before starting this book, Larry Trask, defends in one of the chapters, in a combative but broadly unhelpful style—the comparative method is of little use, and linguists must resort to internal reconstruction in various ways. The big name in this area is apparently Luis Michelena, who posthumously contributes two chapters on the chapter, both written in the '60s—one on Ancient Basque consonants, the other on Latin and Romance borrowings—at least one of which is good. The rest of the chapters seem to reflect where the work has mostly happened: there's one on non-finite verb forms (also by Trask, better than his other one), one on infinite verb forms, two on pronouns, and one on the word orain 'now' and how Basque expressed its sentiments before borrowing that word from Latin or one of its descendants (as hora or something like it).
The rest of Basque's tremendous grammar and lexicon receive only oblique attention at best, and the overall impression you get is that a very significant amount of good fundamental work has been done in the 20th century, but also that a very significant amount still remains, at least as of 1995; I envy the vasconists that, though not, obviously, to the extent that I'm going to be one of them.
(John Benjamins did a piss-poor job typesetting, with even the simplest diacritics triggering glaringly obvious fallback fonts, very basic IPA having to use low-resolution bitmaps, and diacritics even having to be written in by hand—by someone with atrocious handwriting—in a few cases. I appreciate that 1995 was on the tail end of the awkward period where every stage of publishing had already moved to home computers but home computers were not yet particularly great at any of it, but an academic publisher should be able to do better.)
Because it is a language isolate—which the one vasconist I could have named before starting this book, Larry Trask, defends in one of the chapters, in a combative but broadly unhelpful style—the comparative method is of little use, and linguists must resort to internal reconstruction in various ways. The big name in this area is apparently Luis Michelena, who posthumously contributes two chapters on the chapter, both written in the '60s—one on Ancient Basque consonants, the other on Latin and Romance borrowings—at least one of which is good. The rest of the chapters seem to reflect where the work has mostly happened: there's one on non-finite verb forms (also by Trask, better than his other one), one on infinite verb forms, two on pronouns, and one on the word orain 'now' and how Basque expressed its sentiments before borrowing that word from Latin or one of its descendants (as hora or something like it).
The rest of Basque's tremendous grammar and lexicon receive only oblique attention at best, and the overall impression you get is that a very significant amount of good fundamental work has been done in the 20th century, but also that a very significant amount still remains, at least as of 1995; I envy the vasconists that, though not, obviously, to the extent that I'm going to be one of them.
(John Benjamins did a piss-poor job typesetting, with even the simplest diacritics triggering glaringly obvious fallback fonts, very basic IPA having to use low-resolution bitmaps, and diacritics even having to be written in by hand—by someone with atrocious handwriting—in a few cases. I appreciate that 1995 was on the tail end of the awkward period where every stage of publishing had already moved to home computers but home computers were not yet particularly great at any of it, but an academic publisher should be able to do better.)
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews