Frislander wrote: ↑Sat Jul 24, 2021 6:29 am
It perhaps might be remembered that proto-Basque seems to have been relatively "labial poor", I recall at least from Trask Historical Linguistics discussing an example of how internal reconstruction suggests that proto-Basque had no *m at least (it being largely confined to loanwords, absent from morphology and the relatively few native instances can generally be shown to be products of nasal assimilation of *b, e.g.
mihi "tongue" from
*bini (the *n being lost by the regular deletion process found elsewhere in Basque)).
The inventory Trask reconstructs is lenis */b d g z s n l r/ vs. fortis */(p) t k tz ts N L R/, plus a suprasegmental aspiration feature.
In that case then one might suppose that perhaps *b might not actually have been a stop in proto-Basque and it might have perhaps instead been a glide *w or similar and underwent fortition to a stop in common with the same process in Spanish.
There could be phonotactic evidence one way or the other. My impression is that there's no reason to suspect this. Unless *d and *l can be unified, in which case the natural thing to do would be to posit /β l ɣ/, but that seems difficult since there was also *L.
Trask says the typical root had the structure C1VC2C3VC4, with heavy restrictions on the permissible consonants in each position:
- C1 could only be /b g z s l n/
- Permissible medial clusters were {r n l}{p t k b d g z s tz ts} and {z s}{p t k}
- C3 could be any consonant if C2 was absent
- C4 could only be /tz ts L N R/ or
possibly {n l r}{tz}
I'm also curious as to the status of *p in proto-Basque, are we sure it was even present?
No.
Duaj teibohnggoe kyoe' quaqtoeq lucj lhaj k'yoejdej noeyn tucj.
K'yoejdaq fohm q'ujdoe duaj teibohnggoen dlehq lucj.
Teijp'vq. Teijp'vq. Teijp'vq. Teijp'vq. Teijp'vq. Teijp'vq. Teijp'vq.