More than you wanted to know but not more than I wanted to know

[muckefuck]

Seven Things I Learned Last Friday at the Workshop in Basque Linguistics

1. Basque has dative overmarking. It's far from universal and it is, in fact, stigmatised by most speakers, but Biscayan Basque dialects allow for animate direct objects to be put in the dative case (e.g. Nik zuri entzun dizut).
2. Basque Spanish has a different kind of leísmo from Standard (Peninsular) Spanish. Instead of reserving it just for male humans (e.g. Le he oído a un político), some speakers use le with all masculine animates or even all masculine objects generally. Penny even suggests that the standard system is a result of a compromise between this sort of generalised leísmo and the non-leísta varieties of eastern Castile.
3. There is a hierarchy of Basqueness and one of the criteria is mastery of a local dialect. This is what distinguishes "real" Basques (euskaldunak) from "new Basque-speakers" (euskaldunberriak) who only speak the standardised variety taught in school. After them come the vascos, who speak no Basque at all, and then the maquetos, who seem to occupy a role comparable to xarnegos in Catalonia.
4. The Basque word for "futon" is futoi and Basque-speakers will even borrow cabrón as kabroi. This is an old correspondence going back to the early days of Vulgar Latin contact, but it--and others like it--appear to have been given new impetus by the need to keep contemporary borrowings from changing the face of the language too much.
5. There are Italian dialects with umlaut plurals. I knew metaphony was widespread in Italic varieties, I just didn't know there were dialects where it combined with final vowel reduction to produce pairs like ['fjoɾə] "flower", ['fjʊɾə] "flowers".
6. Some Basque varieties show metathesis of pronominal clitics in auxiliaries. Okay, this point is so obscure and technical, I'm not even going to try to explain it here. Rest assured that it is cool, not least of all because there are lots of variations which help provide insight into how the process operates.
7. Basque prosody is different. Looks like the earlier prosodic system combined stress with pitch-accent, and topped it all with distinctive sentential stress, adding up with a system quite unlike anything seen elsewhere in Europe. Vestiges survive among older speakers, but it looks like garden-variety stress accent is on the march, at least in the Spanish Basque Country.

All in all, it was an afternoon very well spent. I'm glad Nuphy convinced me to come down and join him and I'm a bit surprised he made it through all four presentations with me, given that theoretical linguistics is a stretch for him even in German, much less crazy moon man languages.

Comments

[sandor-baci.livejournal.com]

Just knowing that you're out there, caring about, taking an interest, in things like these makes me feel good. I can't follow you there. But jeezo man, you make it seem fascinating!

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

For me, the real treat is talking afterwards to someone like Nuphy, who knows enough to ask intelligent questions but enough less than me that I can give him intelligent explanations.

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

I'm envious; I'd LOVE to attend a Basque workshop!!

[embryomystic.livejournal.com]

There are Italian dialects with umlaut plurals.

Oh yes, we had a guest speaker in my Intro to Romance Linguistics class who talked about the linguistic diversity of Italy, and this is one of the things he talked about. Pretty cool, I thought.

[tisoi.livejournal.com]

^add to favorites