TY - JOUR
T1 - Old Basque had */χ/, not /h/. Medieval data, implications for reconstruction and Basque-Romance contact effects
AU - Manterola, Julen
AU - Hualde, José Ignacio
N1 - Funding Information:
Julen Manterola’s work was supported by the Basque Government (IT1344-19), the University of the Basque Country (UFI11/14) and the Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad of Spain (FFI2016-76032-P, AEI/FEDER, UE).
Publisher Copyright:
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
PY - 2021/10/8
Y1 - 2021/10/8
N2 - 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/.
AB - 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/.
KW - Latin f
KW - Medieval Basque
KW - Reconstruction of Basque /χ/
KW - Romance languages
KW - Substrate hypothesis
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U2 - 10.1075/jhl.19041.man
DO - 10.1075/jhl.19041.man
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85116968458
SN - 2210-2116
VL - 11
SP - 421
EP - 456
JO - Journal of Historical Linguistics
JF - Journal of Historical Linguistics
IS - 3
ER -