Gascón y euskera: afinidades e interrelaciones linguísticas

• Main Author: Jacques Allières
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: UPV/EHU Press 1992-04-01
• Series: Anuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca "Julio de Urquijo"
• Online Access: https://ojs.ehu.eus/index.php/ASJU/article/view/8323

If we try to compare the Basque language with the neighbouring romance tongues and dialects, we must deal with all the precise features which define linguistically every-one of them. The present article is an attempt to elaborate such a synthesis, based upon my personal experience of both areas. On the phonetic level, we may quote as to the vowel system: any cases of retention of the primitive sound of latin Ū, the change of its "normal" product [y] to [œ] in border regions of east Gascony, together with the creation of a three-grade vocalic system ("Black Gascon") along the Ocean coast north of the Basque Country, the non-shutting of open vowels before the accent in the SW of Gascony and the presence of nasal ones in some regions of Beam and of the neighbouring basque-speaking Soule; as to the consonant system, the local (SW) conservation of unchanged latin intervocalic stops, which may have been much more extensive in early times, the similar shift of romance [v] to [b] and [f] to [h] in both Gascony and Castile, which may correspond to an early euskarian tendency, while the maintaining of the latin opposition between simple and geminate intervocalic sonants, especially [l], [n] (with eventual palatalisation of strong partners and/or loss of weak ones) and [r] and the phenomena of assimilation of stops -total if sounded, by means of a sonorization if soundless- by a preceeding nasal, and also the ranging of initial position to a "strong" position for consonants like [l] in Catalan and Asturian ("bable"), [n] in this last dialect, of [r] from Catalonia to Galicia and Portugal -whence palatal sounds or prothetic vowels. On the morphological and syntactical levels; the strange form (eth, era) of the "pyrenean" definite article in Gascon, its system of asyllabic pronouns often combined  (cf. the "personal indices" of the basque conjugation), the curious interferences between latin perfects and imperfects in west Gascony, the loss of tone alternations and of a specific radical for the future and the conditional in the south-west, finally the gascon use of "enunciative particles" (que...) and of some partitive turns. All the features mentioned here may perhaps be related with a basque "adstratum", or, more audaciously, substratum.