Advances in Proto-Basque Reconstruction with Evidence for the Proto-Indo-European-Euskarian Hypothesis Routledge Studies in Historical Linguistics Series

This book presents a new reconstruction of Proto-Basque, the mother language of modern Basque varieties, historical Basque, and Aquitanian, grounded in traditional methods of historical linguistics. Building on a long tradition of Basque scholarship, the comparative method and internal reconstruction, informed by the phonetic bases of sound change and phonological typology, are used to explain previously underappreciated alternations and asymmetries in Basque sound patterns, resulting in a radically new view of the proto-language. The comparative method is then used to compare this new Proto-Basque with Proto-Indo-European, revealing regular sound correspondences in basic vocabulary and grammatical formatives. Evaluation of these results supports a distant genetic relationship between Proto-Basque and Proto-Indo-European, and offers new insights into specific linguistic properties of these two ancient languages. This comprehensive volume, which includes a detailed appendix including Proto-Basque/Proto-Indo-European cognate sets, will be of general interest to linguists, archeologists, historians, and geneticists, and of particular interest to scholars in historical linguistics, phonetics and phonology, language change, and Basque and Indo-European studies.

Errata for the book can be found at: https://julietteblevins.ws.gc.cuny.edu/proto-basque/

Part I: Reconstruction of Proto-Basque

Introduction to Part I

1. Basque and Proto-Basque

2. The Proto-Basque Vowel System

3. A revised Proto-Basque Consonant System

4. Proto-Basque Phonotactics

5. Proto-Basque Stress and accent

6. Advances in Proto-Basque Reconstruction

Part II: Comparison of Proto-Basque and Proto-Indo European

Introduction to Part II

7. Results of the comparative method

8. Statistical Evidence for Relatedness

9. Proto-Basque and Proto-Indo-European Historical Phonology

10. Potential Implications for Indo-European Linguistics

Appendix: Proto-Basque reconstructions with Proto-Indo-European comparisons

References

Proto-Basque Index/ Proto-Indo-European Index/ Basque Index

Juliette Blevins is Full Professor in the Linguistics Program at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, USA, where she is Director of the Endangered Language Initiative. Her main research interests are sound patterns and sound change, with a special focus on phonological typology, as detailed in her influential book　Evolutionary Phonology: The emergence of sound patterns.