Friday, November 30, 2007
No menus to spare
I’ve realised that I’m quite resourceful at entertaining myself… My flight was delayed, so I decided to have a little glass of wine at an airport lounge. To my delight, I noticed, in front of me, an Euskera-Spanish bilingual menu, so I started concluding meanings of morphemes, analysing phonetics, and looking at grammatical structure of noun phrases (menus are not normally written in full sentences).
Ok. Does that sound geeky to you? Well, when it was finally time to board my flight, I asked the bar lady if I could take the menu with me (a simple printed piece of paper wedged between two pieces of plastic – printable off any computer), and was deeply hurt by the resounding “no”. Not even when I explained that I was a linguist doing an analysis of Euskera. That really made me sad for a moment. Now that’s geeky. However, now I’m happily in mid-air, on a few too many painkillers (wisdom tooth coming out), and not the least bit perturbed by the untimely end of my scientific/linguistic research. Time to enrol myself in Euskera classes, methinks.
But despite all that, I have drawn a few basic conclusions:
There is no [v], or else if there is, I have a suspicion that it is not distinguished from [b] as in Spanish, and that this seems to be reflected in the spelling. There was no evidence of any “v”, even in places where the words were borrowed and the ‘proper’ spelling required one (eg. Spanish Vermouth → Euskera Bermuti). I would conclude that Euskera does have a [v], but that it has fallen out of use, so that v → /b/ and that it has been reflected orthographically. I wonder if the French Basques do have a [v], because if they do, it would be evidence of one effect Spanish has had on Euskera pronunciation (v → /b/). However, [p] and [b] are separate phonemes, as are [k] and [g], [t] and [d], the usual “unvoiced-voiced” suspects. Also, generally, there is a CNC structure – Euskera avoids consonant clusters.
NP = (Adj.) N / N (Adj.)
This means that Basque must be an inflectional language – as the word order didn’t seem to be so important.
Euskera morphemes:
Edo = Or
Eta = And
Garagardo = Beer (or possibly the partitive form)
Ardo = Wine (again, possibly the partitive form)
Barazki = (Adj.) Vegetable/vegetarian
Ogitartekoa = Sandwich (probably inflected)
Ogi = Bread
Ogian = Bread + an (inflection)
Gazta = Cheese (may be inflected)
Erdionduzko = (Adj.) Semicured
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Final note... ONLY with Mimo, do I arrive in Helsinki to be taken straight to a Gothic party (with all my suitcases!). At least in Porvoo with my Aunt, I relaxed, did useful stuff and went to a poetry reading...
Not that it isn't useful to do spontaneous, relaxing things! I definitely enjoyed my surprise gothic night!!
fon @ 1:19 PM link to post * *