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Katherine Johnson’s mathematical calculations helped guide some of America’s most important early space missions while she confronted the racial and gender barriers faced by Black women in twentieth-century America.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
| Proto-Basque | |
|---|---|
| Reconstruction of | Basque dialects |
| Era | 500 BCE – 100 CE |
Proto-Basque (Basque: aitzineuskara; Spanish: protoeuskera, protovasco; French: proto-basque)[a] is a reconstructed ancient stage of the Basque language. It preceded another reconstructed stage, Common Basque, which is derived by comparing dialects of modern Basque. Common Basque is their reconstructed common ancestor. Proto-Basque is based on the comparison also of words that precede Common Basque, such as Latin words in Basque, and toponyms. Common Basque is dated to the 5th and 6th centuries, while Proto-Basque stage can be roughly dated to the last centuries BCE, before the Roman conquests in the Western Pyrenees.[1]
The foundation for the study of both stages was laid out by the Basque linguist Koldo Mitxelena.[b] The topic was launched by him in the first edition of Fonética histórica vasca in 1961.[2]
The first linguist who scientifically approached the question of the historical changes that Basque had undergone over the centuries was Koldo Mitxelena. His work on Proto-Basque focused mainly on between the 5th century BCE and the 1st century CE, just before and after initial contact with the Romans. By comparing variants of the same word in modern dialects and the changes that Latin loanwords had undergone, he deduced the ancestral forms and the rules for historical sound changes. His groundbreaking work, which culminated with the publication of his book Fonética histórica vasca (1961) (a revised version of his doctoral thesis of 1959), was carried out mostly before the Aquitanian inscriptions were found, but they fully backed up Mitxelena's proposed Proto-Basque forms.[3]
Since then, a number of other prominent linguists, such as Larry Trask, Alfonso Irigoien, Henri Gavel and most recently Joseba Lakarra, Joaquín Gorrotxategi and Ricardo Gómez, have made further contributions to the field. Some of them, such as Lakarra, have focused their attention on even older layers of the language, called Pre-Proto-Basque (or Old Proto-Basque), that preceded the Celtic invasion of Iberia.[4]
Onomastic attestations of the Aquitanian language, which is only known from the names of places, persons and deities in inscriptions from the first centuries CE, closely match the reconstructed form of Proto-Basque. For instance, Aquitanian names contain elements such as Seni- or Sembe- that fully correspond to the reconstructed Proto-Basque words *seni 'boy' and *sembe 'son'.[5]
A small sample of what is thought to be a form of Proto-Basque has been discovered on the Hand of Irulegi, an inscribed bronze artifact in the shape of a right hand dated to the 1st century BC.[6]
The consonant system of Proto-Basque was reconstructed by Mitxelena as follows:[7][8][9][c]
| Stops | Sibilants | Sonorants | Fricative | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Labial | Dental | Velar | Apical | Laminal | Nasal | Lateral | Rhotic | Laryngeal | |
| fortis | – | T | K | TS | TZ | N | L | R | h |
| lenis | b | d | g | s | z | n | l | r | |
The characteristic fortis–lenis contrast was realized in three ways:[7]
This consonant system differed in many ways from the consonant system in Modern Basque dialects:[8] most notable is the lack of /m/, /p/, the semivowels /w/ and /j/, and the entire palatal consonant series in Proto-Basque, and on the other hand the distinction between fortis and lenis nasals and laterals which is not found in the modern language.[7][9]
This relatively small consonant system was further subject to positional restrictions: only the lenes ⟨b, g, z, s, n, l⟩ occurred at the beginning of a word (also ⟨d⟩, but only in auxiliary verbs), while only fortes were allowed in final position. The fortis–lenis contrast was therefore restricted to word-internal position.[7]
Evidence for the Proto-Basque consonant system comes from sound correspondences between modern dialects, the distribution of sounds in native (i.e. non-borrowed) vocabulary, and from the phonological adaptation of early Latin/Romance borrowings.[10] E.g., the positional restrictions of Proto-Basque explain why the Common Romance affricate in /tselu/ 'sky' (< Classical Latin caelum) became a fricative in Basque (zeru) at the beginning of a word,[11] whereas the simple fricative at the end of the Latin word corpus 'body' was adopted as an affricate in Basque (gorputz).[12] Further, the voicing contrast of stops in Latin/Romance borrowings was only preserved in medial position (e.g. lacum > laku 'lake' versus regem > errege 'king'), but not in word-initial position due to the lack of the fortis-lenis contrast in this position; thus for instance, both p- and b- became b- in Basque: benedica- > beindika 'bless', pacem > bake 'peace'.[13][14]
Studying the behaviour of Latin and early Romance loanwords in Basque, Mitxelena discovered that Proto-Basque *n was lost between vowels and that Proto-Basque had no *m. Both are relatively unusual cross-linguistically, but /n/ was also partially deleted between vowels during the history of the nearby Gascon and Galician-Portuguese.
| Proto-Basque | Modern Basque | English |
|---|---|---|
| *ardano | ardo | wine |
| *(h)ur | ur | water |
| *arrani | arrain | fish |
| *bene | mehe | thin, slim |
| *bini | mihi | tongue |
| *egu-gaitz | ekaitz | storm |
| *eLana ~ *eNala | elai ~ enara | barn swallow |
| *gaztana | gazta | cheese |
| *ini | ihi | rush (plant) |
| *organa | orga | cart |
| *sen-be | seme | son |
| *seni | sehi | servant |
| *suni | suhi | son-in-law |
| *un-be | ume | young, baby |
| *zani | zain | guard |
| *zini | zii, zi | acorn |
One of the puzzles of Basque is the large number of words that begin with vowels in which the initial and second vowels are the same. Joseba Lakarra proposes that in Pre-Proto-Basque there was extensive reduplication[15] and that later, certain initial consonants were deleted, leaving the VCV pattern of Proto-Basque:
| Pre-Proto-Basque | Proto-Basque | Modern Basque | English |
|---|---|---|---|
| *dar → *da-dar | *adaR | adar | horn (anatomy) |
| *dats → *da-dats | *adats | adats | long hair |
| *der → *de-der | *edeR | eder | beautiful |
| *dol → *do-dol | *odoL | odol | blood |
| *gor → *go-gor | *gogoR | gogor | hard |
| *nal → *na-nal | *anaL | ahal | can, to be able |
| *nan → *na-nan | *anan-tz | ahantz | to forget |
| *nin → *ni-nin | *inin-tz | ihintz | dew |
| *nol → *no-nol | *onoL | ohol | board |
| *nur → *nu-nur | *unuR | hur | hazelnut |
| *zal → *za-zal | *azal | azal | bark |
| *zen → *ze-zen | *zezen | zezen | bull |
| *ten → *te-ten | *eten | eten | break |
| *ran → *ra-ran | *aran | aran | plum |
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Proto-Basque (Basque: aitzineuskara; Spanish: protoeuskera, protovasco; French: proto-basque) is a reconstructed ancient stage of the Basque language. It preceded another reconstructed stage, Common Basque, which is derived by comparing dialects of modern Basque. Common Basque is their reconstructed common ancestor. Proto-Basque is based on the comparison also of words that precede Common Basque, such as Latin words in Basque, and toponyms. Common Basque is dated to the 5th and 6th centuries, while Proto-Basque stage can be roughly dated to the last centuries BCE, before the Roman conquests in the Western Pyrenees. The foundation for the study of both stages was laid out by the Basque linguist Koldo Mitxelena. The topic was launched by him in the first edition of Fonética histórica vasca in 1961.
The origin of the Basques and the Basque language is a controversial topic that has given rise to numerous hypotheses. Modern Basque, a descendant or close relative of Aquitanian and Proto-Basque, is the only pre-Indo-European language that is extant in western Europe. The Basques have therefore long been supposed to be a remnant of a pre-Indo-European population of Europe. The main hypotheses about the origin of the Basques are: Native origin, the mainstream theory, according to which the Basque language would have developed over the millennia entirely between the north of the Iberian Peninsula and the current south of France, without the possibility of finding any kind of relationship between the Basque language and other modern languages in other regions. Basque-Iberism theorizes the existence of a kinship between the Basque and the Iberian language, and therefore between their speakers. Caucasian origin theorizes that the Basque language and the languages of the Caucasus may have a direct relation, explaining why they share some linguistic typologies absent in the Indo-European languages.
Basque ( BASK, BAHSK; endonym euskara [eus̺ˈkaɾa]) is a language spoken by Basques and other residents of the Basque Country, a region that straddles the westernmost Pyrenees in adjacent parts of southwestern France and northern Spain. Basque is Europe's only known language isolate (with no relation to any other known languages) and the only surviving language of Paleo-European origin. The Basques are indigenous to and primarily inhabit the Basque Country. Basque has 806,000 speakers: 93.7% (756,000) are in the Spanish area of the Basque Country and the remaining 6.3% (51,000) are in the French portion. Native speakers live in a contiguous area that includes parts of four Spanish provinces and the three "ancient provinces" in France. Gipuzkoa, most of Biscay, a few municipalities on the northern border of Álava and the northern area of Navarre formed the core of the remaining Basque-speaking area before measures were introduced in the 1980s to strengthen Basque fluency. By contrast, most of Álava, the westernmost part of Biscay, and central and southern Navarre are predominantly populated by native speakers of Spanish, either because Basque was replaced by either Navarro-Aragonese or Spanish over the centuries (as in most of Álava and central Navarre), or because it may never have been spoken there (as in parts of Enkarterri and south-eastern Navarre). In Francoist Spain, Basque language use was suppressed by the government's repressive policies. In the Basque Country, "Francoist repression was not only political, but also linguistic and cultural." Franco's regime suppressed Basque from official discourse, education, and publishing, making it illegal to register newborn babies under Basque names, and even requiring tombstone engravings in Basque to be removed. In some provinces the public use of Basque was suppressed, with people fined for speaking it. Public use of Basque was frowned upon by supporters of the regime, often regarded as a sign of anti-Francoism or separatism. In the 1960s and later, still under the regime, the trend reversed and education and publishing in Basque began to flourish. As a part of this process, a standardised form of the Basque language, called Euskara Batua, was developed by the Euskaltzaindia in the late 1960s. Besides its standardised version, the five historic Basque dialects are Biscayan, Gipuzkoan, and Upper Navarrese in Spain and Navarrese–Lapurdian and Souletin in France. They take their names from the historic Basque provinces, but the dialect boundaries are not congruent with province boundaries. Euskara Batua was created so that the Basque language could be used—and easily understood by all Basque speakers—in formal situations (education, mass media, literature), and this is its main use today. In both Spain and France, the use of Basque for education varies from region to region and from school to school. The current mainstream scientific view on the origin of the Basques and of their language is that early forms of Basque developed before the arrival of Indo-European languages in the area, i.e. before the arrival of Celtic and Romance languages, as the latter today geographically surround the Basque-speaking region. Basque grammar remains markedly different from that of Standard Average European languages, due to its agglutinative morphology and ergative-absolutive alignment. Agglutinative morphology refers to the fact that it is a language that is formed by stringing together morphemes (word parts) without significant changes made to their forms. Moreover, ergative-absolute alignment refers to a system in which the subject of an intransitive verb is treated similarly to the object of a transitive verb, while the subject of a transitive verb is marked differently.
Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Germanic languages. A defining feature of Proto-Germanic is the completion of the process described by Grimm's law (also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift), a set of sound changes that occurred during its gradual divergence from Proto-Indo-European. The Proto-Germanic language is not directly attested and has been reconstructed using the comparative method with other more archaic and earlier attested Indo-European languages, extremely early Germanic loanwords in Baltic and Finnish languages (for example, Finnish kuningas 'king'), early runic inscriptions (specifically the Vimose inscriptions in Denmark, dated to the 2nd century CE), and in Roman Empire era transcriptions of individual words (notably in Tacitus's Germania, c. AD 90). The non-runic Negau helmet inscription, dated to the 2nd century BCE, has also been argued by some to represent the earliest attestation of Grimm's law.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →The Greenwood District.
