Workshop in Basque Linguistics in Chicago

[linguoboy]

Last week, my ex (who, as some of you may remember, is a professor of German at a local university) tipped my off that what passes for a linguistics department at his institution was hosting a "workshop" in Basque linguistics. It was pretty small--just four presenters--but obviously it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up, so I took the day off and the el down to the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois. These were the presentations:

1. Itxaso Rodriguez: "Dative over-marking in Gernika Basque: a contact phenomenon and its implications"
2. Miren Lourdes Oñederra: "Sound substitution as translation tool: Spanish loanwords in Basque."
3. Karlos Arregi: "Basque plural clitics: A case study in Crossmodular Parallelism."
4. Jose Ignacio Hualde: "Basque prosodic systems"

In terms of quality, they were all over the map. Overall, I found the first and the third the most interesting. I had high hopes for the second--the presenter was even a member of the Royal Academy of the Basque Language--but it was the most half-baked of the lot. The fourth began promisingly, but kind of fell apart when he couldn't get his vocal samples to play (which was particularly embarrassing since he was using his own laptop).

The first benefitted from a young and enthusiastic presenter and suffered a bit from lack of data. She was working from the hypothesis that dative over-marking was characteristic of youth speech, but discovered during her research that whether a speaker was "Spanish-dominant" rather than "Basque-dominant" seemed to be a more important variable. Unfortunately, she had no older "Spanish-dominant" speakers in her sample, so there was no way to test this, really.

Her presentation also got weaker when she tried to make the leap from an empirical study of a particular grammatical phenomenon to sociolinguistic generalisations about identity, but at least this sparked an interesting discussion about the relationship between Basque language and Basque identity. The other Basques seemed to broadly accept her scheme of categorisation into native-speakers (euskaldunak), L2 speakers (euskaldun berriak or "new Basque-speakers"), Spanish-speaking Basques (vascos), and outsiders (maquetos). I was immediately struck by the parallels to Ireland when she explained that the key to being accepted as native-speaker was speaking a dialect rather than Standard Basque.

All the second presentation had going for it was an interesting point about rules which were originally phonological becoming morphological in a situation of stable bilingualism. That is, in an environment like modern Spain, where all Basque native-speakers acquire Spanish from at least school age, there's no strictly linguistic need for them to adapt newer loans to the phonetic system of Basque. Continuing to do so clearly serves other purposes, but it's hard to say what those really are when you've got no data, merely anecdotes.

(I'll break here to keep this from getting overly long.)

[Miekko]

Is there possibly an element of analogy involved in adapting words to Basque phonology? I find I do that with words between standard Swedish and my dialect - loan words that have no gone through a few centuries of divergence are passed through a guess as to what divergences there should be, and come out like that. And most of my dialect-speaking friends do that as well.

[linguoboy]

The most intriguing presentation was the third, since that had both interesting data and an interesting hypothesis. "Crossmodular parallelism" is the idea that different "modules" of grammar share operations, they simply operate on different "alphabets". For his example, he chose something he termed "fission" and tried to show parallels between the diphthongisation of segments in a Campanian dialect and the "splitting" of a plural morphemes in Biscayan, then went on to demonstrate the "metathesis" of these clitics in particular varieties. His evidence was good and he responded well on the fly to questions about other forms from fluent speakers in the room.

I would go into more detail, but it was easily the most technical of them all and--as far as I know--the only one currently slated for publication. So if you want to know more, you can download some of the papers from his website. When it was over, I turned to my ex and said, "Did that break your brain?" and he replied, "Pretty much." For me, it was at that sweet spot where I had to hang on every word to follow his train of thought, but in the end I think I pretty much grokked what he was trying to convey.

The last had an intriguing idea as well, namely that the earlier accentual pattern of Basque was completely different than what we find in either contemporary Basque or in any other European language. He had plenty of good data from a lot of informants (they recorded 20% of the population of one village, for instance), although he didn't attempt a full reconstruction. The problem was, as I said, that he couldn't play most of his clips without quitting PowerPoint and opening another programme, which gave the talk a very disjointed feel. And this was after stuffing my head for over three hours, so I was getting somewhat droopy anyway.

Afterwards, I chatted briefly with one of my ex's colleagues and found that the whole workshop had been organised by the students. It seems that by chance there are about a half-dozen students from the Basque Country there right now and they were asking for something like this. So the faculty gave them some names (two of the presenters were from Urbana-Champaign and two--the best and the worst--were from the University of Chicago). Pretty damn cool that there's critical mass of people interested in Basque just in my part of Illinois.

[linguoboy]

Is there possibly an element of analogy involved in adapting words to Basque phonology? I find I do that with words between standard Swedish and my dialect - loan words that have no gone through a few centuries of divergence are passed through a guess as to what divergences there should be, and come out like that. And most of my dialect-speaking friends do that as well.

Clearly that is going on, but finding the operative patterns is more difficult than it looks. Her data showed that they do not operate simply on the level of morphemes, since there were examples of recent borrowings where they operated on submorphemic sequences of segments. For instance, there's a historical correspondence of -ón > -oi (from earlier -ONE(M) with deletion of the nasal and diphthongisation) in Latinate borrowings (e.g. millón <> milioi) that gets extend to such words as futón > futoi. (Actually, the need for stress in this sequence seemed to be in doubt, as some speakers accepted plancton > planctoi and some did not.)

More fundamentally, however, there's the question of why speakers feel a need to preserve these analogies. The Basque-speakers in question have no trouble at all producing the sequence ['on]; they do it all the time when they speak Spanish. They could borrow these words with /on/ as easily as they adapt them by analogy to /oi/. So why do these continue to do this? What sociolinguistic purpose does it serve and how would you go about demonstrating that? (I suggested that she might want to compare/contrast what happens in other minority communities to get an idea what factors might be operating.)

[Miekko]

I guess it's about identity - projecting identity as well as maintaining it and making it easy to spot. If they said futon instead of futoi, it's more likely to be misidentified as spanish by a listener passing by, or somesuch. Also, this way maintains some kind of separation that helps ensuring the survival of the language.

[Whimemsz]

The papers/presentations on the guy's site were indeed interesting, thanks for the link to it! (Based on your description I'm assuming Arregi's talk basically covered the same territory as this presentation?)

[linguoboy]

The papers/presentations on the guy's site were indeed interesting, thanks for the link to it! (Based on your description I'm assuming Arregi's talk basically covered the same territory as this presentation?)

Yeah, that looks like substantially the same presentation only much rearranged. Does it make much sense without the accompanying explanation?

[Whimemsz]

The papers/presentations on the guy's site were indeed interesting, thanks for the link to it! (Based on your description I'm assuming Arregi's talk basically covered the same territory as this presentation?)

Yeah, that looks like substantially the same presentation only much rearranged. Does it make much sense without the accompanying explanation?

It took a careful reading but I think I get it, yeah. Though of course since it's just the outline to accompany a talk, there's a lot of supporting info missing that I'd like to see. So I understand his general thesis, but there's not enough actual supporting data there to satisfy me that he's justified in treating the two phenomena as equivalent on a more underlying level.

I actually found this presentation easier to grasp than some of his other stuff (I don't really know anything about Distributed Morphology, so some of his other papers go right over my head).