Larry Trask, a world expert on Basque linguistics and the history of the Basque language, passed away on March 28, 2004. Larry contributed extensively to several online communities, including Basque-L and the Indoeuropean list. This collection of his postings is dedicated in his memory. To learn about Larry, see this article.

The other day, I promised to say something about the Basque words for 'lord' and 'lady'.

Now, the word for 'lady' is everywhere <andere>, which in some varieties has been reduced to <andre>. In Bizkaian, the form has shifted to <andra> (old Bizkaian <andera>), in typical Bizkaian fashion, and the sense has shifted to 'woman', but these developments are clearly secondary.

As it happens, ANDERE is attested as a female name in Aquitanian, and so we may be confident that the word is old in Basque. Quite a few people have seen this as a borrowing from Celtic, since Old Irish has a word <ander> 'young woman'. But there is another idea.

A few years ago, Joaquín Gorrochategui pointed to the existence in Aquitanian of a Latinized male name ANDOSSUS. He proposes to interpret this as an Aquitanian name *<Andots>, which is perfectly reasonable. Now comes the interesting part.

Gorrochategui points to the existence in Basque of an apparent suffix <-dots> ~ <-ots>, found in several animal names, as in <bildots> 'lamb', and at least occasionally having the apparent sense of 'male'. He therefore proposes that Pre-Basque had a stem *<and->, and that this stem could take female and male suffixes to yield both *<andere> 'lady' and *<andots> 'lord'.

Of course, *<andots>, if it ever existed, has disappeared. But the historical word for 'lord', <jaun>, is a very funny-looking word for a noun: it looks for all the world like the participle of a lost verb, possibly meaning something like 'exalted'. Gorrochategui's hypothesis requires that the original *<andots> should simply have been replaced by this <jaun>.

Now, I find this appealing, but I can't really tell if there's anything in it. If Gorrochategui is right, then Pre-Basque, or perhaps better Pre-Pre-Basque, must have been significantly different from the historical language, in allowing stems like *<and-> and in possessing explicit male and female suffixes.

Finally, though I don't recall that Gorrochategui mentions this, it will not have escaped your attention that his proposed stem *<and-> could provide a source for the adjective <handi> 'big'. A sense along the lines of 'great' would not seem unreasonable within Gorrochategui's proposal. But who knows?

Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK

larryt@cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)

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andoitz at korta dot com 26-Aug-2008 5:41 #8170 Take not of the existing name Andoitz.
ANGUSJHUCK at aol dot com 05-Nov-2006 15:58 #3916 When I say that Iberian texts do not normally make explicit references to women, I mean that personal names do not differ between genders: BALKEADIN and ORDINBELAUR could equally be male or female. However, in some situations (such as ownership marks), a suffix is added to the personal name to indicate gender: -ARR for males and -EN for females. Thus we know that ALOSORDIN-ARR (Enserune) is a man, while KOBAXI-EN (also Enserune) is female. The element DOS or DOST may simply be a personal name compound element which is confined to the Pyrenean region. It may be cognate with Basque zotz "small branch, baton, etc". An example in the East Iberian Script is BAKARDOS, who is commemorated in a rock inscription from the Cerdagne region.
ANGUSJHUCK at aol dot com 10-May-2006 17:20 #3023 I am a little surprised that Professor Trask should think that *ANDOTS has disappeared from Basque. De Kerexeta, in his dictionary, lists ANDUSTE "vanidad, soberbia". This is surely sufficient to explain the Iberian theonym, ANDOS, which might have meant "proud". (The suffix, -TE, turns an adjective into a noun.) That *ANDOS is an extension of ANDI "great, big, etc", is probable, but bear in mind that ANDOS is found North of the Pyrenees, where we might expect to find an initial H-: ANDOS is always without one. (I find it rather odd that most Vasconists accept that the personal and deity names found in Roman texts North of the Pyrenees are Vasconic, but insist that the Iberian texts - which contain a very similar lexicon - have nothing to do with Basque. One suspects that political and ideological considerations must be at play here.) A curious feature of ANDERE is that while it is found in ancient sources North of the Pyrenees, it is almost totally absent to the South. Indeed, I am unaware of any text in the Iberian lanaguage which makes an explicit reference to women (though the Ullastret Lead Foil comprises a petition to a female deity). I note that Professor Trask alludes to the presence of derivatives of ANDERE in the insular Celtic languages. The word cannot be native to the Celtic languages, because there is no Indo-European antecedant. It therefore must be a borrowing from Vasconic (like words for "battle", "confluence", "hole", "horn", "palm of the hand" and "salmon". Most Vasconists, including Professor Trask, insist that Basque was only ever spoken in the Basque Country and Gascony. Yet the Celtic languages reached Britain from the North of France and Belgium, nearly 1,000 miles to the North!
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