Euskal kanta bat 1783ko antzerki-lan batean / A Basque song in a 1783 play

Abstract

In this paper I present a critical edition of a short song written in Basque. It is a well known comic piece that continues to be sung even nowadays, and it was inserted by Rita Barnetxea in one of her dramas (Catalin, 1783). Some of the features attested in it are quite interesting from the linguistic point of view. In short, the text combines modern traits with several archaisms which were more common 200 or 250 years earlier than in the end of the 18th century. On the one hand, this paper intends to fix a critical version of the text. On the other hand, an exhaustive analysis of the innovations (graphic distinctions and phonological rules) and the archaisms (morphosyntactic features and lexical variants) is given in order to highlight the peculiarity of the text.