Euskal lexikoaren historiarako: ikerketak Euskara Arkaikoan

Resumen

The main objective of the present study is to define a methodology to work on Basque historical lexicology, an underdeveloped field in the Basque Linguistics. The purposes are, on the one hand, to consolidate the bases for future synchronic and diachronic studies, and on the other hand, to open new research procedures for the Basque lexicon. Thus, we did a synchronic analysis of the archaic Basque language, by taking a sample of eleven documents from the 15th-16th centuries, and studying, defining and gathering the way in which lexicon was formed at that time. In conclusion, we tried to characterize the lexicon of those texts, focusing on derivatives, compounds and loanwords. To this end, we rely on the few works available about Basque language lexicon (e.g. Sarasola 1997), and especially, on some works about the lexical history of other languages spoken in the surrounding areas (e.g. Barber 1976, Nevalainen 1999).
The main corpus for our analysis was the inventory of archaic Basque words, collected from Sarasola's Euskal Hiztegia. The resulting data showed us that most of the lexicon from 15th-16th centuries is inherited from ancient Basque language (58%). However, if we add some words to the mentioned corpus that were not considered in Euskal Hiztegia, the number of loanwords increases (44%), reducing the difference with the percentage of inherited ancient Basque words (55%). By contrast, loanwords were the most common trend to create new lexicon (66%). In fact, loanwords are more frequent than the total of derivatives (22%) and compounds (13%). In any case, it is obvious that Leizarraga influenced those results.