Historical implications of the Western Basque Tonal Accent [1975]

Abstract

Luis Michelena has recently given us a most useful survey of the types and histories of accentual systems in the Basque-speaking area. Of the five types that he discusses, the most widespread one, and the only one whose history has not been in principle understood, is his type I, a tonal accent found in the western part of the area. This occupies the greater part of the Basque-speaking area within Spain, in Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa, and adjacent parts of Navarra. The present paper represents an attempt to rise to the challenge inherent in Michelena's remark that, «type I, as it stands, is, to say the least, a historical enigma».The amount of accentual diversity found is not completely indicated by this specification of five types. We must not forget that there is an additional, negatively characterized, sixth type, in which (much as in French) there seems to be no distinctive accent that is a property of individual words. This is now found in most of the Labourdin and Low Navarrese areas, and perhaps also in part of the Western area. Furthermore, some of these types have subtypes showing subsidiary differences. This is true of type II as between the Souletin and the Roncalese dialects. And it is especially true of the type I accent that primarily concerns us, where differences between dialects belonging to this general type encompass such things as the location of the accented syllable within the word, whether monosyllabic stems are necessarily 1 The original typescript of this 1975 article by the late William H. Jacobsen is kept at the Jon Bilbao Basque Library, University of Nevada, Reno, together with other papers by the same author, including a shorter version of this paper, for oral delivery at a conference, and a handout with examples and maps (William H. Jacobsen Papers, BAQ090, Box: BSQAP0449. University of Nevada, Reno. Jon Bilbao Basque Library). The editorial team of ASJU is grateful to the Jacobsen family for granting us permission to publish this paper in the pages of this journal and to the Jon Bilbao Basque Library librarian, Iñaki Arrieta Baro, for handling the process with efficiency and professionalism.

The reconstruction of Old Common Basque accentuation: Closing open issues

“…In section 5, I discuss the different proposals that have been made regarding the origin of marked accentuation in the Western-Central and Eastern systems, showing that vowel contraction cannot be the oldest source of marked accent (contra Jacobsen's 1975Jacobsen's [2022 proposal). finally, section 6 offers a brief summary.…”

“…By and large, accentual exceptions in the Western-Central area are explainable from their etymology: these are borrowings, morphologically complex words and words that have undergone a contraction (Mitxelena 1972;Jacobsen 1975Jacobsen [2022). Taking aspiration in Northeastern Basque as an indication of which syllable was accented before the shift, on the other hand, no clear pattern emerges regarding the distribution of /h/.…”

“…different authors have given relatively greater or lesser weight to these sources. The most radical position in this respect was expressed by Jacobsen (1975Jacobsen ( [2022), for whom vowel contraction would have been the original source of accents in a system where prior to this event all words were unaccented. Jacobsen's proposal has received relatively little attention, no doubt because it was made in a manuscript that had remained unpublished until very recently.…”

“…As Jacobsen (1975Jacobsen ( [2022) points out, the existence of a connection between vowel contraction and marked accent in some Basque varieties has long been noticed, since there are minimal pairs where the member with marked accent is known to have undergone reduction of a sequence of identical vowels. These include the two minimal pairs that Jacobsen mentions, for which we give examples in ( 12) from two varieties with regular [+2] accent, Zumaia and Goizueta:…”

William H. Jacobsen’s contribution to Basque accentuation and historical morphology

“…(Michelena 1972: 111) Michelena's reluctance to accept Jacobsen's analysis of unmarked accentuation in Western Basque as unaccentedness (which, as mentioned, was based on observations about gernika Basque), appears to have to do with his conviction that, at a deeper level, the accentual system was essentially the same in the whole of the Central and Western area. In fact, in his additions and corrections to the chapter on Basque accentual systems in the second edition of Fonética Histórica Vasca, Michelena explicitly mentions Jacobsen's (1975) manuscript and states that, in spite of https://doi.org/10.1387/asju.23471…”