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Is There Some Basque in Your English? by William H. Jacobsen, Jr. The following suggestions of possible etymological connections between Basque and English words have been contributed by Miguel Echegarary of Madrid, who has made a hobby of studying the origins of Basque words for over thirty years. He has focused especially on apparently related English words whose etymologies are unknown or doubtful. R. Echegaray refrains from putting forth a definite theory or hypothesis to explain these similarities. He feels that the connecting links in such cases may be due to the Western European substratum, or else to Scandinavian or French. One such case involves the English words slur and slurry.* The latter is a technical term used in fields such as mining, cement manufacture, and petroleum exploration. It refers to a semisolid mixture of earth, clay, or other hard materials, and water. Related to this is slur, which originally meant ‘thin mud, ire’, but now means, as a noun, ‘deliberate slight, aspersion, imputation, stigma,’ and as a verb ‘to cast aspersions upon.’ Thus the latter meanings arose metaphorically from the concept of throwing earth or mud at someone. The etymology of slur has been considered doubtful or unknown, beyond a probable relationship to Middle High German slier ‘mud, slime.’ Sr. Echegaray suggests a connection with the Gascon word, eslurro, describing an earth fall or mud slide, or the collapse of a building, which in most cases would be caused by the action of water. He further follows J. Corominas (p. 111 in Tópica Hespérica II, Editorial Gredos, Madrid 1972) in connecting this with the Basque world lurra ‘(the) earth’. Consequently these words may have a common origin, all reflecting a root lurr-. Another suggestion concerns English agog ‘in a state of excitement, eager expectation.’ One may plausibly recognize here a prefix, a-, with the same meaning and function as in alive, aglitter, etc. This leaves a root gogo, which Sr. Echegaray compares to Basque gogo, a word with a rich range of meaning, such as ‘spirit, mind, soul, thought, desire, wish, will.’ Many of these would overlap with the sense of positive interest or expectation intrinsic to agog. Several authorities compare this English word to late Old French en gogues ‘mirthful,’ with plural of gogue ‘merriment, pleasantry,’ whose etymology is also obscure. Thus the Basque word may have been borrowed into French and thence into English. Incidentally, it seems likely that the English word go-go, as in go-go girls, may represent a more recent borrowing of this same Basque word. This reflects an extension of the name of a number of bars and nightclubs which had sprung up in France and Spain called by variants of Whiskey A-Go-Go (i.e., ‘whiskey to one’s desire’), apparently stemming from a famous club of this name in Biarritz. The question of a relationship between Basque lo or lo-lo ‘sleep’ and English lull and lullaby (also loll and Lollard) is also raised, to the extent that these are not merely imitative in origin. Sr. Echegaray also points out a possible indirect connection between the Basque word for ‘iron’ burni (also burdin) and English burnish ‘to polish (metal) by friction.’ In this case the Basque word would have been a borrowing from a pre-Roman Indo-European language, as it is clearly not derived from Spanish or Latin. English burnish is borrowed from a stem, burniss-, variant of Old French burnir, brunir, ‘to make brown, burnish,’ formed from brun ‘brown, shining,’ which in turn was borrowed from the Germanic word that is directly represented by English brown. This seems to reflect an Indo-European root meaning ‘brown, bright.’ Since technical objects or processes typically retain their original names as they are passed from one culture to another, this word may imply that the Basque first came into contact with iron from a pre-Roman Indo-European-speaking group. *A Spanish version of this etymological note was published by Sr. Echegaray in the Boletín de la Real Sociedad Vascongada de los Amigos del País XXXI: 1-2 (1975), pp. 273-274. |
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