Repasando a Joseba Lakarra: Observaciones sobre algunas etimologías en euskera a partir de un acercamiento más cognitivo

Abstract: Over the past decade the Basque philologist Joseba Lakarra has published a series of articles in which he puts forward his reconstruction of an entity he calls Pre-Proto-Basque, whose exact referential time frame is still quite unclear. In these articles a large number of new etymologies are introduced along with a particular kind of methodology and theoretical basis for investigating them. While the material published by Lakarra is readily available on the web, there has been little critical discussion of its merits. The present study is an attempt to remedy this situation and at the same time to bring into focus the value of applying a more principled approach to the Basque data, one that derives it methodological and theoretical orientation from the field of cognitive linguistics, and more concretely from the emerging subfield of cultural linguistics, also known as ethnolinguistics. In a broad sense, the term cultural linguistics refers to linguistic research that explores the relationship between language and culture, bringing the sociocultural embedding and entrenchment of language into view and consequently charting the interactions of speakers of the language with their ever changing environment, the latter understood in the amplest sense of the term. Thus, cultural linguistics has a diachronic dimension as it attempts to understand language as a subsystem of culture and to examine how various language features reflect and embody culture over time. ‘Culture’ here is meant in the anthropological sense; that is, as a system of collective beliefs, worldviews, customs, traditions, social practices, as well as the values and norms shared by the members of the cultural group. Until very recently, there has been a dearth of research on the Basque language and culture that embraces the methodological and theoretical premises of the field of cognitive linguistics and the related sub-discipline of cultural linguistics. Outstanding exceptions have been the investigations carried out by Iraide Ibarretxe Antuñano (1). In short, very little research has been done on Euskera which takes into consideration the fact that the relationship between language and culture has significant implications for diachronic studies of the language: that language is a not only a system firmly grounded in culture, it is a macro-level system that through the individual choices of its agents at the micro-level, changes across time, dynamically. It functions therefore as a complex adaptive system (CAS) (2). This article is the first in a series.