Dos etimologías vascas: Txakur ‘perrito, perro’ y zakur ‘perro’ con un apéndice dedicado al análisis de la etimología de zakur de J. Lakarra

The following article explores the etymology of the Basque word zakur ‘dog’ and the palatalized form of the same txakur, often used today to refer to small dogs and dogs in a generic sense. Particular attention is paid to the question of the relationship between the latter term and Romance forms such as cacharro ‘puppy, young dog’. The study also examines the problems that arise from etymologies put forward in the past including the most recent one of the Basque philologist Joseba Lakarra, who derives the term zakur from a compound form that, according to him, originally meant ‘guardian agazapado’, i.e., ‘crouching guardian’. Over the past decade 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 rather unclear. In these articles a large number of new etymologies are introduced, including the one he dedicates to zakur, 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 by examining in detail the etymology of the term zakur and by doing so, 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. 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.