Some questions

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kalemiye
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Some questions

Postby kalemiye » 2009-06-29, 22:24

Kaixo!

The other day Sean of the dead told me he was studying Basque and I tried to recall the few words of this language that I have heard from my grandma back in the day. I am not sure about the meaning of some of them.

Txirristra (sp? it sounded like that to me) meant tobogán as far as I recall, and it had it's own castilianized verb, which is "chirristrarse" (which I soon realized that was not understandable for my peers in the park, haha). Is it commonly used nowadays?

Another one I am not sure is something that sounded like "arrautxa", which I think means something like cojones in Spanish (due to the context in which I remember it), but I am not sure. I wonder if somebody has heard it and what its meaning is.

Thank you!
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arabarra
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Re: Some questions

Postby arabarra » 2009-06-30, 15:38

Hi renata!


Txirristra


the word you mean is "txirrista", which is interesting... It derives from "irrist" (slide down, "resbalar"). The beginning "tx-" gives the to "irrist", -a very unpleasant concept- a certain touch of fondness... I do use the word "txirrista" in Basque, but never heard "chirristrarse" (i find the word rather nice, though )

The other word is certainly "arraultzak", which is the plural of "egg", with all its polysemics...

cheers!

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loqu
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Re: Some questions

Postby loqu » 2009-09-19, 10:12

Ren, may I use your thread for my random question? :P

Well, while I was trying to sing along a song in Basque, I recalled the very original Basque distinction between z and s and rapidly went to see Wikipedia article on that.

But that made me think... every Iberian Romance language has a unique feature on voiced plosives, that get fricative or approximant between vowels. I mean B (originally [b], but becomes [β] between vowels), D ([d] -> [ð]) and G ([g] -> [ɣ]). I don't know where this comes from but I've always assumed some kind of Iberian substrate. Thus... being Basque the only Iberian language that is not from Romance origin... does it have also that feature? Or do voiced plosives remain always plosive no matter what context they're in?

Hope I've made myself clear.

And btw, Wikipedia does not say a single word on that.

Thanks!
Нека људи уживају у стварима.
Let people enjoy things.

Quevenois
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Re: Some questions

Postby Quevenois » 2009-09-19, 10:56

Ok.
Last edited by Quevenois on 2010-11-20, 2:45, edited 1 time in total.
אַ שפראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמײ און פֿלאָט

arabarra
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Re: Some questions

Postby arabarra » 2009-09-23, 7:34

I am exceptionally bad at understanding phonetics... Can you explain with examples in Castilian how they two different ¨g¨-s sound? I wasn't even aware, we had two :oops:


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