ABSTRACT
Here is a simple example. Since the arrival of the Romans in the Basque Country just over 2000 years ago, Basque has borrowed thousands of words from Latin and Romance. However, the cereal names gari ‘wheat’, garagar ‘barley’, and olo ‘oats’ bear no relation to anything in Latin or Romance, and must be indigenous; we may therefore assume that these cereals were already known to the Basques before the Romans arrived. But we must be careful. Basque arto ‘maize, American corn’ is also an indigenous word, and a rash investigator might therefore conclude that maize too was known to the ancient Basques. But this is absurd, since maize is native to the Americas and was introduced into Europe only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this case, our historical records of Basque are adequate to explain what has happened. The word arto originally meant ‘millet’, which was formerly a major food crop among the Basques; since
the newly introduced maize proved to be much more suitable for the damp Basque climate than millet, the new crop virtually displaced the old one, and the name was transferred from millet to the somewhat similar-looking maize. Today the Basques call millet artatxiki ‘little arto’. But it is nonetheless millet, and not maize, which is the indigenous cereal. Such transfer of words from one referent to another is a constant stumbling block in evaluating lexical evidence for ancient cultures.
