Mailegatze morfologikoa eta generoa euskaraz
ISSN: 0046-435X
Year of publication: 2019
Year: 51
Issue: 127
Pages: 229-248
Type: Article
More publications in: Fontes linguae vasconum: Studia et documenta
Abstract
Due to the long-term situation of intensive contact, Basque has borrowed a number of morphemes from Latin and Romance languages. Whilst certain varieties show an incipient inflectional distinction of gender as a result of the borrowing of lexical pairs ended in -o/-a, Eastern Basque has to a certain extent acquired a derivational gender distinction by means of the Romance-origin suffix -sa. Based on a corpus of historical Souletin, in this paper we analyse the occurrences of the morpheme -sa. Moreover, we will show that present-day Eastern Basque speakers continue to use -sa as a productive suffix, despite the fact that the Royal Academy of the Basque Language has advised against it.