Medieval Basque Phonology through Hebrew Texts in Christian Spain: A Study of Basque Sibilants Written in Hebrew Aljamía

Abstract

The study of phonetics and phonology in the medieval period is particularly difficult, since the preserved text, which is an essential working tool, is not always as precise as we would like it to be. The task is even more complicated when we do research on an unwritten language as is the case of Basque in the medieval period. As the Basque language did not have its writing system at the time, it was written in Romance script, which not always matched Basque sounds. This study puts forward a new source of information that brings in new data. We will add knowledge to the study of medieval Basque phonology through Basque texts written with Hebrew script from manuscripts preserved in the General Archive of Navarre. We will also try to show that the use of the Hebrew alphabet in specific cases, such as the affricate-fricative contrast, can help to endorse trends in certain linguistic phenomena of the Basque language, hitherto intuited by other means.