Talk:Bidasoa

Basque Country (historical territory) reverted

I saw that the Basque Country link was turned into BC (autonomous community). This is not so, as the river comprises three administrative realities, it is mainly Navarrese, an only Basque Autonomous Comunity on the left bank at the low stretch of the river, but it is all the way Basque Country (historical territory). Iñaki LL (talk) 15:39, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

pronunciations wrong

3 pronunciations for 3 languages, all seemingly wrong. I'm tempted to "correct" them per the spelling, but is there something odd about this name? — kwami (talk) 07:24, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Basque should be [bidas̺oa]. The reason, Iñaki, is that the change of /b d g/ to /β ð ɣ/ a) does not occur word initially and it is also largely restricted to certain dialects of Bizakain and Gipuzkoan. As an over-regional pronunciation guide, we shouldn't aim for those dialectal pronunciations therefore. Good refs would be Hualde, José Ignacio Basque Phonology Routledge 1991 ISBN 0-415-05655-1 and Rebuschi, Georges Structure de l'énoncé an basque SELAF 1984 ISBN 2-85297-159-3. Akerbeltz (talk) 13:27, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Kaixo Kwami and Akerbeltz, Well, at this point I've seen quite a lot of different phonological alphabets and am quite confused frankly speaking. The fact that you Akerbeltz give Bidasoa as [bidas̺oa] quite baffles me. I must acknowledge my perception is half academic and half intuitive, but I don't think the d between vowels (and so b and g) can be represented as a fully-fledged voiced dental plosive, but as a dental fricative. In fact, the French speaking people hardly feel this d when pronounced in Basque or in Spanish, while in French it is perceived by us, the Basque (standard form) and the Spanish speaking people, as exaggerated and over-stressed, for example in Bidasoa. The /s/ in your phonological transcription is even more striking, since /s/ is the typical Basque "z", correct me if I'm wrong. Another point is that some phonetical characters can't be seen normally in the usual English or Spanish keyboard, I hope sth can be done about this, since I only see squares and not the proper characters. Regards Iñaki LL (talk) 22:07, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Hi there, Reverted some of the phonetic features Iñaki LL (talk) 22:24, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

Oops, you did post, sorry about my other edit. The thing is, intuition has little to do with this - if you check the literature (which i did) you'll see, as I posted above, that /β ð ɣ/ are dialectal. There's plenty of dialectal stuff in English that doesn't get transcribed in the phonetic transcriptions either. Orthographic s and z have fallen together in much of Gipuzkoa and some parts of Biscay but again, it's considered a dialectal feature. I don't see the problem. The display issue just means you're lacking a font with IPA extensions. Akerbeltz (talk) 23:25, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

O, here you are :), Well, I base my transcriptions (mistakenly?) pretty much in universal phonetic letters, such as /s/ for Basque "z" you know. I've looked more carefully into each language IPAs and as far as I see they are pretty individualized, like accepting in Basque IPA /z/ for what is universally knowns as /s/. I find this quite misleading (a /do'nostia/ transcription sounds to me /do'noztia/ in an English language article), but may I recognise, haven't read anything of Jose Ignacio Hualde's book on Basque phonology. If you check out the Bidasoa article you can be saying almost the same pronunciation in Basque and Spanish, but their corresponding transcriptions differ quite a lot, with the Spanish transcription sticking more to the true pronunciation (why are not there fricatives in the Basque IPA???). Don't think /β ð ɣ/ are dialectal, it is just the way it is pronounced in Basque (general, standard, check out Nafarroa Oinez's song in Bera back in the early 90s too), isn't the theory at the service of practice?;) As for the IPA extensions, anywhere to download from? Regards Iñaki LL (talk) 09:14, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Ok, where to start LOL. As a rule of thumb, when you transcribe a language into IPA, you distinguish phonemes, i.e. the sounds that mark distinctions in meaning in a language. Basque happens to have (at most) three sibilants, normally written s z x. Which is why the Batua spelling system has three letters for them but if you recall, there were big arguments about whether or not to write h and whether or not there should be s z x or just z x. In the end, they decided (quite sensibly) to be inclusive and use a system that was both historic to some extent and includes dialects that make these distinctions. So although in much of Gipuzkoa there is no s, you still write sagarra in Batua. The same applies to /β ð ɣ/. They are dialectal in Basque and I'm sorry if I have to re-iterate that what you think is not relevant. What counts is what published literature says about /b d g/ versus /β ð ɣ/ in Basque and the literature says that the phonemes are /b d g/ and that in some areas these happen to come out as /β ð ɣ/ between vowels. Which normally means that they'll still be written /b d g/ in a phonetic transcription unless you're transcribing a dialect pronunciation. It's very similar to the issue of whether or not to write r in phonetic transcriptions of English as some dialects have it and some don't.

The next question then is on how to write them in the IPA and because of their phonetic values, they are written as /s/ (for z), /ʃ/ (for x) and /s/ with a symbol underneath (for s) to indicate that in Basque this sound is made with the tip of the tongue, not the blade.

There are various fonts that will provide the symbols. You could look for Arial Unicode, Lucida Sans Unicode or DejaVu Sans/Serif. They're free and have the right code points. Akerbeltz (talk) 10:48, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

PS as for the song, that's not that meaningful. He will have sung in whatever was his dialect, not an over-regional standard. If you listen to someone from Iparralde, you'll not hear fricatives - that's exactly the point. In a way, we're dealing in IPA batuta, not Gipuzkeraren IPA. Akerbeltz (talk) 10:51, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Yeaa, that's insightful, thanks:). About phonology, what looks confusing is that in Spanish a fricative "d" (/ð/) appears in the charts (Spanish IPA), while it keeps being irrelevant for the phonology, don't think there's any meaningful opposition between d and ð in Spanish, it's just phonetics. The same goes for the Bidasoa article, while it holds true that in northern Basque dialects may not be pronounced the way I'm telling (fricative like in Gipuzkoa, Baztan,...)..., but isn't it because of the French influence? Looks like to me

As for the s - z thing, if /s/ keeps being Basque "z", it doesn't make sense either a /do'nostia/ transcription ("donoztia"), which is how it has appeared lately in my computer at least.

Didn't know that much about the Gipuzkoan not having "s", new input for my Euskara knowledge, hehe, it goes almost inperceptible

Thanks again for the codes Iñaki LL (talk) 11:29, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Ez horregatik! Now I'm no expert on Spanish phonology but I think the reason /ð/ (etc) are transcribed is because in Spanish it's obligatory to do that i.e. there is no Spanish dialect that has bodega as /bodega/, it's always /boðeɣa/, so that's the way it's transcribed. But if you take a Basque word like jadanik and went on a tour asking people how they say the word, you'd get /x j χ ɟ ʒ/ etc for the j and /d/ and /ð/ for the d - so usually one then aims for something that is over-regional, either by elevating one variant to the status of "over-regional" or by picking a historically underlying form etc. Which means that the IPA transcription is often "not quite what people in a certain area say" but that's the way it works.

I cannot say if it's French influence but I would say, based on the historical data and the fact that Navarrese dialects have /d/ too in some areas, it seems like /b d g/ are the historically underlying forms which got eroded to /β ð ɣ/ more easily in Hegoalde due to the impact of Spanish/Basque bilingualism. But that's an educated guess, not gospel.

No, the s in Donostia is /s̺/ (that's an s with a little square bracket underneath) - I just didn't write it out above because you said you were having problems seeing it. Put differently, /s1/ for z and /s2/ for s). The merger of s/z is old in Gipuzkoan and it's in part responsible for older spelling pairs like Euzkara/Euskara (Euzkadi was Goiri, but the spelling problem predates him). Akerbeltz (talk) 12:06, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Your words were coming back to my mind yesterday:), this s/z thing in Gipuzkoan... I realised you are talking about Bizkaian, aren't you? That's a feature of Bizkaian (may I add tz/ts too), pronunciations like "arratzalde on", etc. feel really strange to Gipuzkoans. It remains true that in dialectal fringe areas of Gipuzkoan (like Azpeitia) similar phenomenons take place. Cheers Iñaki LL (talk) 08:50, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, I was snowed under with non-Wiki stuff! You're right in the sense that it applies to virtually all dialects of Bizkaian but not all dialects of Gipuzkoan. I was just a bit too lazy to modify precisely. Akerbeltz (talk) 09:13, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

Don't worry, my last comment was a bit late for the current timing standards:) Yes, it is felt as a typical Bizkaian linguistic feature (didn't check out any books). Besides Azpeitia and other inland fringe areas of Gipuzkoan, the phenomenon applies to coastal areas (Zumaia, Zarautz, etc.) as far as I can remember. Iñaki LL (talk) 10:39, 4 June 2010 (UTC)