An assessment of the Basque Interpretation Hypothesis on the inscription contained in the hand of Irulegi

Abstract

The present article assesses the Basque Interpretation Hypothesis (BIH) of the text contained in the hand of Irulegi. Given that the basic premise of the BIH is the alleged cognacy between sorion and the Basque collocation zori on ‘good fortune’, this article examines the phonetic evolution of other lexicalized adjective phrases with on as a head. The comparative method is applied, by comparing two strings of segments that belong by hypothesis to the same language but represent two diachronic states of the same phrase. The resulting evidence is inconclusive as to whether the compared items belong to the same language, and the Basque ascription of the text is consequently not confirmed.

Keywords

• hand of Irulegi
• on ‘good’
• adjective phrases
• lexicalization
• comparative method