Vasconic words for “milk” (1): Basque galatz

Azkue lists the following:

galatz (B, Añ) “manteca de vacas; beurre de vache”, (B-a-o) “nata o tela de la vache; crème ou toile du lait”, (B, Ms Lond) “gordo, manteca del animal; graisse, partie grasse de l’animal”.

Azkue gives two further unrelated meanings, indicating that we are looking at three distinct homonyms. It is the first of these homonyms that concerns us here.

The range of meanings that Azkue provides is a little bit unclear (Azkue’s Spanish and French translations are not exact matches). However, they seem to centre of lard, butter and cream.

Butter is a post-agricultural product that probably arrived rather late on the scene. Lard is much older and possibly goes back to the early days of hunting mammals. It is therefore reasonable to surmise that “lard” is, if not the primary meaning of galatz, at least the older one.

Does Basque galatz have cognates in other Vasconic languages?

Almost certainly.

I can find no clear Iberian cognate, which is not surprising, because words for “lard” are unlikely to be found in anthroponyms and toponyms.

There does, however, appear to be a Pelasgian cognate. This is evidenced by Greek gala, galaktos “milk”, which is almost certainly a substrate loanword. The stem would appear to be gala, which is identical to galatz save for the omission of the sibilant suffix. When the word was Hellenised, -aktos was added in oblique forms, because Indo-European requires that words for “milk” are either masculine or neuter. They cannot end in /a/. I think that we can safely assume a Pelasgian *gala ”milk”.

Greek has not lost the Indo-European word for “milk”. That is retained as amelgein “to extract milk (from animals)”.

There is a pan-Vasconic word for “milk”, as we shall see in a subsequent post, and it is not the progenitor of galatz, *gala. Pelasgian *gala has very likely shifted its meaning from “lard” to “milk” in much the same way that Basque galatz had shifted its meaning from “lard” to “butter” and “cream”.

This semantic movement is confirmed when we look at possible cognates in other non-Vasconic Dene-Caucasian languages.

Consider the following (all cited by Starostin):

North Caucasian

Lak hal “a skin crease filled with fat” (I am not quite sure what that is)

Akusha ħaIli “fat”

Chiragh χIule “fat”

Tabasaran χIul “fat”

Agul X̀al “fat”

Burushaski

halél “fat”

Sino-Tibetan

Old Chinese  油 *Łu “oil”

The meaning, “fat”, seems to be reasonably consistent in all the reflexes cited, with the exception of Pelasgian *gala, where the meaning has shifted to “milk”. Perhaps the Pelasgians had a tendency to convert milk into a more viscous form (ie, yoghurt), and distinguished it from human milk by using a different word.

Note how the initial consonants on the non-Vasconic side are much softer than on the Vasconic side. That is quite unusual. Given that the lenis variants are more widespread than the fortis variants, it looks as if fortition was on the Vasconic side.