Ala ffede, bada! More new Basque texts from 16th-century judicial processes in Navarre

Abstract

The documentation of thousands of judicial processes between the 16th and the 19th centuries is kept in the Royal and General Archive of Navarre. It is written in Spanish, and scribes translated the testimonies of Basque monolingual speakers into Spanish to record them in writing. However, when necessary, within the Spanish translation, scribes sometimes provided witnesses’ words in Basque. In this work I have studied several short passages in Basque included in judicial processes from the end of the 16th century. Firstly, I have explained how and why such texts were produced. Afterwards, I have focused on the reliability and value those texts may have as data-sources for dialectology and historical linguistics. Then, I have edited and analysed the attestations from San Vicente, Arlegui, Pamplona and Ujue. Lastly, I have listed the linguistic features which appear in the passages, and provided a lexicon and a list of verbs.