Basque Surnames - Orthography

Orthography

During the medieval period Basque names were written broadly following the spelling conventions of the official languages of the day, usually Spanish and French.

The main differences lie in the way the relatively large number of Basque sibilants are spelled. These are especially hard to represent using French spelling conventions so on the whole, the French spelling of Basque words in general tends to be harder to reconcile with the modern spellings and the pronunciation. Also, vowel initial Basque surnames from the Northern Basque Country acquired an initial d (French de) in many cases, often obscuring the original Basque form e.g. Duhalt < de + uhalte ('the stream environs'), Dotchandabarats < de + otxandabaratz ('orchard of the female wolf'), Delouart < del + uharte ('between streams').

Since the introduction of Standard Basque and a common written standard, the number of non-indigenous spelling variants has begun to reduce, especially in Spain, taking on a form in accordance with the meaning of the surname in Basque, which remains irrelevant in other language spellings.

Note that in the French-based spellings the D is unhistoric and represents the French partitive particle d' "of".