R. L. (Larry) Trask died in March 2004 at the age of 59, leaving unfinished his Etymological Dictionary of Basque. In 2000 he had been awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust to support this project, to which he devoted much of his time between October 2001 and his death. As a colleague of Trask’s for nearly twenty-five years, now in retirement, I agreed, with the encouragement of other colleagues and of his widow, Jan Lock, to prepare and edit his unfinished typescript for web publication.
