Re[2]: [tied] sabrina river

At 2:38:01 PM on Monday, October 9, 2006, Piotr Gasiorowski
wrote:

> On 2006-10-08 18:08, Cuadrado wrote:

>> Hello does any opportunity to connect the river Name
>> Sabrina (Severn) with tribe celtic name : Abr-incate from
>> Cotentin (France) Sabr- = Abr- is aquatic name ?
>>

> I don't think they can be connected. The river-name
> contains the Celtic element *sab- (*sab-ro-). The initial
> *s- has become /h/ in Brittonic, but was still a sibilant
> at the time the Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain (Mod.Wel.
> Hafren but OE Sæfern);

Watts, The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names, puts
Brit. *s- > /h/ in the mid-6th c. and the arrival of the
English in 577. He thinks it unlikely that they'd have
heard anything but /h/ pronunciations and suggests that it
was important enough that they'd probably heard of it rather
earlier.

> the old pronunciation has also been preserved in the
> Latinised form. There are quite a few Gaulish river-names
> and toponyms in <Sab-> on the continent, and there's OIr.
> Sabrann (the old name of the River Lee/An Laoi in County
> Cork), but the meaning and further etymology of this
> element are uncertain (Pokorny's guess that *sab- is a
> variant of *sap- 'taste, peerceive' is not very
> convincing). In Gaulish, the /s/ would not have been lost.

Watts suggests a pre-IE *sab- 'liquid', taken into Celtic
with an r-extension and the regular Celtic suffix *-ina:.

Brian