--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Cuadrado" <dicoceltique@...> wrote:
>
> Does spanish river Ebre = Iber got something akin with Celtic or
> celtiberic ?
> Look at this :
> Celtic = Ibo = to drink
> Breton = Evit = You drink. Cornic Eva = To drink.
> Welsh Yfed = to absorb. Old Irish Ibid = You drink
> IE links : Falisc Pibafo = You drink. Latin Pibit He drinks and
> bibiere = To drink. Sanskrit Píbati = He drinks
>
> Celtic Inscription of Limé : « ibetis uciu. andecari biiete » =
> Drink this (you) and you'll be very kind
>
Frankly, I don't believe the name of the river has nothing to do with
the drink word. Until now the consensus favors the hypothesis that the
Greek Ibe:ros (stress on the i) --and Latin Ibe:rus (stress on the e,
as demanded by Latin secondary accentuation rules)-- derives from the
Basque ibar = valley, riverside. From here any further progress is
very difficult. Basque has had in historic times an extraordinary rate
of change, so it is often impossible to tell what a given word was
like in the Proto-Basque or Aquitanian stage (=later first millenium
BC). Neverteless, ibar is just one of the very few words we can be
very confident that have remained as they were in Roman times, so that
we can admit that, if the explorers/colonisers from the West borrowed
the term from Basque/Iberian-speaking natives, the name they gave the
river when they found and named it was, most probably, just ibar
(probably misheard and adapted, by fronting and lengthening the second
vowel).
Another question is where ibar comes from. For this, no Basque
specialist has any answer so far. If you propose, as you seem to do,
that it may derive from a Celtic language (where p- > zero) the
chances you're on something are few. To this day, all Celtic-sounding
names that have been tried in Basque as loans either north- or
south-bound --and quite a few have been-- have finally resulted in
disappointments: they were either coincidences or unexplained (and
non-IE) substrate words shared by both Celts and Basques. Another
possibility is that we may be dealing with one of the well-documented
celticisms imported into Basque through Latin, but this is definitely
NOT the case of the ibar/iberos placename, if only for chronological
reasons. The only avenue left to explore is, perhaps, that ibe:r- (or
something similar: I mean the word after which Ibe:ros was patterned)
may be actually a Celtiberian term. But I don't think this may be the
case either. Apart from going against the current consensus (though
this shouldn't be a reason for not connsidering it), the fact is that
Celtiberian tribes were settled a long way upriver, not at the coast
where the Greco-Romans first met the river (which BTW at that time
drained into the sea at Dertosa --now inland-- directly from a
canyon-type valley and was not yet adorned with the present [15th c.]
delta).
Ton Sales, from Barcelona