--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
> from Larry Trask, The History of Basque, 331
> "
> South of the watershed the names are overwhelmingly non-Basque. The
> major river here is of course the Ebro, whose name is the Spanish
> development of Iberus, the name given to this river by the Romans;
> this name is of course the source of the name Iberia, applied to the
> whole peninsula. There have been repeated efforts to relate this
> name to the Basque ibai 'river', but there is no evidence for Basque
> speech in the Ebro valley in Roman times. A few scholars have tried
> to claim for the word ibai some kind of ancient pan-European
> existence by imputing it to an early 'Mediterranean' or 'Old
> European' substrate, but convincing evidence for such a suggestion
> has not been forthcoming.
> "
>
> The latter would be my position.
>
> Torsten
In (Proto)Basque there are two words for river: uhalde (in Eastern
dialects), analyzed as ur-alde (=water-edge) and (Western) ibai,
assumed a derivative of ibar (=riverside, valley). (I'm not making
this up, I take it from Trask.) When I said that the present consensus
linked Ibe:ros to ibar I referred to ibar, not ibai. It may not be so
unreasonable to do so. Joan Coromines (a Basque specialist himself)
does it. In his Onomasticon Cataloniae (1995) he says: "It is by no
means mere idle hypothesizing to derive ibe:ros from the
Basque-Iberian ibar whence the (Roman-attested) Iberian adjective
ibarcensis, as Schuchard, Meyer-Lübke and Bertoldi all did. In that
case it would be the name of the Ibe:roi the one that would derive
from the name of the river, and not vice versa. I think it is likely"
(He actually says "I find it probable".)
I won't meddle with the authorised opinions of two experts in Basque
linguistic history, but I note that at the end of his life Coromines
said he had concluded that after all those years he couldn't make up
his mind as to the relation between those two ancient languages
(Protobasque and Iberian). He avowed he did know a lot about the first
a knowledge that allowed him to solve a lot of etymological riddles
satifactorily (including many placenames well south of the Ebro, as
far away, astonishingly, as Elvira in present-day Eastern
Andalusia!!) but virtually nothing about the second (it is still
awaiting decipherment). Coromines respected the conventional wisdom
among linguists according to which Basque and Iberian were different,
but he was very skeptic about this (note he often refers to
"Basque-Iberian"), and considered that verdict a thin belief rather
than established fact. By what I could attentively read between the
lines in Trask's later writings, I detected there this same kind of
skepicism, so that when you quote him saying "there is no evidence for
Basque speech in the Ebro valley in Roman times" I'm not sure Trask
wouldn't have later changed his mind and had come to doubt it himself,
like Coromines, who loudly expressed his incredulity. Lots of Iberian
and/or Basque place-names south of the Ebro have been found and
deciphered through Basque. Basque names have also been found in
territories not previously attributed to Basque (e.g. in the
non-standard, so to say Eastermost Pyrenees). At this time nobody
knows what the precise relation between the two languages were, so I
consider Coromines's "likely" likely, and both (late) men's doubts sound.
As to Lôpelmann (Etymologisches Wörterbuch der Baskischen Sprache) you
cite, his recourse to Phoenician at both ends (the Caucasus and the
Ebro) strikes me as a kind of Deus ex machina (or sleight of hands if
you prefer), and I find his "doubtless" (in "doubtlessly Phoenician")
doubtful, or at least "doubtable". [ BTW, if he happened to be
right, then we'd have a previously unsuspected link between Iberians
and Hebrews, as the latter were the apiru/ebiru/... (=those across the
border) in some Semitic (Canaanean?) language.]
I congratulate you for having a position. But for many of us, the jury
is still out (on the status of Iberian) and all options are open. . .
And, conceivably, ibe:ros can still can derive from Basque --or
"iber.", as Lôpelmann writes-- *ibar.
Cordially,
Ton Sales