> > > > What would he say to Sp. vega?
> . . .
> Before you say one more word about Spanish vega, Portuguese veiga;
check out Corominas/Coromines and many others who shat oceans of ink
on this word.
> It's usually kinked to Bq ibaiko, as well as to ibarra. Since I
don't have any of that at hnnd, maybe Torsten can chisel out an OCD
copy :>
I don't like the tone in some of the postings lately, some people seem
to think I'm the group secretary.
p. 420-421
'Cast vega 'water meadow, fertile land beside a river' : Bq *ibaiko
(?) riverbank
Found in Castilian, Portuguese and Sardinian, vega is attested in
early texts as vajka and vayca, and hence scholars assume a pre-Latin
*baika as its source. The most strenuous attempts have been made to
relate it somehow to Basque ibai 'river', which, given the Sardinian
evidence, is assumed to represent a widespread pre-Latin word. But the
difficulties are severe. First, a derivation from ibai requires some
kind of suffix. Many have proposed a Basque *ibaiko, with the common
relational suffix -ko, meaning something like 'riverbank' or 'land
beside the river'. But no such word is attested in Basque, though the
formation would be unremarkable enough. Second, the suffix required
would appear to be *-ka, not -ko, but no such suffix of a relevant
meaning or function is known in Basque, and proposals that *-ka might
have been an ancient variant of -ko are supported by no evidence.
Third, a derivation involving ibai would require loss of the initial
i-; attempts by Corominas and Pascual (among others) to point to
parallels like the place-name Baigorri, from ibai gorri 'red river',
founder on the fact that such loss of initial vowels is almost
exclusively confined in Basque to proper names, as explained in
Chapter 3. Fourth, Basque has a perfectly good word or its own, ibar,
with (originally) the same meaning as vega, and it is not obvious why
Romance speakers should have borrowed a putative word with a different
meaning when one with the desired meaning was available. (It is clear
that Basque ibai and ibar are related somehow, since they show the
same pattern as Bizkaia and bizkar 'ridge of mountains', but the
nature of the word-formation process involved is obscure.)'
Torsten