Re: The City of Ravenna

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Alexandru Moeller <alxmoeller@...> wrote:

>
> I know there is no sure etymology about the name Ravenna in Italy and
> that some opinions are that the name of the city is of etruscan origin,
> some doubt about.
> I compared some details and I was a bit wondering to see that the name
> of Ravenna looks pretty appropiate to the Romanian Rovine(a place whose
> location is stil disputed since the historians knows that is was
> somewhere around the river Argesh but they don't know exactly where)
> Now, the name Rovine is not only phoneticaly appropiate to Ravenna but
> in its neighbourhood there is also the river which in antiquity was
> called Rhabon.
> Now, so far I remember the river Volga has too an ancient name and it
> was Rav ( or maybe is stil is the name Rav in the morvin language) and
> it is supposed to be cognate with scythian Rha which should be cognate
> with mithycal Sanskrit and Avestan rivers Rañha and Rasah..
>
> It can be there is a very big coincidence and the names are not related
> to each other but it can be there is a relation between these. The fact
> that there is an "-ine" in Romanian "Rovine" speaks for an double "nn"
> in the ancient times. *Rabenne/Rabenna could have been the form which
> yelded the Romanian "Rovine" ( *Ravenne>*Rãvîne>*Rovîne>Rovine). The
> vicinity of the ancient river Rhabon , the Italian Ravenna, the Rav
> river.. do we have here with some Indoeuropean denomination or it is
> maybe more older due its big geographical dispersal?

<Ravenna> resembles some Latinized Etruscan personal names, but both base and suffix are more likely Illyrian, specifically Japygian (by which I mean a pre-Italic IE language of northern and central Italy). The base appears to be an /i/-stem *rawi- meaning 'precipice, cliff, steep slope', etc. This word is found as <ravis> in medieval Latin documents and survives in some modern Italian dialects, e.g. Lucchese <rave> f. 'precipizio scosceso e dirupato, balza, roccia, dirupo', Laziale <ra:ve> f. 'roccia scoscesa'. Place-names <Ravi> and <Rave> are also attested. A related /a:/-stem *rawa: 'landslide, detritus, gravelly terrain' vel sim. was Latinized as <rava> and survives in Marchese <rava> 'dirupo', Abruzzese <ra:va> 'parete', Laziale <ra:va> 'roccia scoscesa'. Documentation is provided by J. Hubschmid, pp. 47-9, "Vorindogermanische und jüngere Wortschichten in den romanischen Mundarten der Ostalpen" (ZRPh 66:1-94, 1950). Italian river-names <Rava>, <Ravasecca>, <Ravennola>, etc., are documented by G. Serra, "Rava: (Ravenna): Ravennola" (StEtr 25:264-5, 1957).

The IE root is evidently *reu- 'to rush, hasten, fall' vel sim. found in Latin <ruere>, and Lucchese <ravina> 'precipizio formato dallo scavare delle acque, scoscendimento' can be regarded as continuing Illyrian *rawi:na:, cognate to Lat. <rui:na> 'downfall, rubbish, ruin'. Hubschmid, like Pokorny, tends to refer IE substratal words of this sort to "Veneto-Illyrian", but I think we can distinguish Venetic from Illyrian here. Historical Venetic has all five short vowels, but historical Messapic (the Illyrian of southeastern Italy) has only four, since */o/ fell together with /a/. Hubschmid's Alpine protoforms *rowa, *rowja, *rowi:ke, and *rówino- are Venetic, but *rawi- and *rawa:- are Illyrian. The river <Plavis> on Venetic land, now <Piave>, reflects the /o/-grade of IE *pleu-, and indicates that Paduan Venetic was superposed on an earlier Illyrian stratum.

The Avestan name of the Volga cannot be derived from IE *reu-. If, as you say, *Rabenna is a compatible protoform to Romanian <Rovine>, my first guess is that the latter is indeed identical in base and suffix to <Ravenna> in Italy, and was applied by Illyrians to a place near a prominent precipice. However, since I have not studied Romanian place-names in general, this is ONLY a guess.

DGK