Post Series: Hydrotoponymy

There are no alteuropäisch hydronyms. There are hydronyms attributable to Indo-European languages, which use the same roots and are extended with the same suffixes, that they develop regularly in their respective languages. Moreover, from that point of view, everything had to be necessarily alteuropäisch. If so, we should consider Indo-Iranian equally as an Alteuropäisch language if we take apa- ‘water’ or we can affirm that Latin dictionaries are the best source of existing alteuropäisch vocabulary (cf. mare, sal, navis, aurum, etc.). As for the Western Europe, there is no distinction between what is considered alteuropäisch and what is called celtic. The same roots and suffixes are used in the anthroponymic construction.

About the Hispanic West.

There has been no more Indo-European language than one, and this cannot come from Central Europe (a huge block of non-Indo-European languages, Basque-Aquitaine and Iberian, separate the Central-European Indo-European group from half Western Spanish). Its dating does not go beyond the Late Atlantic Bronze (1200-1000 BC), coinciding with the rise of the Phoenician trade, the birth of Tartesos, the arrival in the peninsular NE of the urnenfelderkultur that brings a non-Indo-European language (the Iberian) and “the warriors estelae” whose oldest exponents are located from the course of the Guadiana to NW Spain, and whose later cultural and linguistic contributions pass to the central areas of the Iberian Peninsula.

Its western settlement coincides with the necessary and abundant mineral resources (the large vein of gold that from the peninsular NW reaches the Guadiana, copper, lead and tin), in addition to controlling the waterways (all navigable) or the Atlantic maritime trade, which stretched from northern Europe to the Mediterranean.

It is precisely the Greek geographers and historiographers who from the sixth century B.C. distinguish these Indo-European people in the Hispanic West and we have fragments of their texts, which tell us about their expansion (from the center of the plinyan Lusitania, towards the Betica, the lands of the Berones and the peninsular NW), in Strabo, Pliny, Mela and Livy.

On the other hand, what I call the School of Salamanca and its adlateres, which uncritically follow the dogmatic precepts of A. Tovar and others proper nineteenth-century, and making infinite linguistic maps based on anthroponyms and theonyms to differentiate the Celtiberian and Lusitanian, have ignored what was very regular during this period: anthroponymic loans (which go beyond the toponymic field). I can’t give many examples until I publish my work, but the most common ones. Capara, a city that had its importance in Roman times, has been treated as a pre-celt voice (an empty concept where everything fits and in which speculation is too simple), however it corresponds to the Punic-Phoenician voice kpr ‘town, city’ or the anthroponym Malcenus, considered Indo-European, when it really comes from the Semitic sphere: mlk “king, noble, sir”, with examples in areas of Phoenician colonization in Hispania, e.g. Malcius. Others come from the Grece, such as the personal names Pentus and dvs. (equivalent to the Latin Quintus) or Apulus (celtiberian abulos), others are very popular personal name loans from Egypt: e.g. Paesica, Paesula, Paesuri (egipcian PN Παησια, Παήσις, Παησύλα, Παησεύρις from Pa-Ỉs.t) or lusitanian personal name Petobius (egipcian PN Πετοβις from Pȝ-dỉ-w) others from the anatolian or Iranian realm: e.g. Colupata; other Berbers, such as Bibalos and even Safaitic like Gautus (cf. ġt/Γαυτος).

As in other areas of the Roman Empire original personal names were created, and so the one considered pre-celta Paugenda, is nothing more than the vulgar realization of the Latin gerund of the verb pongo “recite poems” (cf. Terentius Varron: “Pala a pangendo. Lego: Pala a paugendo”).

In the Lusitanian inscriptions, all of them late (1st-2nd centuries AD), of which there is only factual evidence of three, in the Portuguese area, since the Spanish ones come from copies of the late 18th century and another one I consider false, in the blindness of differentiating this dialect with Celtiberian, the process of diglossia (identical to the process we currently suffer in this peninsular area) has not been taken into account. A clear example of Latinism is the term taurus, common even in Egypt or Gaul, where it coexists, as in Lusitania, with the term autochthonous tarvos. Others are voices coincident with the Celtiberian, such as the accusative singular lusitano oilam and the plural dative celtiberian oilobos, the accusative singular lusitano usseam, and the plural dative of the Galician deity Useis, the singular from Alava Useae, the Gaul deity Ussia or the Celtiberian place name usama (none of these comes from a Lycian voice that appears 1500 years from when the Lusitanian inscriptions are made, in addition to his more than dubious Ablaut).

The previous, at least in the West of the Iberian Peninsula, are pre-Indo-European voices (páramo, parra, pala, amorodo, etc., hydronymic finished in -r, etc.), of unknown origin, possibly Mediterranean.