<chandro> and <andere>

[Larry Trask]

On Tue, 6 Apr 1999, roslyn frank wrote:

[on Spanish <chandro>]

> My assumption is that the expression
> <chandro> is derived from Euskera, as are many other odd expressions
> that pop up in these codes which are written in Spanish. To my
> knowledge, there is no alternate derivation for the term.

The word is unknown to me, and is not listed in Corominas, which last is
a little surprising.

> Moreover, the phonological reduction of <echekoandra> "the lady of the
> house" to *<chandra> with the resulting form being "masculinized" by
> replacement of the <-a> definite pronoun ending with the masculine
> ending <-o> from Romance seems fairly straight forward to me. However, I
> might be missing something.

Perhaps not so straightforward.  The medieval form of the word for `lady
of the house' will have been <etxekoanderea>, or at best <etxekoandrea>,
not *<etxekoandra>.  And it is not so easy to see how this could yield
the observed <chandro>, especially since the Basque word is so blatantly
and expressly female.  Why on earth choose the female term, instead of
the male counterpart <etxekojauna> `master of the house', especially
when most of the voting heads of household were male?

> On a related note: certainly we know that the compound
> <etxebarri>/<etxeberri> (also with the definite article in <etxebarria>
> and <etxeberria>) meaning "new-house", gave rise to a variety of
> surnames and first names in Spanish, ranging from the very obvious
> Spanish last name Echeverria to the more obscure first name "Xavier".
> The same house name became, for example, Dechepare and Chavert in
> French.

Not quite.  The name <Etxepare> (in French, <Dechepare>) is not related
to <Etxeberria>, but is a distinct formation.  The first element is
<etxe> `house', all right, but the second element is obscure.  Michelena
does not list this name in his etymological dictionary of Basque
surnames, but he does discuss it in one of his numerous articles.  I've
forgotten the details, but he rejects the seemingly obvious <pare>
`pair' in favor of -- I *think* -- a Basque borrowing of Romance
derivative of Latin <capitale> -- more or less *<gapare>, I think.

I'm also not sure that <Chavert> is the same name as <Etxeberria>.
Assuming the name is Basque at all, I wonder if it might not be a French
version of <Etxabertze> `other-house', another common Basque surname
with a number of variants.

> It seems to me that odder things have happened, e.g., Ximena
> (Jimena), the name of El Mio Cid's wife, deriving from <seme-enea> in
> Euskera which means "my (beloved> son." At least that is what one of my
> professors told me some years back.

I am not knowledgeable about Spanish personal names, but this etymology
looks deply suspect to me: `my son' for an expressly female name?
Anyway, this is only the female form of the common medieval male name
<Jimeno>.  This is of unknown origin: many have seen it as a form of
`Simon', though Menendez Pidal derives it from an unrecorded Latin name
*<Siminius>.

> Again in a marketplace town like medieval Burgos, stomping grounds of El
> Cid Campeador, it wouldn't be surprising to encounter this sort of thing
> either given that many of those living there and travelling through were
> probably bilingual in Castilian and Euskera. If I'm not mistaken the
> linguistic boundary at that time was a few kilometers north of the
> Montes de Oca just outside Burgos.

> In the 70's I spent seven summers teaching in Burgos and found quite a
> number of curious characteristics in the Spanish of the Burgaleses, many
> of whom had recently moved to the city from former Basque-speaking zones
> (that is from zones where Euskera was still spoken in the Middle Ages
> (help! Larry, with the exact boundary lines).

It is not generally possible to ascertain the southern boundary of
Basque with precision at any time before the mid-19th century.  There
were certainly Basque-speakers in Burgos after its annexation by the
Kingdom of Navarre in the 10th-11th centuries, but I don't think anyone
knows just how numerous they were or how long the language persisted in
Burgos.  Place names south of the Ebro are almost invariably Romance,
not Basque, though there were formerly several settlements with names
like <Villabascones> `Town of the Basques'.  Even north of the Ebro,
place names are mostly Romance today, though things were different in
1025, when the Reja de San Millan records a number of obviously Basque
place names in Alava.

By the time of the Castilian poet Berceo in the 13th century, the
boundary was probably more or less along the Ebro, though it is likely
that there was a zone of bilingualism.  Berceo, born just south of the
river, was a Castilian-speaker, but he clearly knew at least some
Basque, since he uses Basque words in his poetry.

It seems likely that Basque was still spoken in the vicinity of the city
of Vitoria in 1562, when Landucci compiled his dictionary, and it may
even still have been spoken in the city itself, though we have no good
evidence for this.

Today, of course, Basque is gone as a first language in the entire
province of Alava, save only for the little finger that pokes between
Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa, around the town of Ibarra (Spanish Aramaiona).

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk