alud

[Rick Mc Callister]

Could <alud> be from Iberian Arabic?
Is there such a form as al-lud?
Could it be related to lodo?
i.e. deformed by passing through Iberian Arabic?
My wife uses <alud> for "mudslide"
[which dictionaries agree with]
--also no snow in Costa Rica --
so a question for Miguel or whoever--
is it ever used in any part of Spain for [snow] avalanches?

>> alud "mudslide" 1880 pre-rom; [c]
>> rel. con vasco luta, lurte "desmoronamiento de tierras", [c]
>> v. lur "tierra", elur "nieve" [c]

>Basque <luta> ~ <lurta> ~ <lurte> `landslide, mudslide' is real enough,
>and is obviously a derivative of <lur> `earth'.  This has the regular
>combining form <lu-> in old formations, so the variants in <lur-> are
>probably recent re-formations.  It's not clear to me how the Basque word
>would give rise to Romance <alud>.  As for Basque <elur> `snow', this is
>hardly likely to be related to <lur>: there are major problems with the
>phonology, with the morphology, and with the semantics.

But if <alud> had a different origin, I could see how, in the Pyrenees,
<alud> and <luta> ~ <lurta> ~ <lurte> could have influenced one another
in the minds of bilingual speakers--but that's supposing a lot
OR the possibility that <luta> ~ <lurta> ~ <lurte> could be a "folk
etymology" of <alud> by Basque speakers --or is that too far out?