Iberia

[Max Wheeler]

--On Monday, December 11, 2000 12:10 +0000 Larry Trask
<larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk> wrote:

> The most widespread Basque word for 'river' is <ibai>, or sometimes
> <hibai> on the French side.  This is pretty clearly a derivative of
> <ibar>, whose regular combining form is <iba->.

Some further curiosities w.r.t. Latin Iberia:

1. The preferred form for this root in Latin seems to be Hibêr-; Greek
texts seem to have /ibêr-/ (with smooth breathing) though Greek may well
have lost the phomeme /h/ by the time this word came to be recorded.

2. The range of Latin forms is very similar whether Spain or Georgia is
meant; in particular the morphologically somewhat unusual Hibêr (3rd
declension consonant stem) is used for 'an Iberian' in both senses.

3. There's a problem with the derivation  of the river-name Lat. (H)ibêrum
> Sp. Ebro, Cat. Ebre. In Latin the stress was on the second syllable (it
being heavy), but the Spanish and Catalan forms must go back to a form
stressed on the first syllable (with syncope of the posttonic vowel in an
open syllable). The Greek name of the river was Nom. *íbêr, Acc. íbêra
(Polybius 3.35.2) Gen. íbêros (Strabo III, 3.8) [The refs are those given
by Coromines Onomasticon Cataloniae s.v. Ebre.] I.e. the Greek form of the
name has the right stress to give Ebro/Ebre but the wrong inflection class.
(There's a problem too with the /b/ in Cat. Ebre; regular sound change
would give WCat. */ewre/; thus Catalan borrowing from some other
Hispano-Romance variety such as Mozarabic?). One must assume that the
proto-Romance form was distinct from that represented in Classical Latin or
Greek texts, viz. */'ibero/ or similar [NB it could be */ípero/, which
would give both Sp. Ebro and Cat. Ebre regularly]. It would be nice to
think that this is, or is a direct phonological/morphological adaptation
of, the form in some indigenous language, such as Iberian or
Hispano-Celtic. But the proto-form cannot be */íbaro/ since posttonic /a/
is not subject to Romance syncope.

4. It is possible that Greek íbêr means (1) an East (Georgian) Iberian, (2)
the river Ebro; while Latin Hibêr means either an East (Georgian) Iberian or
a West (Hispanic) Iberian, but not the river Ebro, which was named with the
adjective Hibêrus.

Max
____________________________________________________________
Max W. Wheeler
School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer
BRIGHTON BN1 9QH, G.B.

Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975 Fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 Email:
maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk
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