abarca/abarka/alpargata

[Rick Mc Callister]

>> abarca "sandal" s. X < pre-rom. [c]
>> rel. con vasco abarka; raíz de alpargata [sandal] [c]
>> pre-Romance, Basque origin [abi, wje]

>Basque <abarka> denotes a kind of rustic sandal, traditionally a soft
>leather moccasin held on by a cord passed through holes in the sandal
>and wrapped around the calf.  The word is very probably native, but
>cannot be monomorphemic, with that plosive in the third syllable.
>The favorite guess sees it as a formation involving <abar> `branch(es)'
>and a noun-forming suffix <-ka>.  This is semantically awkward, and
>seems to require that ancestral abarkas were made of foliage -- not very
>comfortable, I would have thought.

	maybe from cord made from pliable bark of branches? would that work?

>Words of somewhat similar form and sense are found in Ibero-Romance and
>in Iberian Arabic.  There has long been a debate as to just how all
>these words are related.  Spanish <alpargata> appears to show the Arabic
>article, but the Arabic word itself might be borrowed either from
>Romance or from Basque.

	The problem with <alpargata> is the /p/ which, of course, doesn't
exist in Standard Arabic--but I don't whether Andalusian Arabic may have
allowed it or not. There are words, though, with al-p- associated with
Andalusian toponymy,etc.; e.g. the Alpujarras [sp?] and others that escape
me now.
	Maybe someone else can help explain this