abarca/abarka/alpargata

[Rick Mc Callister]

Does Basque -ar have a connection with Spanish -ar/-al?
<-al> --on the whole-- is a dialect form
[e.g. Central American <pinal>],
as well as an allophonic form /-al/
in dialects where final /-r > -l/
although there are certain forms that use /-al/ everywhere
/-ar/ is the more common form
Spanish -ar/-al is commonly used for groves of certain trees e.g.
pinar, pinal "pine grove"
mazanar "apple grove" [no apple trees in Central America, so no *manzanales]
naranjal "orange grove"

but oddly, a pear tree is a <peral>

other usages are
dineral "a shitload of money"
polvazal "dust devil, cloud of dust, pile of dust, dusty place, etc."

>[snip]

>An interesting proposal, put forward several times, sees <abar> as
>deriving from <habe>.  This word commonly means `pillar, column' today,
>but its earliest recorded sense is simply `tree'.  The key here is that
>Basque has a number of two-syllable nouns ending in a morph <-ar>, most
>of which denote things commonly encountered in bunches, and not
>individually, like <negar> `tears', <izar> `star', <sagar> `apple',
><ondar> `sand', `remains', <ilar> `peas', and others.  We have long
>suspected that this <-ar> might represent a fossilized collective
>suffix, and the suggestion here is that <abar> might derive from <habe>
>`tree' plus this *<-ar>.

[snip]