Talk:Old European hydronymy

many big european rivers have similar names

reno rhein rhône

-roDANo -eriDANo(pò) -DANubio -DoN -DNieper -DNiestr -DviNa west -DviNa north -DriNa -Drava -oder/oDra

little rivers -meDuNa .... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.53.48.244 (talk) 17:32, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

BC to BCE: get with the Zeitgeist!
As this article is neither thematically Christocentric nor theological in tone or Worldview, the inclusive BCE convention has been standardized throughout as has been common in the revisionist bastion of the Ivory Tower for over 30 years.

Walking my talk in Beauty

B9 hummingbird hovering (talk • contribs) 23:53, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
 * no. see Eras. dab (𒁳) 07:41, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Paragaph Structure
The paragraph "Old European river names are found in the Baltic and southern Scandinavia, in Central Europe, France, the British Isles, and the Iberian and Italian peninsulas. Notably exempt are the Balkans and Greece, as well as the Eastern European parts associated with Slavic settlement. This area is associated with the spread of the later "Western" Indo-European dialects, the Celtic, Italic, Germanic, Baltic and Illyrian branches." doesn't read well. Surely the sentence beginning "This area is associated..." applies to the first sentence, rather than the second, as implied by the current structure?Gabhala (talk) 00:42, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

European hydronymy
If the hydronyms were Indo-European, then the oldest reconstructed stratum would be Proto-Indo-European. But the oldest stratum could be Pre-Indo-European (non-Indo-European), in which case the hydronyms themselves are not Indo-European.

Orczar (talk) 04:57, 8 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Krahe and Kitson say the Old European Hydrynomy is Indo-European - see their references cited in the text.Jembana (talk) 21:52, 9 June 2011 (UTC)
 * ...from Kitson's abstract:

"The Indo-Europeanness of alteuropäisch river-names is upheld emphatically, with a critique of Venne-mann's (1994) contrary arguments. Its Common (not just western) Indo-European origin is emphasized, yielding rational explanations for such features as the frequency of the vowel a."Jembana (talk) 21:56, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

I read Vennemann's Europa Vasconica: his critique of Krahe's theory is not based on the frequency of initial a. This is just an element, and certainly not the central one. The central argument he makes is that the language of OEH is agglutinative as the analysis of the suffixations show the language to be prevocalising. Just a look at Krahe's table is enough to make the point clear (see Vennemann's Europa Vasconica p. 147-154). Hispanist have proved that Vennemann's theory that the language was an ancient form of Basque is wrong as ancient Basque was not agglutinative and had no initial as. They acknowledge though that this language was not IE as it was certainly agglutinative.Aldrasto11 (talk) 00:29, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

Dodder
Is the river Dodder in Ireland linguistically related to the other rivers named? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.97.225.239 (talk) 21:47, 9 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't even see a passing resemblance with the names listed in the article. I mean, they have a form like d-(u/o)-r-(a) – how do you fit Dodder in there? Well, it could be a reduplicated form like *do-dor- or *du-dur-, but that's only a jocular and completely ad hoc guess I just came up with. More seriously, the Irish name seems to be An Dothra, which suggests an ancient Celtic form *Dutro-/*Dutrā- or whatever, still leaving the second alveolar consonant to explain. Sorry, even within a shoddy methodical framework like here, this connection doesn't fit at all. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:31, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

Disputed statement
The *du(b)r element is also listed at Celtic toponymy. It obviously cannot be both Celtic and Pre-Celtic. Noting OI dobur and W dwfr, this is just the normal word for water in the Celtic languages: the most that can be being argued for is a non-IE substrate in Celtic. Added to this, the reference given is very old (1935), and it is trivially easy to find modern references deriving *dubr from PIE *dheub- (on a related issue, I find the inclusion of Eder and Oder on this list extremely unconvincing, as they seem to be reflecting something like *h3od-, or maybe *wed-). In short, this simply isn't a very good example of Old European hydronymy, and I am inclined to remove it from this article. 𝐨𝐱𝐲𝐩𝐡𝐞𝐧𝐵𝑈𝑇𝐴𝑍𝑂𝑁𝐸 ⓊⓉ 12:00, 29 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Agree, remove it.Jembana (talk) 20:48, 29 February 2012 (UTC)


 * You could as well remove them all. I've never encountered any examples that were not horrible, and the list is very representative of the state of the "art". --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:35, 18 May 2012 (UTC)


 * I will remove this example, Parsons 2010 pages 179-180 in Celtic from the West states that it is unequivocally Celtic with numerous example and a map to prove the point plus citations from River 1980 and Sims-Williams 2006. The assertion that it is pre-Celtic is a nonsense that can't be maintained - there are numerous references backing up what user Oxyphenbutazone has written above.Jembana (talk) 12:32, 17 August 2012 (UTC)


 * The issue is more complex than it looks at first. The root *dur may well look IE (and yes alsoCeltic) but it is also certainly non IE, i.e. substrate. Considering it Celtic leads to impossible consequences.Aldrasto11 (talk) 01:58, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Balkans and Slavic excluded?
I find this assertion incorrect. There are many hydronyms pertaining to OEH in those areas. Sava, Drava, Vistola, Tana,  Tamar, Timis, Derventa, Drina, Abon (Rumania), Ibar, Sana, Samara, not to mention other toponyms. How should we interpret the text of the article? Is it a mistake of Krahe's who contradicts himself ?Aldrasto11 (talk) 13:37, 25 July 2012 (UTC)


 * The comments from the three editors above have been verified as correct - using Dur- as a pre-Celtic example has to be removed, it is plainly Celtic.Jembana (talk) 12:34, 17 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Thank you for replying, but your remark does not seem to be relevant to the questions I posed. At most it may concern hydronyms which have the root Dur, although also on these cases it does not address the issue of the agglutinative nature of the language. As I wrote above please just have a look at Krahe's tables given in Vennemann's article (available online).Aldrasto11 (talk) 01:35, 20 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Most scholars I have read classify the language as Indo-European and therefore inflectional not agglutinative. You seem to be supporting a minority point of view - Theo Vennemann's theories have been criticised as seriously flawed. In particular, his theories about Pictish and a Vasconic substatum were seen as based on an unlikely etymologies and it seems a lack of the pre-requisite in-depth knowledge of the Celtic languages. That said, his theory about the substatum influence of Celtic languages on the early development of English has gained wide acceptance so we shouldn't discard all his ideas just the ones where there is a more plausible explanation.Jembana (talk) 04:03, 20 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Thank you for the reply. I will discuss this point in more detail below. The issue of the nature (agglutinative vs. inflectional) of this language must be decided through the analysis of the formants, i.e. the way they are added to the root must show whether  they are IE or not. This is the central argument made by Vennemann and as far as i know none has been able to counter it. I 'll be back later.Aldrasto11 (talk) 03:06, 21 August

2012 (UTC)

While roots such as *dur, *av and even *is may be regarded as IE, it is obvious that almost all the other ones are not. The efforts made by hispanists to prove that *sar is IE look contrived. *ar is certainly not IE: just to cite two of the most productive. The fact that they are not inflectional is apparent if one looks at the suffixation without prejuduce. No known IE language may have created words in that way. Vennemann has a table at p. 155 that shows they are added irrespective of position inside the word, i.e. the same suffix may precede or follow another one. But I think everybody using the two tables by Krahe 1964 p. 62 and especially at p.63 (reproduced by Vennemann at p. 149-150 of Europa Vasconica) can see by himself that the suffixes (apart from the issue of their constitutive phonemes) may be added in a remarkably unconstrained and repetitive way and will come to the conclusion that this/these language(s) were not IE. So going back to *dur: while it looks IE/Celtic it is used as the stem of words which cannot be IE. Moreover the area of distribution of the toponyms does not tally with the areas historically inhabited by Celts. Unless one wants to think that all Europe and the ME were at one time settled by Celts. And we risk the absurd. Aldrasto11 (talk) 05:38, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

As I see it the issue is complex and probably unsoluble. E.g. words rooted in a stem such as Alb- (Alba, Albion/ium, Albula/ela, Albona, Albinia, Albaro/a, Albantia)  may well have been formed upon a previous Al-awa, as hispanists acknowldge for their Spanish Alba. This makes attempts to interpret it on the basis of IE *alb/alp white impossible. Same stands for words rooted in Arg- (Argantia, Argentera, Argua, Arguna): are they from IE *arg for whitish, brilliant or are formed on the substrate root *ar (valley as in Arno river of Florence from ar-anos or Aran Valley meaning cave) +ga (just as Gargano Italy, Gargaso Asia Minor from *gar-ga-no/so)? One can go on with Almos (e.g. cited as the stream south of the Aventine in Rome in a IE dictionary) which may be seen as from IE *al nourish or from a substarte *al river, one of the most productive. And so on.

One root that cannot be IE is *teb/tib which has given Tiberis, Tibur a town of ancient Latium and Tibures a tribe of the ancient Asturias and the name Tiberius or Tevaries. This seems to be a root meaning hill or perhaps oakwood since has given also Tifata a mount in Campania and one of the curiae of ancient Rome. Aldrasto11 (talk) 05:37, 24 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Regarding the distribution of Duro- and -duro- from ancient Europe, Parson's map on page 180 of His chapter in Celtic from the West show that the distribution is almost an exact match with Celtic areas (shown by other place names to be Celtic): north, central and alpine France, Central Europe, Belgium, southern Britain and north-central Iberian Peninsula - refer to Sims-Williams's maps of ancient Celtic place names for more details (available free on-line if you have lots of bandwidth to zoom).Jembana (talk) 00:15, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

The maps reproduced here are largely insufficient and do not match Krahe's tables. I have no time now but I could easily give instances of names in the Balkans and in Greece. As for *dur- too I would say that this list is not exhaustive.Aldrasto11 (talk) 09:56, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

That there are instances of the hydronymic root *dur outside the Celtic area is proved by two cases Dra'a and Daoura in Morocco (cited as an instance of *dur in an article by Moreno Mitrovic "Onomastic Structures" p. 17).

I think these two passages are very relevant to the issue:

"Desde el punto di vista romanico, todas las palabras prerromanas de los territorios donde antes de la expansion latina solo se hablaban los dialectos celticos son palabras celtas; pero no todas estas palabras son de origen indoeuropeo; algunas son anteriores a llegada de los pueblos  arios; hay muchas palabras consideredas celticas atestiguadas tambien en lugares donde en epoca prerromana se hablaban otras lenguas  no latinas, pero tampoco celticas, ni siquera indoeuropeas; lugares como los pireneos, por ejemplo; estas palabras o han sido lievadas alli por los celtas o proceden de lenguas anteriores no indoeuropeas."

Antonio Llorente Maldonado de Guevara "Las"Palabras pirenaicas de origen prerromano" de J. Hubschmid, y su importancia para la Linguistica peninsular" in Archivio de Filologia Aragones VIII-IX 1955 p. 129 (A. Llorente Maldonado summarises Hubschmid's article "Pyrenaenworter vorromanisches Ursprung und das vorromanische Substrat der Alpen" in Acta Salmanticensia  Serie de  Filosofia y Letras VII.2  1954)

Another relevant remark from Wilhelm Giese's review of Hubschmid's book Sardische Studien Bern 1953: "A Celtic word can be considered of IE source only if it is known its parent word in other IE languages. Some Preceltic words have been diffused by means of Gallic. In the Celtic languages of the islands there are Preceltic elements taken up from the Preceltic dwellers (esp. in Irish); it is though important to acknowledge that the respective Celtic peoples may have borrowed words when they were still living on the continent, and that these may be common with Gallic."

In fact it was Hubschmid and not Vennemann who first studied the substrates in toponymy, and proposed three or more substrates in Western Europe, including Berber and Hispanic (Protovasconic) in his works of 1951 and 1953. He also said the occurrence of ethnonym Iberes and potamonym Aragos in the Caucasus cannot be coincidental (ibidem p. 143).

Aldrasto11 (talk) 16:23, 22 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Just for the record: Celtic duro- "fort" (attested in Endlicher's glossary as doro "entry, door") is clearly identical with Germanic *dura- "gate, large door" (whence Old English dor and German Tor), and features the zero-grade variant of PIE *dʰwer-.
 * As for the observation that hydronyms starting with dr- and daour- exist in Morocco – so what? If that's your standard, the Old European hydronymy is global, because I'm sure hydronyms with d and r can be found throughout the world ... very amusing argument. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 13:21, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

A. Moralejo Laso and G. Alessio on Tamaris
...apelativos por Hubschmid, como en Lugo tamaro monton grande de tierra corrida a consecuencia de las lluvias, y tamara cembo, en cuya base presume para todos este autor la presencia del sufijo prerromano de gandara, comaro etc., bien que sin afirmar  su identitad de origen,

El mismo Hubschmid...quiere partir como base de un tema verbal prerromano *tam- resbalar, fluir, que acaso se remonte a la raiz  ide. *ta/*te- fundirse, disolverse ..., y cuya significacion se presta a dar hidronimos. W. Nicolaisen en su estudio Die alteuropǎischen Gewǎssernamen der britischen Hauptinsel (donde) enumera varias series de derivados de temas de la misma raiz, la mayoria britanicos, y en cuanto a su procedencia etnica recoge la opinion de Krahe y de Pokorny que tenian por ilirios por lo menos a los derivados  con -m-; pero con dudas e inclinandose a favor  de un estrato "europeo antiguo" predialectal. Lo que no deja de parecer un poco sorprendente es su ausencia en territorio de la Galia y otros celticos de Europa, cosa que parece argǔir contra este origen.

Per Tamari (bonifica) di Lecce e' da tener presente, oltre Tamarus flumen (Tammaro), anche il siculo Damyrias fl. e, piu' lontano, i preceltici Tamaris, Tamesis (Tamigi, Thames), che ci riportano forse ad un radicale *tam- "argilla" (clay) e all ' etrusco thamce "aedificavit". From: "Genti e favelle dell' antica Apulia" in ''Arch. Stor. Pugliese'' II 1 1949 p. 16-17. Anche Studi Etruschi X p. 189 e n.Aldrasto11 (talk) 00:52, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

Apart from the groundbreaking work by Moreno Mitrovic' "Onomastic structures", which puts for the first time in the right epistemological and methodological perspective the study of ancient European, til then prone to the laxitude which had brought about the Indo European reductionism of the Celticists in recent years, here is now a new contribution by British researchers:

LONDON: For the first time ever, European and Asian languages spoken by billions of people today have been traced back to a single mother tongue as old as the Ice Age. Researchers from Britain's University of Reading have found that our Ice Age ancestors used some words in common with us, such as "you", "mother" and "fire". These words now point to the existence of a linguistic super-family that unites seven major language families of Eurasia: Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, Dravidian, Chuckchee-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut The research traced a set of common words back in time further than ever before to identify the origins of Eurasian languages to a time nearly 15,000 years ago, and corresponding to the end of the last Ice Age.

It is amply provable that the language of hydronymy was not Proto Indo European, but an ancestor language of it. See the potamonyms beginning with letters dr and nahr which are common to Berber Arabic and South Indian languages, sav sov with Uralic and Sami etc.

In the end the school of the Mediterranean sostrate was proved right. Names such as those rooted in *mal- cannot be simply sent to IE *mel or in *kar/gar sent to IE *ger, *tam with *ta with some jump of imagination and sleight of hands by indoeuropeanists.Aldrasto11 (talk) 04:03, 20 June 2013 (UTC)


 * Your triumphance is very premature. This super-family business is pseudo-linguistics. As the article points out, Untermann and de Hoz have criticised the whole idea of a single language behind the hydronymy, to which I might add Petri Kallio in 2003 and recently Piotr Gąsiorowski, and I have mentioned to Mallory the main problem, to which he agreed emphatically: if you subtract roots such as drav-, nid-, arg-, dub-, alb-, dur- (being plausibly explainable as IE) and the suffix -antia, a patent adaptation to Latin of the Ancient Celtic ending *-antī as in Brigantia for *Brigantī, the residue you're left with is so generic that it could be anything: pure CV-syllables, no consonant clusters at all, /p/, /t/, /k/, /s/, /m/, /n/, /l/, /r/, /v ~ w/, /j/, and the vowels /a/ (by far the most frequent one), /i/ (frequent, but less so), /u/ (occasionally found), /e/ and /o/ (rare if present at all). That's not a language, that's a mere artifact achieved by filtering names through several layers of languages until only the most common phonemes and phonotactic patterns and structures remain. "Old European hydronymy" is so unspecific and vague a concept that it is empty and methodically useless, as Gąsiorowski emphasises. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 23:16, 22 June 2013 (UTC)


 * Thank you for commenting. Yes I do agree there is no certainty about a common language, it is just a possibilty. And there may exist a layering of many different substrates. What I disagree is that indoeuropeanists seem not to realize that indoeuropean languages were just carriers of material from previous layers they inherited. I read what Villar, Moralejo, Bascuas wrote, everything is explained through Celtic and this is patently wrong as the same names are found in southern Italy and Romania: Tamaris in Galicia, Tammaro and Tammarecchia in Campania, Tamasul, Tamasesti, Tamaseni, Tamau, Tamasoiu in Romania. It would be difficult to argue that roots like *mal (Tamil malei mountain), *nar/*ner/nir in Arabic naher river, south Indian languages water, in Spain, Italy, Romania too there rivers such as Nera (anc. Umbrian Nahar), are unrelated and/or are IE. As for *alb and *al they are certainly not IE originally as in Basque alba is steep cote. If Kobler writes in his dictionary that the Almus near the Aventine is an instance of IE *al to nourish I am amazed at such a methodologically careless approach. In this way one can explain not only ancient hydronymy with PIE, but all the languages of the world. Draa in Morocco, Sob in Siberia, Saap in Cambodia, Son in Vietnam, Sawaria in Thailand. Are they Celtic? But they may be in some cases borrowed from Sanscrit. Moreover these roots show a distinct meaning: *mal in Maloeis old name of Maleventum/Beneventum always means mount, high place as in Malmedy Belgium and compare Montmedy, France a clear calque; and there is an ancient name Malamantus fl. now in Pakistan (from Villar "El Garuna y sus iguales"); la Magliana a suburb of Rome (where the temple of Dea Dia of the Fratres Arvales is located) is named from the hill above. There are various Strona fl. in Italy (in the Alps) and a Struna fl. in Lithuania, many instances in Romania and Sweden too. Root *mat too in Mons Matinus, Tiora Matiena (the old hometown of the Aborigenes), Matese plateau, Mattinata: Matiena is clearly a Basque formation, see J. Caro Baroja "Toponimos aragoneses" (online). Mendi: as in Basque it always means rocky area: Mendiculeia in Lucania and Mendatica in Liguria settlements in the mounts (other similar in the Pyreneans). *ar always means valley. Cfr. Lake Aral, Aran Valley, Arno river. Clanis always means river and swamp: Chiana in Tuscany, Glan, Glama in Sweden, Glen in Scotland. Thank you for the link, interesting Londobris. As for *is to argue it means move vigourously is not well grounded semantically: as I have said one could always find an ad hoc IE root looking up in Pokorny. But Isente in Campania shows that the root means just water, i. e. rich in water.Aldrasto11 (talk) 05:07, 25 June 2013 (UTC)
 * The crucial methodological problem of this approach is, however, that your non-IE etymologies are even more ad hoc because they operate with unanalysed roots from unknown languages employed to explain names with unknown meanings (obscurum per obscurius), while the Celtic lexemes and IE roots are well-known, so we are on vastly safer ground. Moreover, it is vastly preferrable to explain names in historically Celtic areas with Celtic etymologies rather than speculate about far less obvious possibilities. Your insistence that similar-sounding names always mean the same is unwarranted to the extreme. Coincidences are statistically so likely in this area as to be guaranteed, especially where names have been filtered and distorted through so many linguistic layers – even if the meanings were known with certainty (Basque mendi vs. Latin mons, both "mountain", is one of these coincidences; the Basque word was originally *bendi, which throws a wrench into your etymologies, too). You are committing a gross non sequitur by adducing examples from non-Celtic areas to contest the Celtic etymologies in Celtic areas. As alternative to IE etymologies, you can only offer speculation. Check Larry Trask's Etymological Dictionary of Basque to understand why I'm not impressed by your proposals, including your spurious alba, which is really albo "side, flank" – nothing about "steep" or "mountain". I much prefer the explanation Delamarre gives for albion- in his Dictionnaire de la language gauloise, especially considering that Old High German Albūn (nom./acc. pl.), alpeōm (dat. pl.) reflects *albiōn- too, making it likely a loan from Celtic (via Romance?), with Latin Alpēs perhaps filtered through Raetic or Etruscan. Since *albʰós "white" is a well-attested IE lexeme, toponyms such as Albania are not really problematic, and Caucasian Albania is really Alwania anyway, so unconnected, just in case you were wondering. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 00:55, 9 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Not always unknown: the southern Indian languages (cfr. The word νερ?ν is listed in Glossarium Graeco-barbarum (1614) of Johannes Meursius,page. 365.Phrynicus the Bythenian (2 A.D) in his ΦΡΥΝΙΧΟΥ ΕΚΛΟΓΗ (see PHRYNICHI EKLOGAE NOMINUM ET VERBORUM ATTICORUM, LIPSIAE 1820) advises against calling υδωρ νηρον (fresh) used here as an adjective qualifing the word water:?Νηρ?ν ?δωρ μη ε?πη?, αλλ? πρ?σφατον, ακραιφν??? (page 42). In northern dialects of modern Greek it IS pronounced niro 'νιρ?'.In Thrace and Asia Minor in some places it was pronounced νιαρ? .In Ioannina and Grevena νιρο? and in the island of Lemnos νερο?.Note that Lemnos is the island where an inscription in an unknown language thought by some to be connected with Etruscan,was found.The ancient pronounciaton of 'η' was something like a long 'ε'.Pontic greek has retained the original pronounciation of η.e.g πεγ?δι,well, instead of standard greek pigadi πηγ?δι.However,the word nero νερ? might be vulgar greek,a loanword from other languages, since ancient times.It can be a direct loan from Etruscan neri or some other pregreek language.In dravidian languages the word for water in 'nir' or niru.Karnataka ?niru?, Tuluva ?nir?, Kurgi ?niru?, Toda ?nir?, Kota ?nire?, Badaga ?niru?, Malabar ?nir?, Malayalma ?nir?, Tamil ?nir? (Sir William Wilson Hunter, A comparative dictionary of the languages of India and high Asia, London 1868, σελ. 164), Arabic, Bereber are well known I suppose: nar, ner, nir, nur, for water, nahar river in Arabic (countless instances throughout Europe as hydronyms, Nahar in Umbria, now Nera); san'el too water in Arabic. As for the bases studied by Ribezzo, Alessio, Bertoldi, Battisti etc.: mala/mel, mata/met, mendi, samara, sal(ap), tul, tauro, vel, car, can(t), these have consistent meanings wherever they turn up. In Italy Matese Plateau, Matinus Mons, Matera, Matelica, Mattinata poleonyms, Meta Mons, mata app. bush. And malei in Tamil means mountain.


 * As for bendi/mendi this should be a case of the phonetic alternance voiced labial/liquid: in toponymy now it occurs as mendi in France and Italy (cfr. e.g. Mendatica in Liguria a settlement on a high area near a waterfall of river Arroscia). I am not sure what is your authority though as linguists usually cite this word as "mendi": e. g. L. Curchin writes "Mendiculeia. A homonym in Lusitania (Ptol. II 5, 6) excludes the possibility of an etymology from Basque mendi mountain (Garvens 1964: 16). Very similar is the village name Mendicoleius in Lucania..." ("Place names of the Ebro Valley" p. 23); in another article "Toponyms of Lusitania" p. 147: "Mendiculeia. Paralleled by a homonymous GN among the Ilergetes. Tovar (1976; 72) thought both were Italian foundations, citing a Mendiculeius vicus in Lucania...". (Needless to say I disagree with his conclusions). Gartzen Lacasta "El Euskera en el Alto Aragon" p. 251 mentions microtoponym Larramendia as formed by two basque words, larra pasture and mendia mountain.


 * On alba (sic Battisti "Illirico e paraillirico" and Alessio "Sul nome di Otranto") I think it may be related to *alawa but this entails a somewhat finer and longer methodological introduction.


 * In principle I agree with A. Porlan's view ("Los nombres de Europa" p. 55) that toponyms are derived from an ancient time language we do not know and all the languages we now know inherited them: so Basque toponymic forms too are inherited (though they might perhaps be closer to the original having undergone fewer passages in Porlan's view). If it is so we cannot say *alb is the original: we can only make a collection of the occurrences of words seemingly related to this base: in Basque it may be albo and means steep cote: many towns in Italy were named Albion or Alba as I wrote, as in ancient times towns were built on elevated places and this warrants the semantic shift to "oppidum". The more original meaning seems supported by the name of the hill of Albaro located in Genova, which in fact is a long, steep and flat-top hill delimiting the east side of the alluvionated plain at the estuary of the torrent Bisagno.


 * However in Spain there are many cases of poleonym Alba which go back to Alava and linguistically a derivation of alb/alp from *alaw/araw looks likely, Bertoldi already held this view. But this is of course all conjectural. What certainly does not look plausible is a relation of the occurrences of alb/alp with colour white. Albios oros of Strabon is certainly not white, and the Alps are not white; though I am aware somebody has tried to explain [Alps] as the clear part of the mountains, i.e. the unwooded tops. I would argue that hydronyms such as Elbe, appellatives in Scandinavian languages meaning river (älve, elve), correspondences such as Albona/Labin in Histria in which the Croatian word is part of the long Mediterranean series *lab/leb/lip rock means rocky, which points in the direction of elevated area.


 * On a broader perspective/scope I do not believe Pokorny is a sacred text and that looking up at his list of roots to explain everything in toponymy is good scientific attitude. Who is going to make a much needed critical revision of Pokorny's work?


 * Wp has a good list of river names. I find especially interesting Romania: one can find instances that should be accounted of as Celtic by indoeuropeanists, with good correspondeces in India and southern Italy. E.g. the series Samara ,Samaroaga, (cf. south Italy assamarrari li panni to soak/wash clothes in water, Ribezzo), Savar, (Savara, Savaruna, Savasta in Italy), Sabas Rom., Sabari India; Sileru India, (Sillaro, Seler It., Sil Spain), Silha, Silagui Rom. Savarona in Lombardy is still used as an appellative for sewage canal. And going back to Tamaris there are correspondences in Sweden (Tämmarån) and Russia (Temernik). Will celticists drop their claims? In Popper's language this assumption is falsified. I would also recall the very appropriate comment  by W. Giese I posted here above. I wish to stress that one could go on for a long while listing bases which recur in hydronymy and cannot be satisfactorily explained through IE, starting perhpas with alaw and arag down to  vis/viz.Aldrasto11 (talk) 05:05, 13 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Sorry if I may sound boring but I hope the following quotations from the respected Spanish-Galician philologist Abelardo  Moralejo Laso 's article "Notas acerca de Hidronomia Gallega" will help to explain my opinion.
 * p. 159 : " (Esaro)... La primera y muy productiva era con su alternancia *eis/*ois/*is "moverse rapida o violentemente" sentido que cuadra perfectamente al Ezaro por la descripcion apuntada. La raiz está viva en verbos del sanscrito, como ísyati apresurar, ésati resbalar, y en adjectivos como ésah presuroso, ísirah fuerte, activo...y en el ant. nord. eisa asaltar. Ademas forma muchos hidronimos de sus tres alternativas con diversos suffijos, entre ellos aro/ara/era." He goes on mentioning the Esaro in Italy and then Isaran/Isarco, the Isara in Gallia now Isère, the Isar in Munich and the Yser in Belgium, the Eisrà in Lithuania. The problem rises for this etymology from the fact that many of these rivers are not satisfactorily described by such a feature. Moreover  ezera in Latvian means lake, which disqualifies this interpretation. Last assuming the hydronym may be a qualifying adjective does not look well founded: it looks much safer to assume the base +is- meant simply water/river.


 * p. 164: "(Arnoya, Arnego)...de *Ar-naecu-...La misma base u otra igual figura entre las hidronímicas de Krahe, ...de la raíz ide. *er/*or- con el sentido originario de "excitar, poner en movimiento", gr. ornumi excito, muevo, lat. orior surjo, scrt. árnas oleaje, ársati fluye...". Here too it looks odd that ancient people named rivers with a verb meaning to excite, to move or even to flow. And these rivers such Arno, Arne, Orne really have nothing different from others as to degree of motion. But more importantly we are sure this base +ar means valley (as in Basque still an appellative) and is widespread in and outside Europe with this precise meaning.


 * On a different plane one could also question these hypothetical derivations on IE historical-linguistical grounds as the produce of an unattested language.Aldrasto11 (talk) 05:40, 22 July 2013 (UTC)


 * LOL, because "Vasconic" derivations are somehow less hypothetical? You're good at comedy, but not at linguistics or even basic logic. My authority for Proto-Basque is Koldo Mitxelena, he showed that a separate phoneme /m/ did not exist in Proto-Basque and Modern Basque /m/ comes either from /nb/ or from /b/ preceding nasals. For modern Greek νερό, see Wiktionary. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 19:47, 5 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Frankly I do not see what the fact you mention may prove. It is a well known phenomenon that a phoneme /b/ in whatever language environment may easily change to other ones: /v/, /f/, /m/, /0/. E.g. Anc. Ind. vastu, Gr. (v)astu, Mess. vasti and Basta, Russ. miasto, Cz. mesto. So in our case from a former bendi to mendi it is unecessary to postulate a direct influence or borrowing, homoplasy would suffice. You want a non IE instance? Viz is a root meaning water in Turkish, vis and bis both recur in countless instances of toponyms with a variation that looks casual. Bisagno, Bisenzio, Viserba, Vismara, Vezza, Vezzola. Best the case of the Vistula= Isula= Visula=Bisula=Viscla; cf. also Vesantion=Besancon. In India Vipasha/Beas an cf. Slov. Vipava It. Vipacco. Aldrasto11 (talk) 08:43, 21 March 2016 (UTC)


 * L'étymologie est une science où les voyelles ne font rien et les consonnes fort peu de chose. (Attributed to Voltaire by 19th-century Indologist Max Müller.) Academic etymology has long overcome that stage, starting in the 1870s with the Neogrammarians, but amateur etymology is still generally stuck in it. As are your attempts. See Bongo-Bongo (linguistics).
 * You can't just pretend that sounds alternate willy-nilly, because otherwise anything could be related to anything; homoplasy isn't even a linguistic concept, but a random biological concept that you just pulled out of your behind because you've run out of arguments. The bare assertion that labial consonants interchange or vary randomly in Indo-European is worthless and won't impress a sceptical mind. Laypeople may be convinced by your equation of Sanskrit vāstu with Common Slavic *město, but experts in historical linguists will ask you to provide more examples where Sanskrit v (or a Proto-Indo-European *w) corresponds to Slavic *m (instead of the regular and phonetically entirely expected correspondence *v), preferrably in the same (word-initially before vowel) or a similar phonetic context. You've even failed to notice the basic problem that the Sanskrit word is an u-stem and the Slavic word an o-stem, although Slavic generally preserves u-stems and does not change them into o-stems (to be precise, the u-stem declension of neutral u-stems nouns is preserved, but they change to masculine nouns). Not to mention the little but highly relevant detail that Slavic *ě points to a long vowel (PIE *ē or *eh1) or diphthong (PIE *oy or *ay), while Sanskrit, together with the Tocharian evidence, points to something like PIE *wóstu. So, even if we ignore the problem with the initial consonant, the vowels don't fit either. At all. And in modern etymology, they do matter. Even ablaut doesn't mean that vowels can vacillate wildly and arbitrary; ablaut follows regularities and rules, too. If Slavic had a regular cognate, it would be *vostъ and a masculine noun. So much for your first example. After it, you go off the rails completely. Turkic? What the hell? What does that have to do with Western/Central Europe in the 2nd millennium BC, i. e., the Bronze Age?! I've had enough of Turkomanic cranks, thank you.--Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:51, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Urbicus (Orbigo), Urbanja, Urbas, Urbashka
In the article mentioned here above Moralejo Laso considers the name of the leonese river Orbigo (anc. Urbicus) as derivated from Basque +ur water plus -bi two, two rivers. The Bosnian hydronyms Urbanja etc. seem to point to another explanation even though one does accept the folk etymology from the Serbo-croat name of the willow tree. Noteworthy is the extension of the base as +urb-.Aldrasto11 (talk) 04:25, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

To these one may add Urviş in Romania, wow!!! Orba in Italy, Orge in France all from Urba.Aldrasto11 (talk) 04:37, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Isara > Aire (England)
I removed the example of Aire (river in England) from the list of examples of Isara, because the etymology is not consistent with the other examples, which are all connected to the Celtic root of the word iron (isarnon). Also not to be removed as WP:OR, this list needs a source.--Wuerzele (talk) 15:54, 11 June 2014 (UTC)


 * You are wrong: these instances are not at all connected to the Celtic root isarnon=iron, but in the view of Krahe and other indoeuropeanists to PIE *eis to move rapidly. See Pokorny. I must add that this view too is wrong as these rivers do not move more rapidly than other. This has been observed by Italian linguists and lastly by Vennemann.Aldrasto11 (talk) 06:51, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Article focus
As it stands, the article seems more like a summary of Krahe's scholarship on Old-European river names than an encyclopedia article on the names themselves. He's clearly an important scholar in the field—indeed, the founder of the field. But information about his work must be better subordinated to the larger discussion so that other scholars' contributions don't seem like an appendix or afterthought, as they presently do.

Krahe needs to be mentioned in the introduction certainly, but try to focus on the larger subject. Then put the exposition of Krahe's arguments under a subhead titled something like Foundation of the Study. A second section (analogously titled—Recent Developments?), discussing emendations to Krahe, could follow that. Just make sure that you focus always on the topic, not on a particular scholar, however salient. KC 21:30, 30 March 2016 (UTC) KC 21:30, 30 March 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Boydstra (talk • contribs)

References with text
The references to sources are too prominent in the article and get in the way of the valuable information communicated here. All of that technical information can be relegated to a Notes section, and the point of the article will come through much more clearly.

I should add that I have absolutely no expertise in this field. I can offer advice only about writing. I hope someone—perhaps the original author?—will take on my suggestion and turn this important entry into the really fine entry it could be.

KC 21:48, 30 March 2016 (UTC) KC 21:48, 30 March 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Boydstra (talk • contribs)

Missing in map?
I would assume the Dutch IJssel, which used to be known by the Romans as Isala, fits in the *Sal-, *Salm- group, no? Bataaf van Oranje (talk) 11:52, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Mitxelena (in English editions he appears as Luis Michelena) was only the creator of the modern Basque language.
"Creator of the modern Basque language"? What on earth is this supposed to mean? C'mon, people... 96.42.57.164 (talk) 15:51, 4 June 2017 (UTC)