Re: Basque name formation?
- From: "Douglas G. Kilday" <fufluns@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 4 Sep 2006 23:04:10 -0700
John Atkinson wrote:
[...]
While I'm at it, her mother's surname, Malaga, doesn't seem to be Basque,
but rather comes from the city of the same name in the far south of Spain.
This even though "-aga" is a common ending for Basque place-names.
According to Wikipedia, it's Phoenician. They say: "The Phoenicians founded
the city Malaka here, in about 1000 BCE. The name Malaka is probably derived
from the Phoenician word for salt because fish was salted near the harbour;
in other Semitic languages the word for salt is still Hebrew מלח mélah. or
Arabic ملح milh. . [... Before the reconquista,] the city was called
Mālaqah (Arabic مالقة)."
Another slice of Wikibaloney, I'm afraid. One cannot arbitrarily alter
the triliteral {mlH} into {mlk} or {mlq}, so there is no way Malaca is
derived from 'salt'. The Wikiderivation is empty anyway. What ancient
seaport had _no_ fish-salting activities near the harbor?
The river was also the Malaca (now the Guadalmedina), so we have the
usual chicken-egg problem of hydrotoponyms. If the name is in fact
Phoenician, one possibility is a noun <mlqH> 'captured (place)' (cf.
Heb. <malqo(a)H> 'booty') from the triliteral {lqH} 'take, seize,
capture, etc.'. But that is only a late-night guess. If I had ready
access to a big library, I would look first in Menendez Pidal's
_Toponímia hispánica prerromana_, which may be an old book, but I
trust it more than an encyclopedia constructed by on-line anarchy.
.
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