Talk:broa

Etymology

Hi, @Florian Blaschke.

I think that the problem with this etymology is my poor wording. Essentially, the old "accepted" etymology made Galician and Portuguese broa a Germanic loanword, which is reasonable. The problem is that no Germanic term can explain the ancient form borona, which is the same form used in Asturian. So, Coromines, author of the Diccionario Crítico Etimológico Castellano e Hispánico proposed a Celtic or, rather, Indo-European but pre-Celtic origin for this word. His proposal was *borŭnā (the u was stressed), with *bor- < *bhər- "barley" (so, from PIE *bʰers-). See Joan Coromines, José A. Pascual (1983–1991) “borona”, in Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico (in Spanish), Madrid: Gredos.

There are somehow similar formations in Galician and Asturian, as:

• Galician trobo - Asturian truébano < Medieval Latin local documents trobano < PIE *treb-.
• Galician cando < ML local documents candano < PIE *(s)kand-.
• Galician vargo < ML local documents varganum < PIE *h₁wreǵ-.
• Galician laxe, Portuguese laja < ML local documents lagena < Celtic *lagina

And more. - Froaringus (talk) 15:40, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

@Froaringus: So he was probably thinking of Lusitanian? That's difficult because the attestation of this language is so limited. It's possible that his etymologies are essentially correct, of course, but they're very hypothetical, if not speculative. We should definitely make this clear. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:11, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

Well, give or take... The known Lusitanian inscriptions 40 years ago were though as mixed code, I think, so I don't know if he has any particular idea on them...

Joan Coromines thought that some of the place and river names and some of the vocabulary found in the Northern half of the Iberian peninsula was obviously Celtic... but then, acting as a substrate rather than as an adstrate, was another IE language with preserved /p/ and diverse features that he called sorotaptic (Greek σορός + θαπτός), because he thought was the language brought by the Urnfield culture. So... Yes?

In any case, Coromines was certainly very speculative sometimes, excessively forward-thinking, but his multi-volume dictionary is your first stop (THE dictionary), when you want to research the etymology and history of a word in Spanish, Galician and Portuguese, Catalan or Asturian. I mean, labelling one of his proposals as speculative or plainly wrong would require by itself to reference a later paper or work that says so. And in particular, this one appears to be accepted by the Spanish Academy (https://dle.rae.es/borona "Perhaps from Celtic *borŭna", although that is not exactly what Coromines wrote). - Froaringus (talk) 22:00, 18 June 2023 (UTC)