Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 1.djvu/540

 444

NOTES AND QUERIES. [io* s. i. JUNE 4)

-speaking village on the sea-coast of Bask- land), on the other side of the rw or river- mouth, proposed to me some time ago. It is, namely, from portu, Latin for harbour (puerto in Castilian), and halde, aide, which means side in Baskish or Heuskara. The g in the name is a phonetic buffer, keeping the com- ponent elements apart, and represents the h of halde, corrupted into halete under Cas- tilian influence. We find aide meaning side in the Baskish New Testament of Leiar- raga, e.g., John xxi. 1, itsas aldean=on the sea-side ; Mark x. 1, Jordanaren berte aldeaz = on the other side of the Jordan. Names ending in aide are common in Baskish, e.g., Larralde = pasture-side ; Elizalde = church- side. So Portugalete means simply Port- side.

Fontarrabia is well known to all readers of -the first book of Milton's 'Paradise Lost,' 1. 587 ; and many people who have visited that village at the mouth of the Bidassoa, which separates French and Spanish Bask 'lands on the sea side, will have thought that the great poet misuses " By " before it. For it is not very near the scene of Roland's defeat. It is commonly, but wrongly sup- posed to owe its name to the Arabs and their fountains. The Heuskarian form of it, how- ever, is Ondarrabia. This must have been first Fondarrabia and then Hondarrabia. "The Castilian Fuenterrabia and the French Fontarabie have preserved the initial F, but seem to have been formed under the false impression that the first element in the name came from fonte. Other Baskish words may be quoted which, once beginning in fo, took h for /, and then lost the aspirate. The name, then, must be analyzed thus : Fpn-

darra is the sediment, the deposit of liquids, the remains, the sandy strand. Under the form hondarra or ondarra this may be seen in many dictionaries, e.g., the l Diccionario Manual Basco-Castellano Arreglado del Dic- cionario Etimologico de D. P. Novia do Salcedo' (Tolosa, 1902), where it is defined (p. 242) : " Arena ; arenal ; desecho, sobra, residue ; hondarras, heces, hondo, residue, sobra." Fondarra is derived from Latin fund(d}, through Castilian fond(o) bottom, and to the same source is the postposition hondo, ondo = behind, after, near, to be ascribed.

The termination arra means that which belongs to, the dweller in, the frequenter of. The two shores at Fuenterrabia remain as the sediment of the sea arid the river. And as evidence of the evaporation of the Baskish

language there is the shortening of the .name of this particular place. In 2 Cor.

xi. 25, the words in profwndo maris of the Vulgate Latin became en la profonde mer in Calvin's French, and itsas hundarrean=iu the depth of the sea, in Lei9arraga's Baskish. Here we see the u of fundus remaining, and a euphonic e before trie locative case of the definite article a postpositive. In Acts xxvii. 28 hundarrera occurs twice, in the phrase rendering /jtoAtVavrts. The end of the triple compound is fo'a=two, a popular shortening of biga. The latter form thereof is common in Leigarraga's N.T. of 1571, reprinted with almost perfect accuracy at Strassburg in Elsass in 1900, and with amendments at Oxford in 1903. Biga is commonly shortened not only into bia, but into bi also. In St. Mark x. 8, while the determinate or articulate form of bia, i.e., biac, repre- sents 01 8vo at the beginning of the verse, the indefinite Svo at the end is rendered biga. I have heard Basks explain the name as meaning " the nest on the strand," as if the second part came from abia, which derivative of Latin cavea means both cage and birdsnest in their language. But the most characteristic feature of the place, that which must have struck the ancient mariner long before the picturesque high street and church arose, is that which gave it its name, the two sandy strands.

EDAVARD S. DODGSON.

A WELL-KNOWN EPITAPH. Under the above heading I discussed at 9 th S. ii. 41 the Greek epitaph

/cat crv Ti5x?7, jueya ^aipere. TOV Xifj.ev'

OuSev f/Jiol ^ V/MV, Trou^ere TOV? /J.fr' e/xe,

and gave five instances of Latin versions by writers of the days of the revival of learning and onwards, very similar to each other, but differing in particulars.

With reference to one of those versions that marked in my note as (a) a correspond- ent from St. Austins, Warrington MB. ROBERT PIERPOINT was good enough to point out, in a private letter to me under date 30 March, 1901, that " it occurs again on p. 419" of Chytrseus' work, ed. 2 [s.l. 1599], "and that on p. 405 is the following : Invent portum, dum tu jactaris in alto. Eventu ut simili fac tua navis eat."

The facts are so.

The corresponding references to the first edition of Chytrseus (1594) are respectively p. 542 (the headings being ' Regiomonti Borussise ' and ' Borussica' [sc. Monumenta] : with the subheading 'Quies') and p. 524 (the monument being one raised in memory