Of Spain, Suevi, Iacetani and Napoleon

A reader forwarded to us a link to the Wikipedia page on the Suevi where one of the editors happily said the following;

“ALLARIZ BEARIZ MONDARIZ In Galicia there are different villages with names ending in IZ, like Allariz and Beariz (Ourense) and Mondariz (Pontevedra), which origin comes from the Swebian tribe. Allaritz, Bearitz, Mondaritz….like Austerlitz.”

Like Austerlitz indeed.

So, let us take a look at Austerlitz.  Austerlitz is, without a doubt, a German name.  It would seem to be a name that is completely unrelated to the Slavic name of the town.

But two interesting things come up right from the start here.

First, the current name of the town is – now – Slavkov u Brna (which, in Polish, is Sławków, i.e., its pronunciation is Suavkuv).

The Czech name literally means Slavkov by Brno, i.e., the Czech city of Brno (known in German as Brünn).  (We will not touch the topic of whether this Brno has some connection to Bern in the Switzerland and other similarly named cities… for now).

So that’s a quasi-Slav (Suevic?) connection.

Ok, whatever.

Second, and more importantly, the Czech name also seems to be a relatively new one and an older Czech name may have been Novosedlice (a name found already in Cosmas’ Chronicle of the Czechs).  It is, supposedly, from that Novosedlice that Austerlitz comes from.  If so, then Austerlitz is merely a corruption/mispronounciation of Sedlice or Sedlitz.

Ok, ok.

But there is something else.  Let’s look at the claims about Allariz, Beariz and Mondariz.  Allariz still stands as Allariz.  And so does Beariz and so does Mondariz.  Here they are in blue:

But are -iz and -itz endings Suevic?  Well, the stems certainly could be Germanic, e.g., Allariz may be from Alaric.  On the other hand, were place names with such suffixes to be found in East Germany they would likely be classified as Slavic.  Add to that that where they’d be classified as German it would be in West Germany.  But in West Germany such names appear only in certain areas – towards the south – not in west central or north and certainly not in Scandinavia.  They’d be found somewhere in between the Slavic and the ancient Vindelician area.  That itself is, or at least should be, interesting.

However, there is more, there are other places with -iz and indeed even -itz (!) in Spain.  Are these also Suevic?  The problem is that they are nowhere near the former Suevic kingdom.  For example, take a look at these with special notice of the cluster just north of Pamplona and into France:

Are these all Basque?  The largest concentration just north of Pamplona is really in Navarre.  There are Basques in Navarre, for sure.  Indeed, the first King of Pamplona was called Eneko (Íñigo) Arista and was Basque.  But the rest of Basque country (Navarre currently is not in Basque country) contains such names only sporadically.

BTW what are these green stars you ask?  They are other interesting names such as:

• Grocin
• Zubiri
• Eslava, and our favourites:
• Liedena, which just happens to be right next to
• Yesa

And there are more…

This Navarre bias is demonstrated here too if you use the Buscador tool to look for -itz suffixes which gives you this (we mark the pure -itzes not, e.g., -itzu or -itza – though if you look closely those too are primarily in Navarre) (Vizcaya is Bizkaia or the current administrative province of Basque country):

Apparently, these references may be a sign of the former tribe of the Iacetani.

For more of this you can look at the Venetic area about Bretagne.  As far as we know the only major recent effort to compare Slavic and Basque languages was in the “Veneti: First Builders of European Community” book which. while not the clearest in exposition, is certainly more than worth reading.

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