Spanish jara 'rock rose; low bushes' (updated)

Spanish jara (old xara) 'rock rose (Cistus); low bushes' designates several species of perennial shrubs common in the Mediterranean area, especially Cistus ladanifer, which in other Hispano-Romance languages and Moroccan Arabic are designated with derivatives of Hispanic Latin stip(p)a.

The Spanish word has correspondences in Portuguese (en)xara 'low bushes' and Galician xara, Basque xara, txara, zara 'rock rose', and it's a borrowing from Hispano-Arabic ʃáʕra (Classical ʃaʕrāʔ) 'thicket, wood'¹. The Arabic word is in turn related to ʃaʕār- 'thick and interlaced trees which give shadow in summer and shelter in winter; vegetation', ʃaʕīr 'barley' < Semitic *ɬaʕVr- 'barley; grass, straw' (ND 2219), contaminated with ʃaʕr- 'hair' < Semitic *ɬaʕr- 'hair' (ND 2220).

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¹ F. Corriente (2003): Diccionario de arabismos y voces afines en iberorromance, p. 307-308.

New Vasco-romance blog

Dear readers,

I've created a new Vasco-romance blog for a smoother communication with my potential readers about Romance etymologies (including borrowings into Basque). To achieve this goal, I'm going to write in Spanish, although occasionally I'd employ Catalan. 

This way, I'm going to migrate some of my older posts (translating them into Spanish, if necessary) to the new blog, while I'd keep in vasco-caucasian (in English) those topics which I consider to be of interest to a wider audience. I'm sorry for the inconveniencies this might cause.

Regards,

Octavià  

Basque otso 'wolf' (updated)

Basque otso 'wolf' apparently derives from Aquitanian OSSON, OXSON¹, where XS probably reflects an apico-alveolar affricate like the one found in modern Basque. There're also the Iberian onomastic element ośon and the "Tartessian" toponym Osson-oba 'River of wolves', whose second member is probably an Italoid toponymic element (e.g. On-oba) cognate to Lithuanian upė².

My colleague Miguel Carrasquer links this word to Berber *wVʃʃVn 'jackal', in turn linked to Egyptian wnʃ 'wolf' by Militarev. I regard this and other substrate loanwords as remnants of a Paleo-Berber language once spoken in the Iberian Peninsula. This would possibly be reflected in the distribution of Y-chromosome haplogroup E-M81, native to NW Africa but found also in some areas of the Iberian Peninsula (especially on the west), with a strong peak among Pasiegos of Cantabria, an ethnical group of trashumant shepherds³.

Distribution of Y-chromosome haplogroup E-M81

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¹ J. Gorrotxategi (1984): Estudio sobre la onomástica indígena de Aquitania, p. 250-251.

² F. Villar (2000): Indoeuropeos y no indoeuropeos en la Hispania prerromana.
³ Attempts to explain this as a result of the Muslim conquest (8th century AD) can be dismissed.