The etymology of opaque place names based on a cognitive and interdisciplinary method

The method to study the etymology of opaque place names (we don't know what they mean) has been the same since the nineteenth century and, according to our research, it presents some weak phases of research process. For that reason, we have designed and experimented with a different methodology, with a cognitive and geographical approach. The initial objective was not to know the language in which the opaque toponyms were created, but what they referred to.

Based on the principles of corpus linguistics, a corpus of 180 Pyrenean population toponyms was first constructed, along with quotations of them in medieval documents. In total there were 464 toponyms in the corpus. Next, each toponym was associated with its morphological (all possible segmentations of the place name) and geographic variables (the elements of the landscape where the settlement is located). Finally, the statistical filters made it possible to relate the 1179 segments of the opaque toponyms of the corpus to 133 elements of the landscape. Thanks to this, it was possible to reconstruct five prototypical (model from which there can be variations) old cognates (they served to form words in European languages from different affiliations) which show great antiquity because they refer to basic and versatile concepts: ‘something that is cut’, or ‘does not move’, or ‘is on top’, etc. Therefore, this linguistic archaeology research reveals that in the opaque European toponyms, considered linguistic fossils due to their permanence over time, prehistoric cognates from a common old language, possibly Proto-Indo-European, could endure.