Hualde deitura, hidronimia eta paisaiaren elementuen kokapena Euskal Herriaren ekialdeko mugetan

Abstract

The surname Hualde is present in many of our villages and valleys, but with some variants and different spellings it occurs more frequently in the north-eastern limits of Euskal Herria. Based on the study of the surname, its variants on both sides of the Pyrenees are investigated and the components that make it up are analysed; on the one hand, the hydronyms derived from the Basque base ur ‘water’ and, on the other, those constructed with the Basque postposition ‑alde ‘towards the part of, near’. This also makes it possible to analyse other hydronyms and other common and habitual postpositions in Basque Onomastics, since the postpositional is the way chosen by Basque to express what Romance languages reflect by means of prepositional locutions. Thus, thanks to the postpositions of place, the exact location of the house, surname or place name to which they refer can be determined, and the place occupied in the landscape by the first compositional element of the name it accompanies can be precisely indicated. Throughout the article, we analyse the hydronyms found mainly in the Roncal Valley (Navarre) and in the neighbouring towns of Larrau and Santa Engracia (Basabürüa, Zuberoa) and, to a lesser extent, and always in relation to the previous ones, in the Salazar Valley (Navarre), in the valleys of Barétous and Aspe (Béarn) and in the Ansó Valley (Aragon). The study of this semantic field shows the postpositive richness of Basque, which clearly shows the continuum existing between both sides of the Pyrenees. In fact, there are few cases in which a toponym or a surname is not found on both sides, albeit with small differences adapted to each place; there are indeed peculiar morphological or phonetic features that define their origin, but which, ultimately, are also clearly recognised as mere variants of the same common trunk, proof that in another time the relationship between both communities was very close, to the point of constituting the same neighbouring community in which the Pyrenean mountains were not an impassable limit, but a meeting place.