Guadix
GranadaAndalucía
Two-member Arabic compound on pre-Roman toponym. The medieval form Wādī Āš (وَادِي آش) derives from the Arabic wādī ('river, river valley') plus the old Iberian name Acci (attested on Celtiberian coins and cited by Pliny the Elder as the capital of the Bastuli), phonetically reinterpreted as Āš. The Castilian form Guadix preserves the complete Arabic composition with apocope of the final ī.
Evolution of the name
- Acci Iberian 3rd centuries BC–5th
- Wādī Āš Andalusi Arabic 8th–15th centuries
- Guadix medieval Castilian from 1489
Reflections, to the letter
Wādī Āš named the river before the town: the water of old Acci's valley. That same river — today the Río Verde, the Río de Guadix — still crosses the basin, and it is what carved the lunar clay gullies where people dug their cave-houses. The city of caves owes itself, letter by letter, to the wādī it carries in its name.
Glossary
- Apocope
- Loss of one or more phonemes at the end of a word.
- Attested
- A form or word documented in writing in historical sources; opposed to "reconstructed" (forms proposed by comparative inference but not actually documented).
- Mozarabs
- Hispano-Roman Christian community that survived in al-Andalus after the Muslim conquest of 711, preserving its Catholic religion but progressively adopting Arabic language, dress, onomastics and sometimes the Arabised liturgical rite (Mozarabic or Hispano-Mozarabic rite). The Mozarabs maintained their own episcopal sees in the great cities of al-Andalus (Cordoba, Seville, Granada, Acci-Guadix, Toledo) until the 12th-13th centuries, when the Almoravid and Almohad persecutions pushed them to massive emigration to the northern Christian kingdoms. The Mozarabic rite survives liturgically in the Corpus Christi Chapel of Toledo Cathedral since the 16th century.
- Pre-Roman
- Prior to the Romanisation of the Iberian peninsula (3rd century BC); applied to toponyms, linguistic roots and populations.
Sources
- Corriente, F. — Diccionario de arabismos
- Bertrand, M. — Acci, ciudad romana
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Camino Mozárabe