*Navis/Novis ‘river’

A dozen or so river names across Europe may descend from something like *navi- or *novi-.

While discussing Φλαουιοναουια, Garcia Alonso (2001:218) wrote:   “Navia is frequent as a river name, and as a place name, with examples in the Iberian Peninsula, France, Britain, Germany and Lithuania ... and fits well in the Alt-europäisch hydronymy ... It could be the same root we see in Sanskrit navya , ‘navigable’, Old Persian naviya ‘fleet’, Greek νηιος ‘concerning a ship’, all from Indo-European *naus-‘ship’ ... It is possible to relate this to nava ‘valley’, widely used throughout the Iberian Peninsula ... and in other areas of Western Europe (the Dolomitic Alps, Corsica). The metaphoric use of a word meaning ‘ship’ to designate a valley has parallel examples: Barco in the toponymy of Castille  .....  Navia is almost unanimously considered pre-Celtic Indo-European Alt-europäisch in fact.”  Another example of that metaphor is English and French combe ‘valley’, related to Latin cumba ‘boat’ and to words in Greek, Sanskrit, etc meaning ‘bowl, bottom of ship’.  (It is unlikely that Welsh cwm existed early enough to be the source of English combe.)  In Latin, navis could mean female genitals, but more often a womb (Adams 1982:89).

Prósper (2010) wrote that “The Iberian Peninsula is strewn with place and river names Nava-hermosa, which means ‘beautiful valley’. A word nava of Celtic or Indo-European pre-Celtic origin was borrowed into Spanish with the meaning ‘flat depression surrounded by valleys, where the rains usually remain’, but hitherto we had no indigenous attestation of this word as an appellative. Now, since the determinatum *nau in CADARNAVAEGIVM must have been a synchronically a noun, not a name, it is plain it may have been directly borrowed from Hiberno-Celtic, where the semantic change from ‘boat’ to ‘valley’ had already taken place.

While discussing Navione, Rivet & Smith cited PIE *sna- ‘to flow’, hence Welsh nawf, nofio , ‘to swim’ and Latin no, nare, so they proposed a British river-name *Nav- ‘fast-flowing water’, related also to the German river Nahe (from Nava) near Bingen.  It is surprising that no one mentions Greek ναω ‘to flow’.   Watson (1927: 47) proposed an origin in PIE *nebh- ‘cloud’, hence νεφος, or Sanskrit nabhas, or nebula or nimbus for Ptolemy's Ναβαρου, the modern Naver in northern Scotland,

An interesting possible root is *nobh- ‘navel’ or ‘central nob’, which was used for the boss of a shield or the hub of a wheel, and also shows up with M instead of N in Latin umbilicus, Greek ομφαλος and Irish imbliu.  Scottish Gaelic inbhir, which is usually anglicised into Inver- in place names (like Welsh aber and oper) meaning ‘river mouth, confluence’ looks suspiciously similar but is usually etymologised differently.  Anderelio nuba may refer to the nub/knob/Nab of Beachy Head next to Eastbourne.  Delamarre (2017,287-292) is keen on the idea of sacred rivers flowing from navel-birth in the earth towards the sea, and lists various rivers in support: the Naab (Danube tributary in Bavaria); Nabalia mentioned by Tacitus as a river in Batavian territory; Ptolemy's πολις of Ναυαλια (probaby Essen, on the Ruhr, and meaning ‘wharves/docks’ or ‘shipyard’, because navalis was Latin for ‘nautical, pertaining to ships’); Nabao in Portugal, allegedly formerly Nabantius; Nablis in about AD 600 somewhere in Thuringia; Nabéran somewhere in France; and the Nevern/Nyfer in Wales (a late-attested name that Owen and Morgan 2007 cannot readily explain), close to the original home of the Stonehenge bluestones.

The river Neva, through St. Petersburg, has been argued over.  It has a “transparent Baltic Finnish etymology”, according to Kallio (2018), in Finnish, but available translated into English via Academia.edu.  English Wikipedia says “Neva is widespread in Finnic languages, having quite cognate meanings. In Finnish it means poor fen, in Karelian watercourse and in Estonian (as nõva) waterway.”  Russian Wikipedia tries to sustain a meaning ‘new’, referring to a breakout of water from Lake Ladoga into the Baltic, preserved into Swedish and other Germanic languages.  This raises a question whether the *navis word was loaned from Indo-European into Uralic, or vice versa.

Early names in Britain that may contain *navis include Anava (river Annan), Brinavis (Brentford), Naurum (Barnstaple Bay), Navione (Brough-on-Noe), Purocoronavis (?Bude), Κορναουιοι (tribe with towns at Chester and Wroxeter), Κορναουιοι (tribe in north-east Scotland), and Manavi (near Clackmannan etc).  Most of these support the swampy more than the bowl interpretation.  With a change of vowel from A to O there are Durocornovium, the Νοουανται tribe in Galloway, the Τρινοαντες or Trinobantes tribe in East Anglia, Durnonovaria (Dorchester), Novitia (river ?Nith), and Novia (Sussex Ouse).  Less likely cases include Navimago Regentium (?Selsey), Noviomagnus (?Old Sarum), Noviomagus (Croydon), Panovius (?Inveresk), and Vinovium (Binchester).  Overseas examples include Αναβον/Αναυον (Komarno, Danube/Vah confluence, Slovakia).  Νουαισιον/Ναυαισιον (Melsungen, on the Fulda), Ναβιου (river Eo, Spain), Νηβιος (river Cavado, Spain).

So many names recorded in Roman sources but commonly described as “Celtic” are really Latin that one must take seriously that Latin Novalis or Novale meant land that was ploughed for the first time or lying fallow.  The name Ad Novas occurred several times across the Roman world:  All look as if they could have been beside swamps before the arrival of modern agriculture and tourism: at modern Cesenatico, Italy, on the Adriatic coast south of Venice, where a series of canals serve as a porto toristico, in a flat landscape; at modern Zmajevac, Croatia, beside the river Danube where it meanders and was probably originally flanked by marshes; at Bni Arouss in Morocco; at Santa Maria, a vico near Naples in Italy.  Novaesium was an important Roman fort at Neuss, beside the Rhine.

Views on the Internet across the rivers Navia in north-west Spain and Naver (ancient Ναβαρου) in northern Scotland show lush waterside meadows, not bowl-shaped valleys or noxious marshes.  Roman Novia was probably the modern Ouse, through Lewes, where a widely reproduced Alamy stock photo shows water meadows.  In the 1600s it became good farming practice to deliberately flood riverside fields in the spring, known as water meadows in Dorset near *Duronovaria (Dorchester) and in Wessex near Noviomagno (Salisbury).  In Roman times one should perhaps envisage flood-meadows, whose inondation was more natural.

The Cosmography's Novitia is usually guessed to be Ptolemy's Νοουιου and the modern river Nith through Dumfries in south-west Scotland, which meanders through a low-lying basin that would prehistorically have been swampy.  Its name appears to have changed to Nith, which is not a simple phonological development, but perhaps a calque translation.  Nith has many cognates across Europe, notably Roman Nido, near modern Neath in south Wales.  Their only viable linguistic parallel is German nieder ‘low’ and its cognates such as English beneath, so maybe Neath and Nith were named by Roman soldiers of Germanic origin, not by native Britons.  On the other hand, among instances of Noviomagus on the Continent, the one at Lisieux in Normandy lies on the river Touques, whose etymology (along with other T-something rivers) has baffled French investigators, but is readily explained by development of PIE *del-/*dol- ‘to divide’ to words such as dale and Welsh dôl ‘meadow’, as at Dolemeads in Bristol and as explained under Dolocindo.

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Last edited 22 December 2024     To main Menu