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I think it is correct that this article is marked as a stub (and should remain so for the moment even though I added some information). There is so much more to say about the river Isar. I just added a section on the etymology of the name of the river Isar. It's a translation from the respective section of the article on the German wikipedia. My goal is to get the article to be just as fine as the German one. I started with translating the etymology section. I hope I got it all right (with the help of a dictionary; even though I'm affluent in English I'm not a native speaker and therefore I'm far from perfect). I'm going to continue with this but I hope some of you might want to help, too. --Maxl22:22, 29 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hiya! Good to see someone working on here. I'm American, but lived for five years as a kid just a block from the Isar in Harlaching, and some of my best memories are still from that wondrous river valley. I'll help where I can. --jpgordon∇∆∇∆23:54, 29 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, yes the Isar is a wonderful river! And since you lived in Harlaching you must for sure know our wondeful zooo Tierpark Hellabrunn! Well, I just added a history section to the article. ;) --Maxl11:48, 30 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yep, best zoo there is! I just added another section about environmental issues. ;) The next section is flora and fauna, that will be hard because I must check out the English name of many species of animals and plants. --Maxl21:15, 30 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
isar does not derive from celtic is, high ar, water (water in celtic was hidor or uisce) otherwise show me your source — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.10.153.124 (talk • contribs)
I agree, that looks like some speculative if not entirely fantastic reconstruction of word roots with little if any base in genuine Celtic languages, whether ancient or modern. Actually, the article gives ura, not ar for water, which however makes equally little sense. There are a lot of spurious lexemes and roots floating around in lists of placename etymologies, many of which are badly researched or severely outdated and cannot be trusted. Celtic philology has made huge strides in the last few decades. At a time when little was known about ancient Celtic, such speculations may have passed as reasonable, but very much of it has proven completely off the mark and untenable. Ancient Celtic is generally similar to other ancient Indo-European languages, Latin, Greek and early Germanic especially (or even modern Baltic to an extent), while those "roots" look very alien and more like some fantasy language for elves. It's not even recognisable Welsh or Irish or some other modern (or medieval) Celtic language, which in any way cannot be taken as good approximations of ancient Celtic as they have changed so much since antiquity; using modern Celtic data to interpret ancient Celtic placenames etymologically is like using French, whether Modern or Old, to etymologise ancient Italic placenames. It just doesn't make sense as it is too misleading.
The Insular Celtic protolanguage that can be reconstructed from Old Irish and the British Celtic languages is a different matter, however: It was a sister language to Gaulish and other ancient Continental Celtic languages, having been spoken at the same time, it is generally similar and can be taken as a representative ancient Celtic language.
That said, the comment above is also imprecise at best: uisce isn't ancient Celtic either, it's Irish (both Old and Modern Irish), and hidor resembles Greek without quite being it (in any stage); it's most certainly not Celtic.
This is all so basic stuff that you can even use Wiktionary and Wikipedia itself to learn about it.
By the way, the Basque "particle" mentioned in the article is also news to me and makes me quite sceptical. Basque is another language with whose history only a few specialists are intimately familiar (not to mention that outside the Basque country, few people are intimately familiar with even its modern stage, not to mention the study of its dialects) and a lot of spurious lexemes and roots are attributed to it (and its earlier stages), which rarely even provoke sceptical comments. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:27, 23 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
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