Koura - Greek origin of portuguese toponomy?

[Tiago Lima]

Greetings everyone, happy to have found this forum.

I'm a forestry engineer interested in ancient techniques of tree management like shredding and pollarding, in which the tree trimmings were fed to domestic animals.

Currently in Portugal the practice is almost non existant and barely recognized of its importance in older times. One of the few remaining locations were trees are still managed this way is located in Paredes de Coura.

According to some articles (such as Ispikoudis&Sioliou 2005 "Cultural aspects of silvopastoral systems"), the greek word 'koura' means pollarding or lopping a tree, deriving from 'kouros' that means young.

Does it make sense for a portuguese rural area to have its name originate from a greek word? The current hypothesis for the name is that Coura comes from the celtic word 'Cora' meaning peace or safety. However, if the name was originally assigned to symbolize a predominance of this traditional way of silviculture, the greek origin would make more sense.


I would love some help to clarify if this association has some truth to it.

[spiros]

You may find this enlightening: κουρά - Ancient Greek (LSJ)

As far as Greek influencing other languages: Today many of our languages can be seen as a kind of semi-Greek or crypto-Greek

Paredes de Coura taking its name after the Greek κουρά I think is quite far-fetched. There are many conjectures about the etymology for various words which are aptly described by the concept of False etymology - Wikipedia.

For etymological queries Dr Moshe is the expert, so moving to Greek monolingual.