With regard to the Iberian word eban and its variants I consider Untermann's proposal to be sure, that is, that eban means something like "he set up", being equivalent to the term CURAVIT in the Latin inscriptions. This proposal was well argued by Untermann, and, as a matter of fact, I have reinforced it, drawing the attention to the morphological parallels with the verb ekiar: (eban-en / eki-en; t-eban / t-ekiar) which hint at eban to be also a verb.

    But in spite of the evidence published and of Untermann's prestige (the most important researcher in the field), in the latest years it has achieved great success Velaza's proposal that eban means "son" and teban "daughter", adjusting to very old ideas: that eban means "son" and Tovar's suggestion that its prefixed t- was a feminine article. That revival is surprising, as Untermann already rejected the meaning "son" for eban and he continues to reject it today, but also because Velaza's proposal suffers from serious logical and documental shortcomings, no matter how hard Velaza tries to ignore those he has no answer to and to give unlikely and inadequate explanations to the rest of them (as his alleged examples of eban on no monumental inscriptions).

    This is why I called this hypothesis "feeble". I have devoted a paper in Arse 35 to a formal and exhaustive refutation of it where all the question is much more clearly explained, I summarize here only the four major arguments (there are nine more in the paper).

    1) NON SEQUITUR of the theory. Even if the little documentation that Velaza affords was sound and true, his conclusion is nullified by a logical blemish, from those data can not be drawn that conclusion, as they don't refute the hypothesis "curavit".

    The fact is that Velaza believes that there is a gender concordance between eban / teban and the personal names they follow. From one very dubious case he concludes teban to be related with women names, and hence that it only can be a substantive, and hence eban /and teban only can be "son" and "daughter".

    But this is based on a false premise: that only substantive has gender concordance. That is true in Spanish and in Latin (Velaza is a Latin philologist), but any linguist knows that in many languages the verb can show a gender concordance with the subject, so that, even if we believed that the t- of teban is a gender feminine mark it could perfectly still be a verb ⁽¹⁾. This criticism formally nullifies the proposal, it is known by Velaza since 1994 and was first published in the year 2000.

    2) Unexpected lack of eban on no monumental inscriptions. According to Velaza's theory we could expect that the word "son" to appear in other kinds of inscriptions, specially since there are a lot of persons mentioned in the lead plaque inscriptions. Even if we accepted the two examples argued by Velaza, there are not only still to few (and in fact only one of them is really eban), but in no one of these cases can be found relating two personal names as it should be if it were a parallel.

    Instead, this exclusivity on monumental inscriptions perfectly matches with a meaning like CURAVIT, as Untermann has pointed out.

    3) No repetition of eban on the same inscription. Even though several monumental inscriptions which mention more than a person (so the Sinarcas stele), only one of these persons is connected with eban in the same inscription. Well obviously is much more natural that only one of these persons set the monument, than thinking that only one of them had a father or that it was forbidden to use the word "son" more than once.

    4) Lack of criterion for the identification of woman names. Velaza hasn't done any study on the subject, and the whole question is still unresolved. All his woman name identifications are dubious at best. In the only case he presents as proof of his theory, aiuni, there are two problems. First: that it didn't even shows the alleged, but most dubious, feminine suffix he quotes as criterion. We have no -in suffix,on which he bases his gender identification. That is, the name is not aiunin; the -n is assumed by Velaza, using a hypothesis as a proof for another. Last, but not least: that the segmentation of aiuni is arbitrary: the whole text is ar'e take aiunibaise** teban, hence it's much more likable that we have here a normal compounded Iberian name aiunibaiser than two atypically simple names aiuni and baise*. By the way, it's obviously much easier to explain the identification of only one person in this inscription translating teban as "he set up" than as "son", even though Velaza expressly says the contrary.

    Velaza is identifying woman names on speculative and ad hoc bases, and speculation can't be used as a proof.