Timeline for Excepting Romanian, is "Wales" ever translated/transliterated in modern languages with the same term as that meaning "Gaul" or "Gauls"?
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21 events
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| Jul 13, 2021 at 13:17 | comment | added | cipricus | I understand people find your post interesting in itself (therefore no down-vote from me), but it is not an answer, because it misses the point of the question, as it explains in great detail a fact that is the prerequisite of my question, not something I ignore, but, on the contrary, the context which triggered the question in the first place. Also it suggests more ignorance of my part than it's the case. But you seem decided to completely ignore my question (if you read more than the title) and my comments. | |
| Jul 12, 2021 at 12:28 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | Then I have to say you utterly failed to drive it home. The question is specifically asking whether there are any other instances than Romanian where the name of Wales or the Welsh people is synchronically identical to the word that is currently, synchronically used to refer to the historical Gauls in that language, rather than with a related, but separate, word. You don’t give any examples of this. You instead counter the question’s statement that there don’t seem to be any examples of it with the words “except for…” followed by a list of non-examples. | |
| Jul 12, 2021 at 12:09 | comment | added | LаngLаngС | @JanusBahsJacquet Ahm? Those fallacies are exactly the point to drive home here? | |
| Jul 12, 2021 at 12:03 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | I had to give this answer a downvote, because it is so heavily infused with etymological fallacies. The statement that French Pays de Galles, etc., are parallel to the Romanian name in meaning ‘Country of the Gauls’ is blatantly false. The French name for the Gauls is Gaulois, and a parallel to the Romanian name would be Pays de Gaulois, which is not what Wales is called. Similarly with Italian (Galles vs Galli), Turkish (Galli vs Galyalılar), Spanish (Galeses vs Galos), Portuguese (Galeses vs Gauleses) and presumably all the others. None conflate the two. | |
| Jul 6, 2021 at 13:27 | comment | added | Adam Bittlingmayer | @cipricus True, the form with â lost that sense if it ever had it. Maybe you should revive it. ;-) | |
| Jul 5, 2021 at 21:15 | comment | added | cipricus |
@AdamBittlingmayer - român means either. No. I am Romanian. In Romanian "român" means Romanian (from Romania — not from Rome! we may love Latinity but we are not crazy!) — while "roman" means Roman, from Rome (and a and â are different sounds; the first is like the first vowel you hear in "mother"; the second is absent in English, but if you hear a vowel after "going" that's it!). Etymologically the former comes from the latter in the way "English" comes from the word "Engla", which means of course something different (the English are not just a bunch of Germanic tribes, are they?)
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| Nov 22, 2019 at 11:00 | comment | added | vectory | *walhaz has no certain etymology, so you are handwaving away a lot of issues if you say "As it really just means at its root "Country of those speaking differently from us"". There is no such root in PIE, I guess, so the given interpretation may be secondary; misattribution, basically. | |
| Nov 21, 2019 at 19:35 | comment | added | Adam Bittlingmayer | It's as if in English instead of "Romania" you would say "Country of the Romans". In fact in Romanian it is a bit like that, român means either. And in most languages, there is no distinction between Roman referring to the ancient empire and referring to the modern city, in some it also refers to ehnic Greeks, in others to all Westerners. Vlach is very ambiguous too. | |
| Nov 21, 2019 at 14:35 | comment | added | cipricus | @melissa_boiko - a complementary question that would clarify things if answered: When was the name of Wales first mentioned in Romanian, and in which form? | |
| Nov 21, 2019 at 14:27 | comment | added | cipricus | @melissa_boiko - So that the phrase "The Welsh are the people living in Wales" sounds literally like "The Welsh are the people living in the Country of the Gauls " (which is Gaul, present France, in Romanian). Even if Gauls and Welsh are Celtic peoples and their names have an old common root, that confusion is not made in other languages. It's as if in English instead of "Romania" you would say "Country of the Romans". Romania is the country of Romanians (not Romans) just as Wales is country of the Welsh (not Gauls). | |
| Nov 21, 2019 at 14:15 | comment | added | cipricus |
@melissa_boiko - Gales is a simple cognate of Wales . Indeed. But Wales is not "Galia" (Gaul in Romanian), nor can we call the Welsh simply "Gauls". But that's what happened when Wales was translated as "Country of the Gauls", even if the Welsh are called "galezi" and not "gali". - The point of the question is to find if there are other translations/transcriptions of Wales similar to that into Romanian. I wasn't able to find one (maybe Corsican:co.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paese_di_Gallia, co.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francia#Storia ?), but I need to know for sure.
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| Nov 21, 2019 at 13:36 | comment | added | cipricus | By the way: just like Galizia/Galicia/ Halycia, Romanian Galaţi most probably doesn't come from anything related to the Celts, but has a Cuman origin: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gala%C8%9Bi#Etymology_and_names | |
| Nov 18, 2019 at 21:12 | comment | added | melissa_boiko | @cipricus not sure what's the point of the question if it's just to list other languages but you mean as in Portuguese País de Gales? Gales is a simple cognate of Wales (in the same g/w relation seen in many words like e.g. guerra < *werra > war), so I find that quite predictable? | |
| Nov 18, 2019 at 17:38 | history | migrated | from history.stackexchange.com (revisions) | ||
| Nov 18, 2019 at 9:13 | comment | added | cipricus |
I find some parts confusing. Etymology, the meaning of the origin-word, doesn't necessarily count for the present meaning of the word. Therefore, Welsh, Galli, Gaul, Celt all mean the same thing. is very problematic. Also: Can “Wales” be translated as “Country of the Gauls”? - Yes. And: 'gal' and 'galez' denoted the same thing but then evolved into a split of two slightly different meanings: that is not the case, as these Romanian words are very recent (post 1850-60 if not later), introduced directly from French. I will edit the question to meet such points.
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| Nov 17, 2019 at 19:26 | comment | added | cipricus | My question simply is: are there other cases where in a language the name of Wales is constructed in direct relation to the Gauls (like in Romanian)? The fact that the name Welsh/Wales is related to the Celtic people is not really the answer here. Simply put, Gaul does not mean just "Celtic" — at least not in French (gaulois), Romanian (gal), etc — but from Gaul, roughly land of present France, no more than Welsh does. The origin of these terms is not their meaning. Calling Wales "Tara Galilor" in Romanian is like calling it "Tara Galatenilor" (Country of people from Galaţi). | |
| Nov 17, 2019 at 19:09 | comment | added | cipricus | The answer is impressive but a bit too much for my needs. I am aware of the history of the name Vlach/Wallachian, and the relation to Welsh (also Waloon, etc). There is an old common origin , but then we have different (hi)stories and especially different meanings. What initially meant "foreign" for Germans evolved in more specific and different meanings: Celtic, Roman, Italian, Romanian. In French "gaulois" and "gallois" are two very different things, just like "gal" and "galez" in Romanian, even if the name of the country is the result of a confusion. | |
| Nov 16, 2019 at 12:07 | comment | added | LаngLаngС | @jamesqf Isn't that covered sufficiently with "As a general rule…" with the Anglo-Saxons doing this exonyming? | |
| Nov 16, 2019 at 5:02 | comment | added | jamesqf | Somewhere in there, you seem to have missed what seems to be a fairly important point: Wales and Welsh are the names the English gave to the country and language, not the names the people of that country use. (And perhaps other countries then copied the English name, varying the pronounciation a bit.) Much as Japan in English is Nihon in Nihongo. | |
| Nov 16, 2019 at 1:33 | comment | added | kimchi lover | You left out that strange plant product, the walnut! | |
| Nov 15, 2019 at 20:38 | history | answered | LаngLаngС | CC BY-SA 4.0 |