Re: Names of countries and national languages

Quoting Daniel Prohaska <daniel@...>:

> I doubt it ever meant "foreigner" even in Old English. I think "Welsh" was
> the Germanic word for "Celt", as pointed out either from the Celtic word for
> the people the Romans called <Volcae> or borrowed from Latin.
>
> It is too much of a coincidence that German dialect speakers in the
> Germanic-Romance contact zone (formally the Germanic-Celtic contact zone)
> would call the Romance speakers "Welsch", while their Slavonic neighbours
> are called "Windisch" or "Wendisch". If "Welsch" were the ford for
> "foreigner", wouldn't the have considered the Slavic speakers "foreign" as
> well?

I'm not sure if that would be asking very much of coincidence, particularly if
_walh_ is of Celtic origin - maybe it didn't spread to eastern lects, that were
reduced to refering to funny-speaking furners in other ways.

What sense of "Celt" to you imagine, anyway? Linguistic? Cultural? If it indeed
never meant any foreigner, the distribution of specific groups labeled as _walh_
suggests to me a politico-cultural reference to the peoples of the Roman empire.
Do we know of far back the term goes?

 Andreas

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