Re: CHAT: Vlach (was: Roumania...)

At 2:21 pm -0400 18/4/99, Nik Taylor wrote:
>"Raymond A. Brown" wrote:
>> But it is not in origin a Slav word but was borrowed from Germanic and is
>> cognate with modern German 'welsch' and English 'Welsh' both meaning
>> "Roman" whether Latin speaking, as in southern Europe, or Celtic-speaking
>> as in the case of Romano-Brits.
>
>Actually, if I'm not mistaken, the English "Welsh" comes from a word
>meaning "foreigner" or "slave".
I really don't see why the word is not cognate with modern German adjective
"welsch" = Roman, Latin, French, Italian, southern (European).  Indeed to
posit a different origin seems to me perverse.

AFAIK the Old English for "foreign" was 'fremde' which just about survived
into the modern Eng. period in dialects as 'fremd', 'fremit'. 'fraim' etc.
and is, of course, cognate with German 'fremd' = foreign, strange, exotic.

Of course the foreigners the Angles & other such people on the western part
of the Germanic world came into contact with were almost entirely from the
Roman lands to their south & west so 'wealh', 'welisc' may well have
acquired a _secondary_ meaning of 'foreign'.  However, it seems to me
significant that in fact in English the word has not developed a more
generalized meaning than its German counterpart but has gone quite the
opposite way: it has developed a more restricted meaning, i.e. the
descendants of RomanoBrits only & not all Romanized peoples.

I must admit I've never heard it suggested that 'wealh'/ 'welisc' meant
"slave".   AFAIK there was no germanic word for this.  The word that
eventually came into the Germanic languages & was them past on to the
western Romance langs was, of course, 'Slav' since the continental Germans
raided the Slav peoples whenever they wanted slaves.  But the meaning
'slave' was secondary and derived from the ethnicon and merely reflected
the predatory habits of the continental Germanic peoples.  I daresay the
early Angle & Saxon invaders of Britain would make forays into the 'Welsh'
to replenish the stock of slaves from time to time.  But if 'wealh' /
'welisc' was ever used with the meaning slave it must surely have been very
much a _secondary_ meaning as, originally, was 'slave' derived from 'Slav'.


Methinks there is a confusion of primary & secondary meanings here.

Ray.