Re: Judajca

On Aug/24/2002, BP Jonsson wrote:

> Not exactly a coincidence, actually!  _Lucus_ means "grove" or "thicket" in
> Latin.  It also happens to be the cognate of the Sanskrit word for "world"!
        Nice. It's said that it was some kind of "holy grove", so it
makes sense. And besides, the "Lug god" theory never seemed too
plausible to me: if I were a dreadful conqueror, the last thing I'd do
would be naming my city after one of the conquered's gods ;-)

> Welcome to the list, then.  Am I guessing right that you are in Portugal?
        Well, this could bear a long explanation, not empty of political
and nationalistic tones, but to make it short: no :-)

        I'm from Galicia, which is right at the top of Portugal, but
part of Spain. Portugal and Galicia were the same thing until XII or
XIII century, and their language (galician-portuguese, as they call it,
a romance language "sister" of the rest of spanish romance languages)
was also the same. They after became part of the Kingdom of Spain, and
yet after splitted because Portugal was given to one of the king's
daughter and Galicia remained under the King's dominion. All of this
IIRC: it was long ago that I studied these things :-) Anyway, there was
the usual political strife, and Portugal became independant. The
languages became also different, because portuguese inherited a more
"arabic" feel while spreading south (as I've been told, I may be wrong),
while galician took more from its neighbour, spanish. Which, BTW, was
imposed by the kings as official language. Galician has a long history
of abuse and despise :-)

        There's a lot more that I could say about this, but I think you
could find more exact information on the web :-)

        A few random anecdotic facts / touristic plugs:

        - According to the legend, Ireland was founded by Breogan (or
          was it his son?), a galician leader. Today, Lugo's "official"
          basketball team is named after him.
        - Galicia is considered one of the "celtic countries", because
          its strong celtic culture and traditions, as its name tells
          and its popular music clearly exposes.
        - Though Franco (the dictator of Spain from 1939 to 1975) was very
          anti-galician (very anti-nationalistic, in fact), he himself was
          galician :-)
        - Galicia has a lot of roman heritage, including Lugo's roman
          wall, which is 2000 years old, 6 meters high, surrounds
          the city center, and needs some good cleaning and fixing.
        - The christian apostol Santiago (James? Jack? I don't know how
          you call him there) is buried in Galicia, in the city that is
          named after him: Santiago de Compostela.
        - Galicia has almost half of all the villages of Spain; not
          because it's big, but because its population is very dispersed
          and almost every two houses are a different village :-)
        - Julio Iglesias, the famous singer, is galician. Though we
          usually don't speak too much about it ;-)
        - Last year's (2001-2002) national soccer league was won by the
          Deportivo de la Coruña, a galician team, breaking the usual
          domination of Real Madrid and CF Barcelona. Forza Depor! :-)

        And I'll stop, because I think I was a bit carried away O:-)

--
        Roberto Suarez Soto

Replies