"ivanovas/milatos" <
ivanova-@...> wrote:
original article:
http://www.egroups.com/group/cybalist/?start=1169
> Hello,
>
> Actually the 18th/19th cent. German word for Walnuà was Welsche NuÃ
- and that referred to Italy as the place it came from. So I suppose
the 'Gallic' wasn't so very clear then any more - although I always had
the gut feeling (from all the bits of literature that mentioned the
nuts and the land) this 'Welschland' didn't mean the whole of Italy,
bust just the Alpine part of it. Wouldn't that still fit the
'Celtic-Gallic'?
>
Well, the Polish word for 'walnut' is _orzech wÅoski_, which means...
guess what... 'Italian nut'. Must be a calque from German. Whatever the
historical subtleties, *walx- refers generally to Celts and/or Romans,
or perhaps to other Romanised peoples. The ancient Germani were not
linguists; Gaulish or Romance was the same damn thing to them. Likewise
the Romans could never tell apart the Celts and the Germani quite
consistently, and didn't see much difference between the Goths and the
Sarmatians, or between either of them and the Slavs. Many of my
students think that Estonian is a Baltic language.
>
> Sabine
>
> P.S. 'magoula' in modern Greek is '(round) cheek'. Where did that
come from?
>
I don't know but I can check. My first impression is that it might be
Slavic *mogyla 'earth mound' > 'hill, prominence' > 'anything round and
convex', but I don't know if such derived meanings are attested in the
adjacent Slavic dialects.
Piotr