I seem to remember that on some small island cultures (Easter Island?) “sea ward” and “landward” are used in the same way. Towards or away from the sea depending where you are standing instead of left or right.
Could be wrong, though.
1 Like
I’m sure there are fields within linguistics that focus entirely on lexicon and geography, as well as accent/intonation and geography. Although I don’t (yet) agree with you, you’ve ignited my interest and I’ve been reading about the topic of languages and geography since I read your comment this morning. Diolch!
Diolch yn fawr iawn. I had put the ‘de’ = right/South thing down to coincidence but I can see the connection, yes.
For some reason, I can’t open the links you provided to the Etymology thread so please forgive me if I’m asking something that has already been discussed in that thread.
What’s the link between ‘Gogledd’ and ‘left’?
Is it more common for the word for ‘South’ to be the same as ‘Right’ in some languages than it is for the word ‘Left’ to mean ‘North’?
This reminds me of something I read. The Proto-Indo-Europeans didn’t even have a word that means’ left’. They only had something like ‘decs’ to convey ‘right’ but no word to convey the opposite of ‘decs’. I wonder if this was the same for ‘South and North’ then? Hard to imagine. I’ll dig around, but if someone can enlighten me on this, I’d be interested to know more about the connections that Owain discussed above.
Also, if the Welsh word ‘de’ means right/dextrous/deft/good, and it also means ‘South’, and the Welsh word ‘chwith’ means left/awkard/strange/sinister, and if there’s a link between ‘Gogledd’ and ‘chwith’ (of which I don’t know about yet), does this mean that people used to view the South as being ‘good and right’ and the North as being ‘sinister’?
2 Likes
@Mererid “Cledd” is an old Welsh word for “left”, apparently occurring in the oldest texts and related to Middle Breton “cleiz”, Cornish “cledh” and old Irish “cle”.
Thus when looking towards the “rising”, “dwyrain”, north is to the “go+cledd”.
And the west is could be towards the “golleuin”, the oldest form of “gorllewin”, “go+lleu +(in)?”, towards the twilight, though this is less straightforward.
Mind you, similar to the way “west” is ultimately related to “vesper”.
My limited research seems to imply that the etymological connections between “north” and “left” are more common than those between “right” and “south”, but that is simply an impression not to be relied on. The real answer is I don’t know.
7 Likes
Fabulous - diolch for that explanation.
1 Like
Now, there is a clear connection in English between ‘right’ and… er… right (correct)!! Children were encouraged to use the ‘right’ hand. As for directions, wouldn’t you tend to find that north was ‘to winter’ or ‘to cold’ and south ‘to summer’ or ‘to warm’, and as you notice, east and west to rising and setting of the sun!! (South could be ‘to light’ and north ‘to dark’ also!!).
1 Like
Ooh, even if you’re wrong, I’m going to believe it until further notice, because it’s so lovely it ought to be real… 
I didn’t know that - thank you Stella!
1 Like
And I see Max Vasmer’s etymological dictionary agrees with you - you are on safe ground, Stella!! 
1 Like
Thank you! I was actually afraid that I was falling victim of the fashion to find those “common Indoeuropean” roots even when there’s no trace of them, in truth. Etymology’s such a shaky ground - I remember at high school in Italy we did a fascinating lesson on the medieval etymology and its passion for finding moralistic didactic roots for Latin words:)
But it’s very pleasant to know that Welsh and Russian, being so very different, share a word:)
They share many… зима / gaeaf is one of my favourites:)
2 Likes
Oh, this is beautiful! Thank you very much, I didn’t know that:)
True, but it does seem that “ffroga” and thence the slightly odd change to “broga” come ultimately from English- according to the geiriadur prifysgol Cymru, anyway.
Very interesting info though!
“Etymology’s such a shaky ground”
And unfortunately, Edward Lhuyd’s Archaeologica Britainnica is often overlooked as a trailblazer in this sort of thing. Taking etymology to a scientific ground. But it only dealt with “celtic” languages (a term he introduced). Etymological fields seem to sometimes know little of Welsh, which makes me wonder how much the wider field really knows of any minor language, but that is another topic!
3 Likes
That is so cool.
In another thread, mention has happened of The Marches, the Marcher Lords etc…This led me to my nice new copy of ‘Roots and Branches’ to see if there was mention of march = stallion, marchog = rider or knight etc. No, but he does note marchnad = market, which made me realise that ‘heard’ Cymraeg would lead to English ‘mark’ not ‘march’. Now we know market and merchant and all those come from Mercury, Dydd Mercher, Mercredi. and I can see that merchants travelled, so is that the source of marching in English, which is done more, really, by the “poor bl**y infantry” than the cavalry?
I got to thinking that in Scotland people talk of ‘messages’ when they mean shopping or marketing. Does that come from the same (French?) root as the soldiers’ mess? i.e. buying provisions.
Also, the English have Moonday, Tues?? Woden, Thor, Freya, Saturn and Sun. We stick with the Roman despite Sol (Sul) becoming Haul in normal speech. Why?
Oh the convolutions of human thought over the ages!!!
1 Like
Well, on the names of the week, we were here throughout the time Britain was part of the Ryokan Empire (simplifying a lot there😉!) but the Englush weren’t, so the Latin for the days of the week became ingrained in Welsh but not English. And they were the Latin for the days, and gods, rather than the objects, hence they didn’t replace the original celtic for moon and sun. Though they did become the names for the lesser used word for the planets, whatever the celtic words for those were. If they had any commonly used ones.