I can take note, when I find them (or remember more) and add them here.
For now I had just taken note of some false friends that are often quite hilarious (by the way I can post some here too, just for fun)
More seriously…the Latinish words really help me a lot, when listening to radio or TV, to understand the topics!
Then if you add actual English words that people often use, and English-sounding or Welshicized…Welshified English…well whatever, you know what I mean…there’s a whole lot of words that can be identified pretty easily - that’s great!
Really?Let me check what they mean…
oh right, now I know what they mean in Welsh, I can guess the origin - but they sound really different from Italian so it was hard to guess (I’m not such a big expert of Latin).
What does patella mean in English, by the way? I’ve never heard it before.
‘Patella’ is borrowed direct from Latin to mean the bone of the knee-cap, which is a sort of shallow bowl-shape of bone
Isn’t braich something like bracchio in Italian? (French, Catalan bras, like English ‘embrace’, ‘vambrace’ ‘bracelet’).
I don’t know about coes in Italian, and to be honest I checked the etymology in the GPC before posting, but I was thinking of Portuguese coxa and French cuisse ‘thigh’. (It helped a bit that I’d got the Portuguese wrong in my head - I’ve always thought it was coixa, which would sound more like coes – but it isn’t .)
Patella then in Italian is rotula. Probably a doctor would have known!
Oh by the way, here’s another Italian-Latin one I remembered: Meddyg!
Patella in Italian is actually a sort of tiny clam that you can spot on rocks in the sea - but for some reason I thought it wouldn’t be the same in English.
Above the patella, in a coes, you have the coscia, in fact - that’s Italian for thigh.
But just like braccio the link to braich to an Italian ear is not that obvious - because it’s got that soft “c” and Welsh “ch” is really different and so are “es” and “scia”!
And just for a laugh, here’s a bunch of funny false friends - although skipping the naughty ones, that are actually quite a few, especially if you consider dialects and regional pronunciation variants!
[In brackets, the actual Italian words that I mistakenly heard or that it reminds me]
bara = coffin (bara)
ymbarel = on a stretcher (in barella)
i fwyta = raisin/currant (uvetta)
eto = hectogram (etto)
panad = bread soup from southern Piedmont (panada)
braf = good boy, as pronounced with a teasing tone and some southern accent (“braaaav”)
yw rheina = urine (urina)
ofyn i = something related to sheeps (ovini)
ffugiol = son (figghiolu - in Calabrese and Sicilian dialects)
And if you ever wondered why some Welsh+Italian romantic moments didn’t work too well
cariad, cariadon = with a cavity (cariato)
[Edit - new findings]
safon (a) = Savona (town in Liguria region)
I know of two books that detail the influence of Latin in Welsh: ‘The Latin Element in Welsh’, 1908, Samuel James Evans, and ‘Yr Elfen Ladin yn yr Iaith Gymraeg’, 1943, Henry Lewis. They both contain lists of loan words, of which there are hundreds, and also an explanation of the sound shifts. Some surprising, e.g. ‘cynnwys’ from ‘condens-’, although upon reflection, it makes sense, others like ‘ffa’ from ‘faba’ quite normal really
cynnwys from ‘condens-’ would never have occurred to me; but yes, I’m thinking particularly about the slightly less obvious ones – not so recherché that you have to go out and get yourself a degree in Comparative Celtic Philology, but the sort of ones that are maybe only obvious after you’ve made the connection. And not just Latin borrowings, although I think that’s going to be the main source of recognizable roots.
Well, some words are more recognizable in written form, like llaeth or llyfrau and related - that look almost the same but do not sound like their latin cousins at all.
While some others, like cynnwys and terfyn, do give a hint if you hear them, more than when you see them.
As for ffa…well…sure it can be connected to fava (fava bean) and also fagiolo/faseolus/phaseolus (bean) and fagiolino (green bean) too, but it’s basically just a syllable and so many other words begin with fa…
I remembered now that i think that someone had probably posted a link to a webpage with a list of Welsh words with Latin origin before in this Forum, but I can’t find it.
I was reading today that the original parent celtic language probably originated about 4000BC, so I guess we have to consider borrowings as things that occurred in both directions.
For really early stuff it’s often going to be difficult to distinguish between borrowings and shared inheritance from an even earlier stage, but I think both English ‘cat’ and ‘car’ are reckoned to come from Celtic words borrowed into Latin; and English ‘rich’ comes directly from Celtic rix/rig- ‘king’, as the -i- sound is the wrong vowel for it to be either original in Germanic or borrowed from Latin rex.
I guess chariot racing - leading ultimately to its reincarnations as car, carriage etc was “the” sport - the romans loved it and the celtic speaking lot were supposedly equally obsessed and renowned for being good at it. A common shared sporting interest and a shared vocabulary?
Alright it does sound different than Terminator. However, it still sound badass enough to me!
Then, about Latin…don’t forget that the sound of “e” and “r” in Welsh is like Italian not like English, and that’s actually enough for me to hear echoes of termine and terminus in terfynwr.
Should check @Novem’s impression, too - since we were talking with her about surprising similarities of sounds between the two languages before.
I don’t know enough about Italic (Latin and related languages like Oscan and Umbrian) to know how we’re supposed to tell that carrus was borrowed into Latin, rather than a shared inheritance, but if I remember correctly it is supposed to have been borrowed. Maybe it was originally a technical term for a particularly Celtic style of vehicle – like calling something a landau or a cabriolet?
Oh, I didn’t mean to tell you it didn’t sound reminiscent of termine – and more so of that, than it does in English – just that (with appropriate graphics) maybe it looks a bit like it, too
Nor me - a lot of people seem to say that carrus was borrowed for whatever that means, but as you say it may have been already present in the same common language - i. e. the hypothesised Proto-Italo-Celtic languages (or perhaps more simply just celtic, before Italic split away), which purportedly existed long after the other families, Germanic, Slavic etc had diverged. All conjecture I guess.
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