Sir William Wallace of Braveheart fame, the country of Wales, and a walnut are all closely related, although not in the way one might think. The Germanic wealh meant “foreign”, and both Wales and Cornwall were so-named because they were full of Kelts who didn’t speak English. (The “corn” in Cornwall seems to be “horn”, from the shape of the peninsula.) The family names Welch, Walsh, Waugh, Wallis, and Wallace (Norman French Waleis) are from this “no speak English” sense. The word was by no means restricted to the English vs. the Kelts who shared their island. Other Germanic uses include the Walloons (Waalsch) who don’t speak good Dutch, the Swiss canton of Valais which obstinately speaks French instead of German, and residents of the province of Wallachia speak Rumanian (Vlach) instead of German. 22Sep09 Welscher is German for “Italian”, while Swedish välsk and Danish vaelsk both mean Italian, French, or “southerner” in general. The word even got borrowed by the Slavs — the Polish word for Italy is Wlochy.
Wealh also meant slave, which shouldn’t be any surprise considering that the word slave itself is simply Slav by way of the Byzantine Empire — see below for the change in pronunciation. 02Nov09 (Another example of the same process is Pawnee, a Plains (Siouan) Indian tribe. That’s the Algonkian word for “slave”.) Also see below for the Slavic word for “slave”, which is robot, as well as the relationship between slave, Hercules, loud, and Louis.
(An extreme example of how a word can get modified over time is the Italian greeting ciao, which is “slave” again! C.f. “your servant, madam” as an archaic polite greeting in English. It went from medieval Latin sclavus to Italian schiavo, which in northern Italian dialects was pronounced “chow”.)
Anyway, the walnut was a “foreign nut” (from continental Europe and ultimately from Persia) as opposed to the native chestnut, acorn, beechnut, hazelnut or filbert, etc.
The general contempt for those who don’t speak the same language certainly extended to the ancient Greeks, whose name for those speaking other languages was barbarian. This meant people who went “bar-bar-bar-”, i.e., spoke nonsense. In addition to those who don’t know Greek, other creatures that allegedly make that sound include a babbler, baby, booby, Berber, and baboon, while balbus is Latin for “stammerer”. Berber and Barbary are from an Arabic word that means “babble” or “confused noise”; Arabic etymologists insist it’s a native term, not related to the Greek, but it’s certainly of the same derogatory formation. Going down to the other end of Africa, the now-offensive term Hottentot seems to be from a Dutch word that means “stutterer”. (The Boers did have a little more justification than the Greeks or Arabs — the “Hottentot” languages, properly called the Khoekhoe family, are the so-called “click” languages like Xhosa, whose unique consonants are unpronounceable by the rest of the world. Note those /KH/ and /XH/ consonants are pronounced as clicks.)
13Mar09 This gives me a chance to point out that rhubarb is of the same formation as “walnut”. The plant’s name was originally rha. Since the good kind was imported from the East (it is native to China) the Greeks called it rhabarbarum, foreign rha. They also had rhapontic, the domestic stuff, which evidently wasn’t as well regarded.
Despite the “obvious” connection, babble is not related to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. The latter is more usually called Babylon, and it is Semitic Bab-ili, Gate of the Gods. The strait between Arabia and East Africa at the entrance to the Red Sea is the Bab-el-Mandeb — Gate of Tears. The “gate” sense was also implicit in the name of the Babylon Five television series about a space station used as a meeting place by multiple races.
PS — that Semitic word for god is in other more obvious terms. As -el it’s in a lot of familiar biblical words from Hebrew eloah such as Bethel (house of God), the angels Michael, Gabriel, Rafael, and Azrael, and personal names such as Israel (Soldier of God, a name given to Jacob), Samuel (Name of God), Daniel (God is Judge), Elijah (God is Lord), Ezekiel (God’s Strength), Lazarus (Hebrew Eleazar, helped by God), Eliot (the Lord is God), Ishmael (God will hear), and Elizabeth (Consecrated to God). One of the few Hebrew names which is translated in the English Bible is Emmanuel — God is With Us. Some sections of the Hebrew scriptures use Elohim as the name of God instead of JHVH.
Meanwhile, the Arabic Allah is shortened from al-ilah, using the definite article to signify The [one and only] God, a distinction English makes by capitalization. 02May09 Bismillah is a common Arabic phrase often heard in conversation; it’s usually translated as “God willing”. Ayatollah means “sign of God”. A rather amusing derivative might be the Spanish cry of Olé!, which is possibly a borrowed form of Allah! Since Allah is simply “God” in Arabic, those unfamiliar with the language are sometimes surprised to find it used by Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews — Jesus the Son of Allah, Moses receiving the commandments from Allah, and so on. 15Dec09 Recently, at least one Islamic state (Malaysia) has made it illegal for non-Muslims to use the word and is attempting to prosecute the local Arabic-language Catholic newspaper and confiscate Arabic bibles.
Although it looks as if they might be related to the above, Phoenician Baal and Hebrew Beelzebub are not. Baal (lord, master) actually has a ”catch“ in the middle and should be written ba’al. Hannibal and the Babylonian king Belshazzar also contain the same element. Beelzebub is an example of folk etymology in Hebrew, by the way. It is ba’al zebub, lord of the fly, a derisive alteration of the name of one of the Philistine gods, ba’al zebul, Lord Prince. C.f. Jezebel, “Where is the Prince?”.
Phoenician (aka Punic), Aramaic, and Hebrew are often grouped together as dialects of Canaanite, being more closely related to each other than they are to the Arabic, Ethiopian, or Akkadian (Assyrian, Babylonian) branches of Semitic. I’ve been told that Israelis can understand 2,500-year-old Punic inscriptions with no problem. For example, the Phoenician chief colony in the West was Karth Hadashah (Carthage) while modern Hebrew for “new city” is Kiryath Hadashah. A valid comparison might be Spanish and Portuguese, which are much closer to each other than either is to Italian or French. (The Spanish port city of Cartagena is another “new city” of the Phoenicians, of course. When it was taken by the Romans during the Punic Wars, they renamed it Carthago Nova — “New New City”.)
I suppose this is the point to insert a linguistic and ethnic protest against popular use of the word Semitic, which is usually completely inaccurate. Newspapers and web sites often use the phrase anti-Semitic as a euphemism when they mean anti-Jewish [religion], anti-Israel [state], or anti-Zionist [political movement] instead. Consider a recent headline: “Anti-Semitism on Rise among Arabs.” This is highly unlikely, since Arabs are Semites by definition. In fact, while the average Jordanian, Saudi, Syrian, or Palestinian is indeed Semitic, the average Israeli is not — the majority of Israel’s Jewish population is of European or American stock, and there are nearly as many Semitic Muslims as Semitic Jews in that country. 18Oct09 Note that people who are pro-Palestinian are routinely called “anti-Semitic”.
18Oct09 Similarly, if asked for the most common Semitic language, many people would respond “Hebrew”. The correct answer is of course Arabic, but Hebrew isn’t even number two — there are many more speakers of Ethiopian than Hebrew.
12Mar09 Interestingly, the words Palestine (the territory) and Philistine (a former inhabitant thereof), are not Semitic in origin. The original Philistines who moved into Canaan and fought the Israelites around 1,200 BCE seem to have died out and been replaced with the Arabic stock that still lives there, but the name of the territory has endured. (The use of “philistine” to mean someone without culture is 17th-century German university slang for a “townie”, from a preacher at Jena using the biblical text “the Philistines are upon thee” after a fatal town and gown riot. It didn’t get picked up into English until about 1825.)
Also note the distressing tendency of some Americans to lump all non-Israeli residents of the Middle East as “Arabs”. Calling an Afghan, Kurd, Pakistani, or Iranian an “Arab” can be dangerous, since they are Indo-Europeans and quite proud of it, and the Turks are ethnically central Asians. (In like fashion, one can be hospitalized for telling a short-tempered Scot or Welshman that he lives in England, and if visiting Cyprus, don’t even think of confusing a Turk with a Greek!) Similarly, “Arab” is occasionally misused as a synonym for “Muslim”, which quite surprises Malaysians, Turks, Nigerians, American Black Muslims, and the Christian Arabs who are minorities in many Middle-Eastern countries — the Egyptian Copts, for example. Lebanon, an Arabic-speaking country with a mostly Semitic population, is 40% Christian. 22Jan10 World-wide, only about 20% of Muslims are Arabs — the countries with the largest Islamic population are Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Egypt (Semitic) is number five, but it’s followed by Nigeria, Iran, and Turkey.
22Sep09 In current American political invective, persons who do not approve of President Obama sometimes call him an “Arab”, although his father was Kenyan.
It’s sometimes been erroneously said that the doctrinal split between the Sunni and Shi’a branches of Islam is really ethnic, between the Shiite Indo-Europeans and the Sunni Semites. Unfortunately for this theory, that divide isn’t nearly so clean, as anyone with a passing familiarity with events in Iraq ought to know. Iraq is 20% Sunni Arabs, 60% Shiite Arabs, and 20% Sunni Kurds. That is, three-quarters of the country’s Semites are Shiite, and the Indo-Europeans are Sunni! For centuries there actually was an ethnic/religious division of the Middle East, but it was between the Sunni Ottoman Turks and their mortal enemies the Shiite Persian Empire, with the Semites sort of caught in the middle.
Historically, the schism goes clear back to the death of Muhammad in 632 ce. The Prophet had no sons, and there was a dispute over who was his proper successor, his cousin Ali (the first Imam), or his son-in-law Abu Bakr (the first Caliph). C.f. the Hundred Years War, another example of a dispute over succession through the female line.
Islam reckons dates from the year of the Hegira, the removal of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 ce, so one often sees such dates as 123 ah — anno hegirae. Unfortunately, one cannot simply add 622 to a Muslim date to obtain the Christian equivalent, because the Islamic year is a lunar one, with only 354 or 355 days. For example, 2008 AD is 1429 AH, more or less, a difference of 579. 02May09 If my algebra is correct, in about 19,000 years the two calendars will have caught up, and 21133 ce will also be 21133 ah. Jews also use a lunar calendar, but they stay close to the civil calendar by throwing in a leap month now and then. For example, Passover is always somewhere in the vicinity of the Vernal Equinox, but Ramadan “drifts” throughout the civil year.
One last linguistic note: In Arabic, Muslims add some variant of the phrase aleyhi salaam, “Peace Be Upon Him”, as an honorific after the name of Muhammad or another prophet or archangel, both when speaking and in print. Thus in English-language text written by a Muslim, it is common to see “Muhammad (PBUH)”, “Jesus Christ (PBUH)”, and so on.