On an Eupedia.com linguistics forum, a user with the handle Maciamo wrote: "Quite a few [Wallonian] words have direct Germanic roots."
If Maciamo hadn't used the word "roots," I would've never even flinched. But I'd just read a long treatise on a Facebook site, Irish Medieval History, and had spent an afternoon tracking down all manner of leads on rabbits—double-checking their information. The Irish have no word for a rabbit nor do the English or the Germans!
In Irish coinín (kun een) is the word used for a rabbit. It derives from the Latin “cunīculus”. Similarly in English the word used was “coney” which was correctly pronounced like the Irish as “cunny”. Rabbits were not native to northern Europe which is why there was no Germanic or Celtic word for them.
Well, I wanted to share my wealth of new-found knowledge (see below). I even joined Eupedia, a feat that took far too long, only to find that I couldn't post a comment anyway. So I'm posting it here.
RE: Walloon, a Germanised Romance language ?
RE: Walloon, a Germanised Romance language ?
conén (or conin) => rabbit/lapin (Danish/Norwegian/Swedish = "kanin", Dutch = "konijn", German = "Kaninchen")
robète => another Walloon word for rabbit (from Middle Dutch "robbe", obviously sharing a root with the English "rabbit")
Maciamo, you erroneously assumed that because there are similarities between certain Germanic words and Walloon words, ergo, Walloon borrowed words from the German, or the Dutch.
In the case of coney, or rabbit, you couldn't be more wrong. I suspect your other examples wouldn't hold up to close linguistic scrutiny either.
Both are loan words—as Iberian coneys/rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) were not native to northern Europe. (Hispania, from the Phoenician, means 'the land of rabbits.') There is no native word for coney or rabbit in Celtic or Teutonic, nor mention of coney or rabbit in England before the Norman period.
You need to trace words back to their earliest sources before you can make that kind of declarative statement. Had you done your homework, you would've discovered that rabbits are not native to northern Europe and that the words (and rabbits) were borrowed from iberia.
The word robète does NOT sharing a root with the English word for rabbit, because that too was borrowed from the Latin. There were no native rabbits in Britain, they arrived during the 12th c. with the Normans. Rabbits were first domesticated by monks during the 5th c. in what is now France. (And the word ‘rabbit,’ from the French, means a young conin, or coney.)
OED a. A rabbit: formerly the proper and ordinary name, but now superseded in general use by rabbit, which was originally a name for the young only.
TheFreeDictionary:[Middle English coni, from Old French conis, pl. of conil, from Latin cunculus, possibly from cunnus,cunus, female pudenda.]
Coney used to rhyme with bunny, was a slang term for a red-light district, so it fell out of favor, so to speak.
English Language & Usage: OFr. conil, connil, cogn. w. Pr. conil, Sp. conejo, Pg.coelho, Ital. coneglio:-L. cunīcul-us rabbit, according to ancient authors a word of Spanish origin. The OFr. pl. (with l suppressed) coniz, later conis, gave an Eng. pl. conys, conies, and this a singular cony, conie. The ME. cunin, konyne, conyng was a. OFr. conin, connin, Anglo-Fr. coning, a parallel form to conil, which gave also MDutch conijn, Dutch konijn, and, with a for o, LG. kanîn, whence mod.G. dim. kaninchen. In Eng. the form cunyng, cunning came down to the 16th c.; but from the 12th c. onward it varied also with cunig, conig, connyg.
It has no native name in Celtic or Teutonic, and there is no mention of it in England before the Norman period; in the quotations the fur, perhaps imported, appears before the animal. The Welsh cwning, cwningen, is from ME.; the Irish coinnín, and Gaeliccoinean, coinein from ME. or AFr."
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/81085/coney-and-rabbit-what-s-the-difference
In the case of coney, or rabbit, you couldn't be more wrong. I suspect your other examples wouldn't hold up to close linguistic scrutiny either.
Both are loan words—as Iberian coneys/rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) were not native to northern Europe. (Hispania, from the Phoenician, means 'the land of rabbits.') There is no native word for coney or rabbit in Celtic or Teutonic, nor mention of coney or rabbit in England before the Norman period.
You need to trace words back to their earliest sources before you can make that kind of declarative statement. Had you done your homework, you would've discovered that rabbits are not native to northern Europe and that the words (and rabbits) were borrowed from iberia.
The word robète does NOT sharing a root with the English word for rabbit, because that too was borrowed from the Latin. There were no native rabbits in Britain, they arrived during the 12th c. with the Normans. Rabbits were first domesticated by monks during the 5th c. in what is now France. (And the word ‘rabbit,’ from the French, means a young conin, or coney.)
OED a. A rabbit: formerly the proper and ordinary name, but now superseded in general use by rabbit, which was originally a name for the young only.
TheFreeDictionary:[Middle English coni, from Old French conis, pl. of conil, from Latin cunculus, possibly from cunnus,cunus, female pudenda.]
Coney used to rhyme with bunny, was a slang term for a red-light district, so it fell out of favor, so to speak.
English Language & Usage: OFr. conil, connil, cogn. w. Pr. conil, Sp. conejo, Pg.coelho, Ital. coneglio:-L. cunīcul-us rabbit, according to ancient authors a word of Spanish origin. The OFr. pl. (with l suppressed) coniz, later conis, gave an Eng. pl. conys, conies, and this a singular cony, conie. The ME. cunin, konyne, conyng was a. OFr. conin, connin, Anglo-Fr. coning, a parallel form to conil, which gave also MDutch conijn, Dutch konijn, and, with a for o, LG. kanîn, whence mod.G. dim. kaninchen. In Eng. the form cunyng, cunning came down to the 16th c.; but from the 12th c. onward it varied also with cunig, conig, connyg.
It has no native name in Celtic or Teutonic, and there is no mention of it in England before the Norman period; in the quotations the fur, perhaps imported, appears before the animal. The Welsh cwning, cwningen, is from ME.; the Irish coinnín, and Gaeliccoinean, coinein from ME. or AFr."
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/81085/coney-and-rabbit-what-s-the-difference
