23 Comments
1096
It is not a coincidence, both come from Proto-Germanic *murhǭ. Welsh must have borrowed it from Old English (moru) or Middle English (more) before English borrowed French "carotte" (hence 'carrot') just as Standard German did ('Karotte').
Thanks, very helpful! NB apparently the same sort of thing happened to mutton, beef, etc. so now Germanic rooted words sound slightly vulgar and frenchified words posh. Nice to see Welsh kept their moronen.
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Germanic words for the animals, French words for the meat. The Norman conquest,. Serfs did the farming, seigneurs did the eating.
I thought that "morot" was a compound word (mo + rot) meaning "moor root", but I'm not certain anymore.
So "Moron" would be the plural form right ? What would the singular be ? I had sort of figured out the pattern of adding "au" as in oren, orennau and tegan, tegannau to form plural forms, but this is obviously a different one...
'moronen'. yes, 'au' is a common way of creating a plural in Welsh, but not the only way. sometimes the singular version is longer than the plural, e.g. moronen/moron. another example is mochyn = pig, moch = pigs. Some plurals are completely random and must just be learnt, e.g. ci = dog, cwn = dogs
I'm always straining my ear to catch a familiarity. Eine Möhre in German, морковь morkov' in Russian.
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You might be interested to know that what we call a carrot was only introduced into the UK around 1668
The audio here is faulty. It has been disabled, but it may take some before that takes effect.
"Moron" is a mass noun, so it means more or less "carrots". If you want to speak about one concrete carrot, you can use the singulative "moronen".
