I was reading along rather desultorily in Brigid von Preussen’s LRB review (archived) of Tristram Hunt’s biography of Josiah Wedgwood when I got to a passage on Wedgwood’s use of clay sent back from Australia in the late 1780s to create a medallion which he described as “Hope encouraging Art and Labour under the influence of Peace, to pursue the employment necessary to give security and happiness to an infant settlement” (you can see an image at the link). Von Preussen goes on to say: “Back at Sydney Cove, Governor Arthur Phillip was delighted to receive his copies of Wedgwood’s medallion, which ‘showed the world that our Welsh clay is capable of receiving an Eligant impression’.” That snapped me to attention: Welsh?! Then I realized, of course, that the colony Phillip was governor of was New South Wales… but was “Welsh” really used like that? The OED entry, revised in 2011, was full of interesting things (1.b. Having the status of a slave or slaves. Obsolete. rare. Only in Old English; 2.b. depreciative. Designating the lineage of a Welsh person, considered to be exaggerated and excessively lengthy. Chiefly in proverbial phrases. Frequently in Welsh pedigree. Obsolete; 4. Welsh coal. Obsolete. rare: 1905 Have you got that ‘Welsh’ trimmed? Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine January 26/2), but there was no hint of any use for NSW. So is this a nonce, perhaps jokey, usage by the governor or is the adjective occasionally used that way, flying below the radar of the OED?
I might add that the OED’s etymology is extraordinarily long, including sentences like:
In the Middle Ages, the Welsh territories consisted of several former kingdoms, subsequently ruled by princes (see prince n. II.6 and the etymological note at that entry); in the 13th cent., Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, prince of Gwynedd, established overlordship over all remaining independent parts of Wales and was acknowledged as Prince of Wales by Henry III in 1267 (Treaty of Montgomery).
You can sometimes find a fuller adjective, as in this Australian judicial decision from 1903: “the testator was domiciled in New South Wales, he appointed New South Welsh trustees, and all the assets are situate in New South Wales. I think, therefore, that these trustees are in the position of ordinary New South Welsh trustees, and, that being so, have a general power to” blah blah blah.
Or this from a 1891 census document: “318 [Tasmania-born ladies] married to husbands of New South Welsh birth probably came hither as single girls.”
That makes sense.
2.b. depreciative. Designating the lineage of a Welsh person, considered to be exaggerated and excessively lengthy.
the OED’s etymology is extraordinarily long, including sentences like …
The evidence points to Welsh redaction of the etymology.
https://australianwords.au/search/
Gives an entry “Welshie”, marked obsolete.
“Does this mean you’re gonna’ name it what I think you’re gonna’ name it?”
Why go searching documents from 1900? Isn’t “New South Welsh” standard to this day?
As a New South Welshman, yes, the full adjective seems unremarkable, but I’m not sure simple “Welsh” ever stuck.
OTOH New Englanders seem never to be New English. I wonder if the people of Poland, Maine are called Poles and/or something else.
I like the idea that the simpler “New Wales” was unavailable because the Brits were somehow parsimoniously keeping “New North Wales” in reserve for some other future colonial enterprise which never actually got established. By contrast, New Britain (near New Guinea) was apparently so named by Dampier circa 1700, in the days of a less cautious approach.
New Britain is right next to New Ireland, yet North America’s New Jersey never got a New Guernsey to match.
The common phrases I know in this context are “Welsh rabbit” (cheese on toast; often distorted to “Welsh rarebit”) and “Welsh comb” (to comb your hair by running your fingers through it) and the more unpleasant verb to welsh, meaning to dishonour a debt,
I understood (don’t know where I got the idea) that South Walians named New South Wales in that way because they couldn’t stand the “Gogs” (North Walians).
I think the only variant I’m familiar with is “New South Welshman”. I can’t recall for sure whether I’ve heard “New South Welsh” before. Definitely not Welsh. I can only speak for the most recent fifty years of course.
OTOH New Englanders seem never to be New English. I wonder if the people of Poland, Maine are called Poles and/or something else.
We Mainuhs would be easily confused by such conventions. Among our town and village names are Lisbon, South China, Norway, Smyrna, Stockholm, Lubec and Bangor.
And then there’s Burnt Porcupine.
Rumors that it was founded by shipwrecked Welshmen are apocryphal.
I have no insight to add to Andrew Dunbar other than having just looked in google books for 21st century hits for “New South Welsh.” In the first page of hits (which may not be representative, of course) it looks like most but not all of the references are in a historical rather than contemporary context. One interesting find was a 2022 book about the economic analysis of cricket, in which the authors did a regression analysis to test the apparently widespread theory that Australian national teams playing Test matches are often overweight (in comparison with total population numbers) with players from NSW for insider-bias reasons rather than reasons of superior playing skill. They say no – Australia actually does better in Test matches when fielding a team with more-than-average NSW players than it does when fielding a team with fewer-than-average ditto. But the lexical point here is that the phrase “New South Welsh players” does appear in their discussion of the issue, but is on the same page as three separate uses of “New South Wales players,” suggesting the former is a minority variant at present or was just “elegant variation” that maybe should have been squelched by better editing. The same page does have two instances of “New South Welshmen,” consistent with the claim that that specific demonym may survive in more widespread use than the bare adjective itself.
I was talking the other day to a true Mainer (born and raised, now approaching 100) who mentioned that she was from China. In addition to the places cuchuflete mentioned, there’s also Sweden and Denmark (no Finland), Mexico, and Peru.
As a new resident of the state, I am still momentarily taken aback when I’m listening to the local news and hear that a man from Norway was arrested for breaking into a house… That’s a long way to come to commit an ordinary crime.
Long before Cook, the region southwest of Hudson’s Bay in nowadays Canada was called New South Wales, though that did not last to the present.
I’ll be damned: “New Britain as a historical term of limited usage referred in its day to the poorly mapped lands of North America north of 17th-century New France. […] British visitors came to sub-divide the district loosely into the territories of New South Wales, New North Wales and Labrador.” Thanks for that!
Welsh pedigree
There is actually a reason for this: as early as the thirteenth century, outside the most heavily Anglicised areas there were hardly any taeogion “villeins” left in Wales – an actual majority of the rural population were in feudal terms bonheddwyr “gentry.” So these pedigrees were mostly real, and the more treasured as most bonheddwyr eventually became very poor.
English mockery of this seems to have started early. The English are only really impressed by money. Thatcherism appeals to their national character …
The article doesn’t say, but the non-Labrador parts of that “New Britain” were mostly/entirely in what ultimately became better-known as Rupert’s Land. That toponym apparently dates back to circa 1670, when the rights to the land were given by H.M. Charles II to the Hudson Bay Company, whose initial CEO (or maybe that’s not the right modern analogy for the role) was his royal cousin Prince Rupert. I guess someone would need to review a bunch of old maps and other documents to see how quickly Rupert’s Land became dominant and drove its toponymic rivals out of use.
David E.’s story re the bonheddwyr:taeogion ratio reminds me of a story I may have told here before about a Lithuanian-American fellow who grew up in a coal-mining town in Central Pennsylvania, where the penniless and Czar-oppressed Lithuanian immigrants who had come to the New World to work in the mines were subdivided into a considerable percentage with noble pedigrees (with coats of arms and everything), on the one hand, and those without, on the other. Some of the armigerous coal-miners supposedly didn’t want their daughters marrying commoners, etc., although I expect others found these genealogical class distinctions of little practical relevance in the new context of Schuylkill County.
All long in the past in Wales, alas.
While I hsve no doubt that my hill-farmer pre-Argentine forebears will (of course) have been exceptionally noble, sadly, the details of my descent from Cunedda are now partly unclear.
@JWB: I remember reading that in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, about 30% of the population were szlachta (nobility), and the poorest nobles emphasized their titles and pedigrees most, a fact that is often mocked in contemporary Polish literature.
New Britain persists. It’s a small town between New Haven and Hartford, Connecticut.
Wikipedia: “ The city was noted for its industry during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and notable sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places include Walnut Hill Park, developed by the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and Downtown New Britain. The city’s official nickname is the “Hardware City” because of its history as a manufacturing center and as the headquarters of Stanley Black & Decker.
Because of its large Polish population, the city is often playfully referred to as “New Britski.” “
And therefore the residents refer to themselves as…?
As David L. is a newly minted Mainuh, he may well be in that transitional phase in which radio traffic reports about roadway congestion in L A cause the brows to furrow. Rest assured, kind sir, that the San Andreas fault has not opened up and dumped that bastion of Californian depravity into our woods. It’s Lewiston-Auburn, replete with its many native speakers of a variety of French.
A major plot point in Vasily Narezhny’s 1814 novel Российский Жилблаз (A Russian Gil Blas; LH posts: 1, 2) is that Prince Gavrilo Simonovich Chistyakov, the main storytelling protagonist, is from a miserably poor village in southern Kursk guberniya where everyone is from the nobility (hence “Prince”) even though they live like the lowest peasants.
@cuchuflete: I presume that French influence would make you call highways “ninety-five” or “two-oh-two”, instead of “the 95” or “the 202”, as in correct LA English.
re the verb “to welsh”: OED finds that all the earliest mentions are in the context of racetrack betting, which decidedly points away from Wales. So, origin unknown.
@Y, close. I (eye) ninety-five, usually followed by north or south. Route two oh two. If you attribute that to French influence, who am I to correct you?
Antelope freeway, one sixteenth mile. Oops! That last one is stuck at 33rpm.
LA English is correct insofar as one likes uptalk and vocal fish eggs, and beginning every spoken sentence with, “Soooo.”
“New South Walian(s)” does exist on the web, but not in the Google Books Ngram Viewer, despite the presence of “South Walian(s)”.
The verb to welch might have something to do with Welsh mortgages, but other than that both have to do with loans, it’s hard to see the exact connection.
The google n-gram viewer has “welsh on a bet” as somewhat more common during my childhood years than “welch on a bet,” but not dramatically so, but with the relative prevalence of the welsh form increasing after 1980. I think I think of “welch” as the canonical form, but this is based on introspection and could well be mistaken. I don’t know how obvious it is to those without obscure historical and etymological interests that “welch” is just an alternate spelling/pronunciation of the same “welsh” as the ethnonym. Neither Cymric Pride nor anti-Welsh bigotry were particularly prominent in the demographic/cultural mix of the milieu in which I grew up.
To circle back, google books reveals some usage of “New South Welch” and “New South Welchman,” although they seem notably rarer than the “sh” forms.
Oh, is this how all Basques in Spain came to be hidalgos?
Judging from where I’ve seen it used, most users have no idea.
I don’t see how racetrack betting decidedly points away from Wales. The earliest appearances of “to welsh, welsher, welshing” are all in London in the 1850s; stereotypes of the Welsh were known at that place and time, weren’t they? Granted, there’s no direct evidence one way or the other.
I think I think of “welch” as the canonical form, but this is based on introspection and could well be mistaken. I don’t know how obvious it is to those without obscure historical and etymological interests that “welch” is just an alternate spelling/pronunciation of the same “welsh” as the ethnonym. Neither Cymric Pride nor anti-Welsh bigotry were particularly prominent in the demographic/cultural mix of the milieu in which I grew up.
All of this is true of me as well; I don’t think I was aware of the etymological link to Wales until I was more or less of college age.
And the same for me.
“Waler” is another term derived from “New South Wales”, but it refers to horses.
Noted on Bluesky: Welsh Pride
The Italian side of my family is originally from New Britain, or at least that’s where they settled after a short stay in New York. I have never heard the adjective “New British”. “From New Britain” is the standard work around.
The city is now far from majority Polish. New immigrants have moved in as the older groups moved out to more affluent towns. “Nuevo San Juan” would probably be a more appropriate nickname today than “New Britski”.
Wikipedia claims that the Polish Americans of New Britain are/were known for having a slightly distinct accent, but the features the article describes just sound like standard central “cone’icu’” to me:
“The use of a glottal stop in place of /t/ before syllabic /l/: in other words, in words like cattle and bottle.[24] The short “a” vowel /æ/ as in TRAP may be raised to [ɛə] for some speakers in Connecticut, including New Britain, though this feature appears to be declining among younger residents”
The glottal stop is so widely spread in CT that I remember my college roommate in New Haven (from Hawaii) would make it a feature of his impressions of local young women, as he found it remarkable.
@Owlmirror: Great find!
Read the whole thread!
(Unlike on the platform known as Twitter, you can read the whole thread even if you don’t have an account!)
Since childhood I assumed that “New South Wales” meant something like “New Wales, and a southerly one at that”. TIL this is at best not the universal interpretation.
Wouldn’t that be South New Wales? Southern New Wales at least?
Wales, but neither Old nor North!
“New Wales of the South” is unambiguous but sounds like a description rather than a name.
Searching Wikipedia for other places named “New [compassPoint] [oldPlaceName]” finds only two;
New East Prussia: this was sort of like New South Wales if the latter had been Gloucestershire
New South Greenland. I give F’s parsing to this name
Yeah, Neuostpreußen was immediately adjacent to Ostpreußen, the way e.g. Neu-Ulm is right across the Danube from Ulm proper. A very different pattern than the “applying a name from our home country to a place in our extremely distant new colonial territory” pattern.
Apparently there was once a settlement in Kentucky known as “New Austria,” which has a compass point buried in it etymologically. But I don’t know how transparent/obvious it is even to German-speakers and it’s opaque to Anglophones. Maybe one reason the Australian thing seems puzzling is that these days maps do not show “South Wales” as a distinct subpart of Great Britain, so we don’t think of the “South” as being as lexicalized as that in e.g. “South Carolina” or “South Dakota.”
A short essay called The origins of the name New South Wales has a cite from John Beaglehole, a biographer of Captain Cook:
But the exact reasoning is unknown:
I was initially a bit skeptical about the non-hoax existence of the surname “Beaglehole,” but wikipedia has a list of prominent bearers of the name. But it’s puzzling because it’s said to be a Cornish name yet the overwhelming majority of examples are from New Zealand and it doesn’t seem that migration patterns were such that NZ should have 80%+ of the bearers of any given Cornish-origin surname. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaglehole
@J.W. Brewer: All the New Zealand Beagleholes listed on that page are from the same prominent academic family.
@Brett All the New Zealand Beagleholes …
Seconded. Beagleholes feature in the index to The Penguin History of NZ. wiki’s list could include Pearl (née Malsin), married Ernest, co-authored some of his works.
This says that Beagleholes were Cornish, and that the name < bugal hal ‘herdsman (or shepherd) on the moors’. One Cornish dictionary spells the first word as bugal.
Maybe the village of Mousehole has a Cornish etymology based on hal, too?
The Beagleholes were justly famous for their monumental editions of Cook’s journals and for his biography. Another Cornish with an interest in the Pacific, Peter Lanyon-Orgill, was a truly strange combination of scholar and fabulist. If you can get past a paywall, this account of his career is worthwhile.
Maybe the village of Mousehole has a Cornish etymology …?
Welcome to the land of cutesy speculation.
Of course no actual cites for this fabulising.
The place is utterly gorgeous. (Think ‘Doc Martin’, which is shot in Port Isaac, around the coast.)
@antC
I would have guessed something like Welsh maes (open field, plain) + haul (sun). There is a place Bron Haul, so the combination is plausible. But who knows?
There are a few places actually called Maes yr Haul, and more yet called Maes Heulog, so it’s a cromulent name, if a bit estate-agent-y. (Kind of place that was probably originally actually called Hangman’s Hill or Gropecunt Lane. Swansea has a “Salubrious Passage”, which is surely a case of protesting too much.)
I think it would be Mes an Howl in Cornish.
I would have thought names are more likely to be property-developer-y than estate-agent-y?
Not at all. Try Latin-speakers…
“In 1612 Welsh captain Thomas Button wintered on the shores of Hudson Bay, at the mouth of the river he named the Nelson. He dubbed his encampment Port Nelson, and “the whole of the western shore New Wales.”
Wiki, entry for New Britain, Canada, with a footnote sourcing it to an obscure volume chronicling the voyages of Captain Luke Foxe and other brave folk.
And this area, now Churchill Manitoba north into Nunavut, is decidedly north.
I wondered if the beagle dog breed name came from the Cornish term, but no source I’ve looked at suggests that — all say “uncertain”, and offer Middle English or Old French possibilities. I note that beagles were not bred as shepherds, but as hunters of hares and rabbits.
I’ve only come across the version “New South Welshman”. It’s rare these days, anyway.
Australian place-naming is an inelegant ad hoc farrago. There is a New England in New South Wales, which itself is part of what used to be called New Holland (compare New Zealand, of course). Two of our six states have mere compass-point names (Western Australia, South Australia; note also our largest quasi-state: Northern Territory) because we’d run out of ideas and grown weary of repetition since we’d already named not one but two states after Queen Victoria.
As this sign in Western Australia attests, originality is not our strong suit. Towns without Aboriginal names (faux or occasionally authentic) mostly mimic British naming, and there is often confusion when more than one state adopts the same Old Country appellation: Surrey Hills (Vic), Surry Hills (NSW); Ashburton (Vic), Shire of Ashburton (WA; there are also Ashburtons in NZ, South Africa, and the US, and two in England); Camberwell (Vic and NSW, aping Camberwell in the UK); and so on.
All this reminds me of our trees. We have our own indigenous ones of course, but hardly anyone can distinguish either them or any of the ubiquitous imports one from another. It’s all so mixed up. I’m pretty sure of oaks and the genus Eucalyptus because I climbed them as a child; but I couldn’t tell a beech from a birch to save my life. They’re none of our business; we generally just take it on faith that there is a genuine distinction between such taxa.
which has a compass point buried in it etymologically. But I don’t know how transparent/obvious it is even to German-speakers
Not at all. Try Latin-speakers…
Maybe JWB meant the German name, but I must admit that for my classmates and me it was a small revelation when we learnt at some point (can’t remember whether it was in a geography or history lesson) that Österreich means “Eastern realm”. With hindsight, that looked obvious, but none of us would have come up with that idea without being told.
All this reminds me of our trees. We have our own indigenous ones of course, but hardly anyone can distinguish either them or any of the ubiquitous imports one from another. It’s all so mixed up.
I’d say that’s true for any of us inhabitants of modern civilization who’s not a botanist, gardener, or ranger – most people here in Germany can just distinguish coniferous*) from deciduous trees, and maybe recognize highly distinctive trees like willows, poplar, and birches.
*)Which people generally call Tanne, whether there are a member of abies or not.
https://www.allcreativedesigns.com.au/pages/speciescommon.html
There is one (silver) birch, but there are blue, magenta, northern white, powderpuff and weeping lilly pillies.
couldn’t tell a beech from a birch to save my life.
All New Zealand native trees seem to be some variety of beech. Small, curled-up leaves. Indistinguishable.
Clearly the early settlers were unimpressed. We have plenty imported from the old country, plus Eucalypts for firewood: grow quickly, burn brightly. Easily distinguishable, I would have said(?)
Most NZ’ers know that ‘Tea (Ti) Tree’ is somehow important to alternative health/honey, but couldn’t tell Mānuka from Kānuka from any other small-leafed bushy thing. You’d be well advised to be able to recognise (and avoid) matagouri, and the hilariously-named bush-lawyer.
AntC’s 2018 description of the Bush Lawyer. Take the darn thing seriously!
I’m more scared (from across the Pacific) of ongaonga, the tree nettle, Urtica ferox.
(I did once examine with interest a beautiful poodle-dog bush, until a friend told me to keep my distance from it.)
Hans has answered my question, and I find his answer, i.e. it seemed perfectly obvious when it was actually pointed out to us but we hadn’t noticed it before it was pointed out, interesting. By “buried” I had kind of been vaguely referring to the German behind the Latin form that we use in English.
Probably bastard beeches (Nothofagus – someone was aiming at “southern beech“, but accidentally added a h). However, they’re in Fagales at least, no farther from actual beeches than walnuts or… birches are.
…but I see Australian beeches are something different again (Gmelina, in Lamiales – closer to mint and verbena than to northern or southern beeches!), and the Australian silver birch (Casearia) isn’t a birch either, it’s a willow (i.e. in Salicaceae, Malpighiales)…
Closely related to “the Giant Queensland Stinging Tree – it won’t kill you, but you’ll wish it had…”
It’s hidden because Osten “east” got its vowel shortened, but Österreich didn’t. Standard German is quite inconsistent in shortening long vowels followed by consonant clusters.
Nothofagus indeed. Curiously, some sub-species are deciduous growing in the North Island but evergreen in the South.
I should give honourable mention to Kauri, Rimu, and the mighty Tōtara: Pinophyta on that page. They still do the small curled-up leaves thing.
the Giant Queensland Stinging Tree
Or yet its dreader cousin, the gympie-gympie, “reputed to be the most venomous plant in Australia, if not the world”. The manchineel is up there too, but I have no plans to compare them in person.
In Patagonia, evergreen and deciduous species of Nothofagus grow side by side.