Polish Etymology!

[awsohllfegyang]

 Heyyy everyone! Interesting question to ask that, for once, google cannot answer. I need to know where the word "plaża" comes from. Polish meaning beach. It MUST come from a romantic origin, or so i thought after translating into other languages. Playa (spanish), spiaggia (italian), plajă (romanian), plaža (croatian and also macedonian), plage (

Comments

[hkitsune]

It's also "plage" in French.

plage (from Etymonline)
“a region,” late 14c., from O.Fr. plage (late 13c.), from L.L. plagia “a plain, shore,” adj. (plagia regio), from plaga “region” (see pelagic). Astronomical sense is from 1949.

[awsohllfegyang]

Thank you! I checked etymonline but realized that I need more of a sound answer. Like if etymonline existed for Polish that'd be fantastic! I need to know from where it entered into Polish specifically; they also use the word "gratis" for "free." any ideas on that one?

[hkitsune]

Latin seems like the most logical assumption there, but really, when it comes to loan words, especially from within a very tightly-knit language family like Romance, it can get kind of tricky. For instance, it might have entered into Polish from Russian from Latin...

[awsohllfegyang]

Yeah that's what I was thinking! Ahhhh. damnit.

[cosmicore]

It comes from French word plage (See Brückner's dictionary, p. 416). Russian word пляж has the same origin.

[obzor_inolit]

[muckefuck]

See my response to hkitsune, above. The word is ultimately derived from Latin, but the proximate source language was French. French was the language of culture in early modern Europe and, as a result, Polish has a number of French loanwords (which can be difficult to spot due to their respellings, e.g. krem, kokietka, peruka, etc.).

One should remember in this context that beach-going did not become a popular recreation until relatively recently. As late as the mid-19th century, it was still an elite activity. So it's not surprising that the word for "beach" (i.e. a part of the coast where one can go bathing) in so many European languages should be adopted from or influenced by the French term.