"Mike Lyle" <mike_lyle_uk@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:471e5582$0$26470$88260bb3@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Tony Mountifield wrote:
[...]
>> In the UK, we would probably call it an alley or alleyway. Over here,
>> alleys are usually too narrow for cars.
>>
> In South Wales, it's a gwyli (but I've only heard it rhyming with
> "bully").
Ah. That may explain something that's puzzled me for almost seventy years.
A
sort of alleyway ran from our back gate down to the village High Street:
it
was too narrow, as I recall, for two adults to walk comfortably side by
side, and the ground was simply dirt - no kind of paving at all. On one
side
was the low tumble-down wall of the doctor's paddock, on the other a
tallish
hedge flanking our field. We called this alleyway "The Gully", which I
heard
for years as "Gullet", thinking there was some allusion to one's throat.
As
our native "u" was the Northern "oo", "gully" indeed rhymed with "bully".
And this was in Shrop****re, only a short distance from Wales.
But NSOED derives "gully" or "gulley", with various meanings including of
course a ravine worn into a mountainside by water, from the French for
"throat", and gives as a dialectal sense of "gullet" "a narrow passage".
So was my childhood "gully" Welsh or French?
Alan Jones
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