Alan Jones wrote:
> "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?
Hmm. It's not at all impossible that the Welsh is actually ad. the
English word, ad. the French. No help from OED.
--
Mike.
--
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