Being that kind of weird

[redbird]

On my lunch break, after buying and eating a sandwich with enough stuff that half of it will probably be tomorrow's lunch, I poked around Google images, researching European geography and terminology for eve99. It turns out that defining the borders of either Silesia or Galicia is difficult, even once you've explained to Google that you mean the Galicia that's at least partly Polish, not the one in Iberia. My grandmother was a Galitzianer, not a Galician, but this may not be a distinction that can readily be translated into French.

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Re: Being that kind of weird

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

IIRC galicia (poland) didn't exist as a entity before annexation by the austrian empire in the late 1700s, which later ceded half of that area to russia, and after WWII some of that went to ukraine. so i am not surprised it would be hard to define a person's ancestry in those terms. i think the eastern part was ruthenia, and the western part was ...somethingpolska (ah, here it is: malopolska = little poland) before austria gobbled it up, but my european history has faded.

was there actually a part of poland that was called galicia pre-austria? maybe there was; the name "galizien" makes no sense in german, so they probably took it from polish. ok, so i broke down and googled it, and yeah, the name originates from halych (polish = halicz/galicz), which was once the capital of the principality of halych-volhynia, then under hungarian rule. so i was wrong about it not existing as an entitly before. and here's a quick little article about what else "galitzianer" means (http://www.forward.com/issues/2001/01.07.06/arts4.html). probably not something your grandmother would have appreciated, *ahem*.

in french, so sayeth wikipedia, that would be "galicie", while the spanish galicia is "la galice", a person from either is "galicien".