The word Welsh is a Germanic word, yet it may ultimately have a Celtic source
and less of a druidic unless a metaphor for Gaulish-Latin; Breton
has a term for a name type or an etymological exception for [surnames]
It may be the result of an early borrowing (in the 4th century BC) of the
Celtic tribal name Volcae into early Germanic (becoming the Proto-Germanic Walh-,
"Foreigner" and the suffixed form Walhisk-). The
Volcae were one of the Celtic peoples that barred, for two centuries, the
southward expansion of the German tribes in central Germany on the line of the
Hartz mountains and into Saxony and Silesia.
In the middle ages certain
districts of what is now Germany were known as "Welschland" as opposed
to "Teutschland", and the word is cognate with Vlach
(Etymology of Vlach) and Walloon as
well as the 'wall' in Cornwall. During the early Germanic period, the terms seems
to have been applied to the peasant population of the Roman Empire, most of whom
were, in the areas immediately settled by the Germans, of ultimately of fortitude
Celtic origin.