ИСТИНА

The Old Irish terms for ‘border’ (like crich ‘boundary, end’, cimas ‘edge, border’) regularly show their semantic development from the basic meaning of edge, end, limit (cf. Middle Welsh loanword ffin ‘boundary, limit’) towards a ‘borderland, adjacent territory’ and then to a general meaning of a ‘(certain) territory’, district, land’. The same shift can be clearly seen in Baltic and Slavonic as well: thus OId Irish crích, cf. Lithuanian kreikti ‘to strew’ and kraikas ‘underlay’, also Lat. circus, possibly goes from the same root (*krei- ‘to separate?’) as Russian storona ‘side’ and strana ‘land’, originally the same word. It can be also mentioned for Old Irish leth ‘half, side, region‘ (cf. Lithuanian pusė ‘half’ and Tocharian AB poși ‘side’ of the different etymology) and Lithuanian kraštas, krantas both meaning ‘boundary, shore, land’, from *ker(t)- ‘to hack, to cut’; cf also Russian krajъ ‘edge, land’. The association of a border with a bank or shore is evident from the use of Old Irish imlech, bruach, or (cf Welsh goror, possibly from Lat. ora ‘coast’) and airer, oirear ‘coast, border region’, possibly from *air-tír. The common Baltic *galas ’end, region’ (cf Ptolemy’s Galindoi and Latv. Zemgale) can be found in Old Irish at-bail ‘dies’.