van HellSing on 23/11/2016 at 17:02
Quote Posted by scumble
But why is it named after a Welsh county?
Late on this, but it's a weird one for me too. In Polish, it's called Gwint. The word's primary meaning is "screw," as in the object itself as well as the helical ridge that gives a screw its properties. The only other associations I can think of is "pić z gwinta," "to drink straight from the bottle, which should be self-explanatory, and "jasny gwint!," which is an euphemistic curse word/exclamation whose origins are hard to trace ("jasny" is "bright). The name "gwint" was used by Andrzej Sapkowski for a dwarven card game in the Witcher novels, but there it's more like poker. "Gwent" seems to have been chosen as a superficially similar word which exists in English, and also is in keeping with another Sapkowski staple - that of using real-world names for countries and cities in the Witcher World.
