EN
No reasonable explanation of the peculiar semantic proportion gołąb ‘pigeon’: gołąbek ‘cabbage roll’ (lit. ‘small pigeon’) has been presented so far. This author suggests that the latter is actually a separate word, possibly borrowed from some Oriental language, and only secondarily adapted to the Polish word gołąb ‘pigeon’ and thus also to its etymological equivalents in the Slavonic languages of Eastern Europe.