The story
- Middle Dutch · derived fromvaleye
- English todayvly
Attested chiefly as vly, rarely as vlaie or fly. From a dialectal form of Middle Dutch valeye, which meant “valley” in standard Dutch; a semantic shift to meaning “swamp” occurred either in Middle Dutch or independently in the speech of both the Dutch colonists of America and the Dutch colonists of South Africa (producing Afrikaans vlei). Doublet of vlei.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.