kimkat0372k Lectures on Welsh Philology. 1877. John Rhys (1840-1915).
30-01-2018
●
kimkat0001 Yr Hafan www.kimkat.org
● ● kimkat2001k Y Fynedfa
Gymraeg www.kimkat.org/amryw/1_gwefan/gwefan_arweinlen_2001k.htm
● ● ● kimkat2194ke Cyfeirddalen yr Adran Ramadeg http://kimkat.org/amryw/1_gramadeg/gramadeg_cyfeirddalen_2194k.htm
● ● ● ● kimkat0369k
Lectures On Welsh Philology – Y Gyfeirddalen www.kimkat.org/amryw/1_testunau/testunau-saesneg_175_welsh-philology_john-rhys_1877_0373k.htm
● ● ● ● ●
kimkat0372k Y tudalen hwn
...
|
|
|
Gwefan
Cymru-Catalonia Rhan 2 Tudalennau 100-299 http://pub5.bravenet.com/guestbook/391211408/
Beth sy’n newydd yn y wefan hon? |
(delwedd
6665) |
...
llythrennau cochion = testun heb ei gywiro
llythrennau duon = testun wedi ei gywiro
Rhan 1 Tudalennau 0-99
www.kimkat.org/amryw/1_testunau/testunau-saesneg_175_welsh-philology_john-rhys_1_1877_0369k.htm
|
|
|
|
(delwedd B5991) |
LECTURES ON WELSH PHILOLOGY. BY JOHN RHYS, M.A., LATE FELLOW OF MERTON COLL.,
OXFORD, PERPETUAL MEMBER OF THE PARIS
PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY. LONDON: TÜBNER & CO.,
LUDGATE HILL. 1877. [All rights reserved.] |
.....
|
|
|
|
(delwedd B6100) (tudalen 100) |
100 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. coed^ 'wood, trees/ Ir. ciad-cholum, 'a wood-pigeon,' Lat.
bu-cetum, ' a pasture for cattle,' Goth, haitki, ' a heath, field,'
haithivisks, ' wild,' Eng. heath, h,eathen. coel, ' angury, superstition,
belief,' Ir. eel, Goth. hails, 'whole, uninjured,' hailjan, 'to cure,' Eng.
heal, health. drcyf-, in dovyfol (also dwymol), ' divine,' O. Ir. dia, gen.
dii, ' God,' Lat. divus, Skr. deva, ' god-like, divine, a god.' hmy (= sa-i),
hroynt, ' they, them,' Ir. iad, Gr. ot, ai. pToy, ' who,' Ir. cm, cS, Lat. ^■Me?,
g;Mae (more commonly qui, qu(B), Umbr. poi, ' who ' — the same particle i
appears for instance in the Lat. hcec (= ha-i-oe), and Gr. ovrocri. Ai. Aryan
di makes u in Welsh, now pronounced nearly like the u of the Germans. It was
derived from di by a process similar to that whereby ov assumed the sound of
v in Modern Greek, before both became identical with I in pronunciation. The
Old Irish equivalent was oi or oe, now written ao (aai), and pronounced in
some parts like the uee of queen according to O'Donovan: as pronounced in
Galway, it seems to me to lie between our Welsh u and i. The following
instances may here be mentioned: — |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE III. 101
cut, ' narrow,' Ir. caol. cynud, ' fuel,' O. Bulg. gnetiti, ' to kindle,' O.
Prussian, knaistis, ' a firebrand,' O. H. Ger. gneisto, ' a spark.' hud, ' a
charm, a spell,' Lith. saitas, ' sorcery,' O. Norse seidhr, ' a kind of
sorcery or magic,' Ger. seid. hiifen, ' cream,' O. H. Ger. seim, Mod. H. Ger.
konig-seim, ' run-honey,' Eng. seam, ' lard,' whence our saim, ' grease,' has
heen borrowed. tu (for ttcf), ' side,' Ir. taobk. ud-, in anudon, ' a false
oath, perjury,' O. Ir. oetk, Goth, aiths, Ger. eid, Eng. oath. un, ' one,' O.
Ir. oin, Mod. Ir. aon, Lat. oinos (later unus), Goth, ains, O. Eng. an, Mod.
Eng. one, atone, only, an — the pronunciation of one as nun was originally
that of a particular dialect like routs for oats, and an is the Old Eng. an
(that is an) shortened owing to the proclitic pronunciation of the numeral
when used as an indefinite article: the Germans of late sometimes distinguish
an and one as ein and iin respectively. Au. Even supposing that the primitive
Aryans distinguished two kinds of au, which is exceedingly doubtful, it seems
to be quite hopeless to separate their respective repre- |
|
|
|
|
|
102 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. sentatives in the modern languages of the Celts. In Welsh
they are u and uw (pronounced like German il followed by German u); the
latter is used only in a few words, mostly before ch; otherwise u and uw take
their places like o and aw. The Irish equivalents are ua and 6. Take the
following instances: — dun, ' a knee/ Lat. clunis, Lith. szlauniSy Skr.
(}roni. rhudd, ' red,' Ir. ruadh, Lat. rUcfus, Goth, rauds, Ger. roth, Eng.
red. tud, ' nation, country,' Breton tud, ' men, a people,' Ir. tuatk, ' a
people, a nation,' Gaulish toutius, Oscan touto, Goth, thiuda, Ger. Deutsch,
' Dutch or German.' buwch, ' a cow,' pi. buchod, Cornish biueh, Breton
bioc'k, all with a final s irregularly represented by ch, but bu and buw also
occur in Welsh, Ir. bo, Gr. j8ov?, Lat. bos, Eng. cow, Skr. nom. gaus, gen.
gos. Duw, ' God,' also Duwch with ch (as in buwch), and only vulgarly used in
Duwch anrcyl! which corresponds to the German exclamation Hu lieber Gott! Gr.
Zeu?, voc. Zeu, Lat. Jou^ piter, Skr. nom. dyaus, voc. dyaus, ' sky, heaven,'
Byaushpitar, ' Heaven-father.' Mw«?, 'porridge,' O. Cornish iot, Breton iot,
O. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE III. 103
Ir. ith, Lat. jAs, ' broth,' Lettish j&ut, ' to mix meal up in \Ater,'
Skr. yws, yusha, 'pea-soup,' d-yavana, ' axpot-ladle or some similar
utensil.' uchel, ' high,' uwck, ' higher,' uckqf, * highest,' Ir. uasal, *
high, noble,' Gaulish uxel-, in Uxela, Uxellodunum; and probably ov^a/xa in
Ptolemy's Ov^afia BapKa is identical with our uckaf, so that we might call
the place ' Upper Barca: ' the root would seem to have been auks (as in Gr.
av^dva) from aug, as in Lat. augeo, ' I increase,' auctus, ' enlarged,
increased, great, abundant,' O. Prussian auktai-, ' high,' Lith. auksztas, '
high.' Cnunch, cuwch, lluwch, rhuwch, are other Welsh words with uw, which is
replaced by u when a syllable is added, but their origin is obscure. The
foregoing are a few points which it was thought necessary to mention in the
vowel system of Welsh: now some of the principal changes and modifications
which have obtained in it must be considered somewhat more at leisure. Some
of them, such as those involved in the history of aw, wy, uw, have already
been touched upon. For it is impossible, language being in -a constant state
of flux and change, to discuss its organism altogether apart from its
pathology, so to say, however |
|
|
|
|
|
104 LECTUEES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. neat such a plan may look in theory. To begin with the evolution
of aw from d, this seems to mean that d passed in the course of time into a
sound identical, or nearly identical, with the English Yowel in hall and
draw, and that, where it was not eventually shortened, yielding o, it was
diphthongised into au, which we now write aw. As to the date of the
transition, no instance of au occurs in the earlier class of Welsh
inscriptions, so it may be presumed that it did not take place before the 7th
century. For a parallel to it we need not go further than English: take, for
instance, the Old English word stdn, that is stan, which is now written
stone, and pronounced stown with a long o followed by a more or less
perceptible w, or with some modification of that diphthong, seldom if ever
with a long o pure and simple. To this might be added plenty more, such as
bone, home, rope, for the O. English ban, ham, rap, respectively. But for a
perfect parallel consult the Swabian pronunciation of German — witness
Schrcaub and aubend for Schwab and abend: nor is the change unknown in
Sanskrit. With respect to oe and wy, it is not quite certain what the Kymric
starting-point should be assumed to have been. But reasoning backwards from
the loan-words which have wy in Mod. Welsh for Latin e, one is led to the
conclusion that for some time after the Eoman occupation |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTUEE III. 105
the antecedent of my in native words naust have also been e, or some such a diphthong
as ei, which could be taken for ^. Either & or ei would here do, but the
advantage of simplicity is on the side of the former when one comes to assign
the common Goidelo-Kymric prototype of Welsh my^ oe, on the one hand, and
Irish 4, ia, on the other. So among the steps whereby d yielded oi, whence
rm/ and oe were differentiated, we should have to reckon ei, ei, ai, which
would make the series e, ei, ai, oi. The earlier of these steps are fairly
exemplified in the ordinary English pronunciation of such words as name,
paper, as ne^m, pe'per, neim, peiper, or even ndim, pdiper, with a long e or
a followed by a more or less marked i, which so frequently mars the English
pronunciation of French words containing a long e, as the w sound in stone
does in that of French words involving long o. The later steps in the series
are well known in Irish, where such instances as croinn for crainn, genitive
of crann, ' a tree,' boill for baill, ' members,' and toibre, taibre, '
give,' frequently occur, and illustrate a tendency which is perpetuated in
the Anglo -Irish pronunciation, which makes the English words firie, I, line,
into foine, oi, loin, approximately. In the case of u and urn, it is probable
that the Aryan au which they represent had become a |
|
|
|
|
|
106 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. Goidelo-Kymric o (or ou), whence the Irish derived their 6,
ua, while the Welsh changed it into a broad u, and later into the narrow u of
Mod. "Welsh. For this is the ordinary representative of both Latin o and
u, as in Uqfur, ' labour,' from Latin labor-is, ffuvien, ' a line, a cord,'
irovn funis, and addurn, ' an ornament,' from adorn-o. In the few native
words already noticed this u was diphthongised into uw, and that, it would
seem, at no recent date, as we appear to detect traces of it in the Breton
bioc'k, ' a cow,' and the Cornish tot, ' porridge,' where the Welsh is bumch
and uwd. Before leaving these points, a word may not be out of place as to
the Irish ia and ua, or ia and ua, as they are more commonly written: the i
and u are long, and followed by only a very slight touch of a. They remind
one somewhat of the Lithuanian diphthongs ie and uo, also written e and u. But
whether the way they were arrived at was the same, or nearly the same, is not
evident: in the case of the Irish ones the steps probably were e, ^a, ia, and
6, da, ua, respectively. No certain traces of either diphthong are known in
the early Ogmic inscriptions of Ireland, and they date, probably, after the
6th century. Here it may be asked why such cases of vowel modification, which
I have ventured to call, in the absence of a better word, diphthongisation,
should |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE III. 107
take place in "Welsh, Irish, English, or anv other language. If you
consult musicians on the matter, they will tell you that a long and sustained
note has a tendency to lose its quality and change its pitch: in other words,
" there is naturally a great difficulty in prolonging a sound at the
same pitch and with the same quality of tone," as Mr Ellis ohserves in
the fourth volume of his work on Early English Pronunciation, p. 1273. He
does not dismiss the question without pointing clearly to the source of the
difficulty: "To retain the vowel quality for a sensible time requires an
unnatural fixity of muscle, and consequently relaxations constantly occur,
which alter the vowel quality." Thus it turns out to be simply a
question of muscle, and the difficulty of prolonging a vowel sound unmodified
is exactly of the same kind as that which one would soon feel in trying, to
iold one's hand up steadily for a length of time, a method of torture which
was well known to Welsh schoolmasters when I was a boy. The phonetic change
here in question has justly been called one of the great alterative forces in
language; the latter, however, holds itself free to have recourse also to the
kind of change exemplified in the reduction of diphthongs into single vowels.
Of this instances have already been alluded to, as where Aryan ai and au
were |
|
|
|
|
|
108 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. supposed to have been reduced in the Goidelo-Kymric period
to S and o, also Aryan di into u, whereby the contihuators of Aryan di and au
assumed the same form. But the common Goidelo-Kymric antecedent of the- Welsh
u to which O. Irish oi corresponds, may, as far as we now can see, be
presumed to have been ai or oi. As a parallel to the reduction of Welsh oi
into u may be mentioned the case of Greek oi, which had in the 11th century
or earlier got to be sounded like V — hence the habit of calling the latter v
■y^iXoy, just as 6 was called e iln\oy when ai had acquired its value —
before its sound (y = ot) was modified into that of t or t], as in the Greek
of the present day. I might dwell on the almost identical treatment of O.
Irish oi in Mod. Irish, where the digraph ao has the sound of Welsh i, or one
between that and Welsh u. The English and Latin parallels are less striking;
but if you trace O. Latin oinos to the more common forms unus, una, unum, and
down into the French un une, the analogy between the history of the latter
and that of the Welsh un is in every respect very close. The same kind of
change is not unknown in the dialects of Mod. Welsh: for instance, the
pronunciation prevalent in many, if not most, parts of S. Wales of such words
as doe, ' yesterday,' oes, ' is,' traed, ' feet,' llaetA, ' milk,' is do,
6s, |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE III. 109
trdd, lldth: so the e and y brought together by the elision of a ^ form a
modern diphthong liable to be simplified as in tyrnas or ternas for teyrnas, '
a kingdom,' and in Anglesey and Carnarvonshire such plurals as tor/eydd,
'multitudes,' and jooz/eyt^rf, ' pastures,' become tor/ydd and por/ydd: so
Lleyn, the western third of the latter county, is ' now invariably called
Llyn. All the foregoing cases of reduction of diphthongs fall under the head
of assimilation, which has been noticed more than once on a former occasion.
Now there are other kinds of assimilation which play a part in the vowel
economy of Welsh, but before they can be discussed to advantage the nature of
vowels must be studied more closely than has hitherto been done here. Now the
vowels belong to the category of musical sounds, and those who wish to study
them as such could not do better than begin by carefully reading the first
part of Professor Helmholtz's great work on TAe Sensations of Tone as a
Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, lately translated into English
by Mr. A. J. Ellis: also part H. 11. of his Appendix xix. to Helmholtz's
text, and Chapter xi. of the fourth volume of his own work already alluded
to, On Early English Pronunciation, especially pp. 1272-1281. I find that the
best thing I can do is to copy here briefly their |
|
|
|
|
|
110 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. views, as far as they serve to throw light oa Welsh
phonology. Sounds are distinguished into noises and musical tones, by which
are not meant the intervals of tones and semitones. The difference between
the former is that the sensation of a musical tone is due to a rapid periodic
motion of the sonorous body, and the sensation of a noise to non-periodic
motions. The vowels, though they are of the former description, may, owing to
the friction of the breath against the parts of the mouth, contain an
admixture of noise, which it is the business of the singer to eliminate.
Musical tones in their turn are distinguished by their force or loudness, by
their pitch or relative height, and by their quality. Their force or loudness
depends on the extent or amplitude of the oscillations of the particles of
the vibrating body; that is, the longer the distances described by the said
particles, as measured from their position of rest, the louder the tones
produced. Their pitch or relative height depends solely on the length of time
each vibration occupies, or, as it is more usually put, on the number of
vibrations made in a second: that is called the vibrational number of the
sonorous body, and the greater it is, the higher the pitch of the tone it
gives. Methods have been invented for the reckoning of vibrations, and it is
found that, if they sink so low as about
|
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE III, 111 30
per second, the ear can scarcely collect them into a series: others follow
one another with such rapidity as to count by thousands in a second. In other
words, musical tones are roughly said to rano-e between 40 and 4000
vibrations in a second, o ' and to extend over seven octaves, while those
which are audible at all range between 20 and 38,000 a second, and extend
over eleven octaves, which will serve to show the marvellous capacity the ear
has of distinguishing sounds in respect of pitch. Musical tones differ in
quality, as when we distinguish the human voice from the note of an organ,
although it may be of the same loudness and pitch; this is, further, said to
depend on the form of vibration, which, in its turn, may vary indefinitely.
For. example, it may be pendular or resemble the swings of a pendulum, as in
the case of a tuning-fork; or they may be like the motions of a hammer which
is uplifted by a water-wheel at regular intervals, as in the case of a string
excited by a violin-bow. Mathematicians and physicists classify musical tones
into simple and compound, without including in the latter term chords, which
they regard as composite tones. Leaving these last altogether on one side,
the only tones they look at as simple are those produced by pendular
vibrations, and all others they analyse into pendular ones. This resolution
of all other vibrations |
|
|
|
|
|
112 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. into pendular ones was in the first instance arbitrary and a
mere matter of convenience, but Helmboltz and others have shown that it has a
meaning in nature, and they consider it as proved that the organism of the
ear is such that it perceives pendular vibrations alone as simple tones, and
resolves other periodic motions of the air into a series of pendular
vibrations, hearing the simple tones which correspond to these simple
vibrations. Thus when a tone is produced, say c, on the violin, a practised
ear hears not oAly c, but also its -octave c\ the fifth of the latter g, the
second higher octave c" , and so on, as follows: — 01;
^- :5^ -s^-
■ n^a^ 0, C, g', c",
e", g", b"l>, c'", d'", e'". 1, 2, 3, 4, 6,
6, 7, 8, 9, 1O. Here c, the lowest note, is the fundamental or prime partial
tone; it is also generally the loudest, and gives its pitch to the whole
tone. C' is .the first (harmonic) upper partial, and it makes twice as many
vibrations per second: g' is the second upper partial, and makes thrice as
many vibrations as c: so with the others, which become fainter and fainter
the higher they go. It is to be observed that any interference with the
relative force or loudness of any partial tone or tones is |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE III. 113 Tecognised
by the ear as a change of quality of the compound tone; and vice versa the
quality of a compound tone depends on nothing whatever but the relative force
of the partial tones: it is important to keep this resolution, in the last
resort, of quality into considerations of quantity in mind as we go on. The
question of the composition of tones has been also successfully attacked from
another direction; for Helmholtz has been able to produce given tones by
means of suitable combinations of the simple tones of forks tuned to the
respective pitches of the partials they are to stand for. Another meaning
which this resolution of musical tones has in nature appears in the phenomena
of sympathetic resonance. An instance or two will explain what is meant by the
term: — Gently touch one of the keys of a pianoforte so as merely to raise
the damper, and then sing a note of the corresponding pitch, forcibly
directing the voice against the strings of the instrument: the note will be
heard from the pianoforte when you have ceased to sing. When the strings of
two violins are in exact unison, and one is excited by the bow, the other
will begin to vibrate. It is well known that bell-shaped glasses can be put
into violent motion by singing their proper tone into them. Lastly, the
vibrations of a fork which, has been |
|
|
|
|
|
114 LECTURES ON
"WELSH PHILOLOGY, struck are rendered more strongly audible by being
held near the mouth of a bottle or any other resonance chamber in which the
air is of the same pitch as the fork. As to the pitch of the air in a bottle,
anybody, however dull he may be, may experiment on that: for instance, if you
blow over the mouth of a bottle when it is empty, you will find that it
yields a deeper and more hollow sound than when it has been half filled with
water, and that its pitch -will be still higher when it is filled nearly up
to the neck. In the case of the voice, the tones are produced by the vocal
chords in the larynx, and they are of the compound nature already described;
and the cavities lying between the yocal chords and the lips form one or more
resonance chambers by which the tones produced in the vocal chords are
influenced. The mouth in speaking assumes a great variety of shapes, and as many
of the latter as imply also a difference of pitch of the resonance chambers
they form will exercise a difierent influence on the quality of the tone; for
resonances differing in pitch reinforce different partial tones, which is at
once recognised by the ear as a change of quality of the compound tone. When,
for. instance, the resonance cavity of the mouth is at its full length in
ordinary pronunciation, its pitch is lowest, and it reinforces the prime
partial |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTUKE III. 115
tone, which then yields our w (English od): compare the case alluded to of
the empty bottle. When the same resonance cavity is at its shortest, and its
pitch, consequently, high, it reinforces the very high partials, and the
vowel produced is Welsh i: compare the case of the bottle filled with water
nearly up to the neck. An intermediate state of the resonance causes the
reinforcement of some of the lower partials, thus producing our a: compare
the case of the bottle half filled with water. Of course the pitch of the
tone is here assumed to be constant as produced by the vocal chords, and the
pitch of the resonances to vary: it is to this variation that we owe all the
tone-qualities which we write in Welsh a, e, i, o, u, w, and to nothing else.
Professor Helmholtz has succeeded in compounding the tones of the more common
vowels from the simple tones of tuning-forks, thereby also assigning the
relative force of the different partials required to make up each vowel: in
other words, he can make his forks, which he regulates by means of
electricity, sing out the German vowels a, e, i, o, u, which I roughly
venture to treat as equivalent to our a, e, i, o, w. Many experiments have been
made by different men to ascertain the exact pitch or vibrational number of
the resonance cavities for the vowels. One of them has arrived at the
following results, |
|
|
|
|
|
116 LECTTJEES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. • when the vocal, chords are tuned to ^j, and c' is assumed
to make 256 vibrations in a second: — Vowel w, 0, a, e, i. Note b^, b\, b\
b"\, b"\ Vibrational No.... 224, 448, 896, 1792, 3584. According to
this, the pitch of the resonance implied in the vowels rises an octave
successively in the order here given: unfortunately, this simple relation is
not corroborated by the experiments of other investigators. However, they do
not so far differ as to establish another order of the vowels, though they do
not find the intervals to be exactly the same. It will suffice for our
purpose to assume, what is fully sustained by the present state of the
evidence, namely, that the difference of resonance pitch between m and a is
greater than between 70 and or and a, and so with the others. In other words,
I would say that the vowels w, o, a, e, i, are separated each from the next
to it by a single step, without insisting on the four steps being exactly
equal. Should it, then, be found that w coming near a is modified into o, or
a coming near i is modified into e, these and the like would clearly be cases
of partial assimilation. Now assimilation of this description is well known
to be a marked feature of the Finnic languages, but it is not unknown in |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE III. 117
other languages, and among them in Irish and Welsh. The Irish instances have
been discussed at some length by Ebel in Kuhn's Beitraege in the course of
his Celtic studies in the first volume of that publication, I will confine
myself to a brief mention of a few of the Welsh ones. Foremost among the
latter may be mentioned the sequence u — a, making o — a in the history of
simple adjectives such as these: crmm ' curved, bent,' fem. crom^ erwn '
round,' fem. cron, dwfn ' deep,' fem. dofn, Jmn ' this,' fem. hon, llwm '
bare,' fem. Horn, and trwm ' heavy,' fem. trom. Now trwm, trom, for example,
points to a common Celtic pair of forms, trumba-s mas., trumbA fem., which
became respectively in the course of time trumb and trumba, the ending of the
masculine having been discarded earlier than that of the feminine, which is
supposed to have retained it until the a had caused the u to be assimilated into
o, whereby trumba became tromba: lastly the a disappeared, but not without
thus leaving the feminine of the adjective a form distinct from the
masculine. Trwm, I may notice in passing, is of the same origin as the
English verb to throng and the German drang and druck, the b of the trumb- it
implies being the regular Celtic continuator of gv, which is attested in the
O. Norse throngva, * to press.' In the case of pwdr, 'rotten,' fem.
podr, |
|
|
|
|
|
1 18 LECTURES. ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. the Latin adjective, from which these words are borrowed,
seems to have been treated as though it were not putris, but putrus, putra.
It is not to be inferred from these instances that the assimilation in
question is confined to adjectives: most Welsh names of the feminine gender
which happen to be monosyllables with the vowel o are illustrations of it. In
a few cases a form with m has been suggested by that in o: thus from Latin
furca we have fforch and also ffwrch, but both feminine: ffordd, ' a way,'
yields the phrase iffordd, 'away,' which is iffwrddin South Wales: so also
cwd seems to be later than cod, which, though differing in gender, have the
common meaning of the word bag. This much by way of introduction to a word of
considerable interest: Venantius Fortunatus, a travelled Italian of the 6th
century mentions, among other musical instruments known in his day, a "
chrotta Britanna." This chrotta, which I take to be his spelling of
crotta, is in point of form the prototype of our modern word croth, feminine,
and in point of meaning of the masculine crwth; croth now means the womb,
also the calf of the leg, while crmth means the crowd or rote, a box hollowed
out of a piece of wood especially for holding salt, and a hump on the back.
So, unless there were crutt alid crotta synonymous in meaning, which is
cer- |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE III. 119
tainly very possible, one must conclude that crotta had all the meanings
mentioned, that is to say, until it suggested a corresponding masculine to
share them with it. This view is confirmed by the fact that the Irish form
cruit remains feminine, and means both a crowd or fiddle and a hump on the
back. The crwth was undoubtedly so called from it shape, and the word for it
appears to be of the same origin as the Greek Kupro?, /cw/arr), Kvprov,
'curved, arched, round, humped, convex!' Similarly among the instances of the
sequence i — a making e — a, the gender adjectives claim the first place; the
following are some of them: bryck ' fveckled,' fem. brech, hyr '■
short,' fem. ber, crych ' crisped,' fem. crech, gnlyb ' wet,' fem. gwleb,
gmych ' brave, fine, noble,' fem. gweck, llym ' sharp,' fem. llem, melyn '
yellow,' fem. melen. Here brych, brech, for instance, stand for bricc, brecca
= bricca; but I hesitate to include in the same category the adjective gnyn^
' white,' fem. gwen, the antecedents of which may have been not vind, venda,
but vend, venda, for the Breton form is gwenn of both genders, and while the
syllable vend occurs several times in our early inscriptions, vind is unknown
in them. In this case the assimilative action of the a of the feminine would
have been simply negative, with the effect of preventing the e passing into y
as in the |
|
|
|
|
|
120 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGT. mascnline. To the foregoing may be added one or two
adjectives from Latin, such as ffyrf, ' strong, stout, solid,' fern, fferf,
from firmus, firma; and sych, 'dry,' fem. sech, from siccus, sicca; nor are
there wanting instances of nouns such as cylcked, ' a bedding or bedcover,'
from culcita, irmneg, ' a glove,' from manica, and gramadeg, ' a grammar,'
from grammatica. There is, however, a native Welsh ending eg = -ica, as in
daeareg, ' geology,' from daear, ' earth,' and Cymraeg, ' the Welsh
language,' for some such a form as Combragica, the masculine being Cymreig, '
Welsh,' for Combragic. There are also in use in Welsh the feminine
terminations ell (=-illa) and es {=-issa or -ista), as in the case of
priddell, ' mould, clod,' from pridd, ' soil, mould,' brenhines, ' a queen,'
from brenhin, ' a king.' And one of the most useful terminations in the
language is en { = -inna or -inda), which is matched in the masculine by -yn,
as in melyn, melen, ' yellow ': take as examples cloren, ' a tail,' from
clarsr, ' covering, a lid,' dalen, ' a leaf,' plural dail, seren, ' a star,'
plural ser. There now remains the converse change of a — i into e — i, which
takes place indifferently where the i remains and where it is blunted into y,
as in the following instances: — Cyntefig 'pristine,' from cyntaf ' first,'
glendid ' cleanness,' from glan ' clean,' keli ' brine,' from hal-en ' salt,'
iechyd |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE III. 121 'health,' from iach
'healthy,' plentyn 'a child,' from
plant 'children,' rheffyn ‘a cord or rope’ from rhaff 'a rope;' these last belong
to that extensive class of formations already referred to apropos of the
ending en of the feminine. Further, the passing of a
into ei — liable in Mod. Welsh to become ai — has commonly been attributed to
the effect of an i; but this is not quite correct, for the occasion of the
change is not the presence of the vowel i, but of the semi-vowel so written
in Welsh, which it will here be expedient to write j. The correctness of this
view will appear to any one who is content to proceed from the known to the
unknown. When the Welsh borrowed Latin words, they seem to have treated Latin
i unaccented and followed by another vowel as j; so we have breich (now
braich), 'the arm,' from brachium; rhaidd, 'a spear or pike,' from radius, 'a
staff, spoke, beam;' cyd-breiniog, ‘feeding together,' from prandium,
'breakfast, the fodder of animals; ' rheibjo, 'to snatch, bewitch,' from
rapio, 'I seize, carry off, ravish, captivate;' yspaid,' a space of time,'
from spatium. Similarly, Maria and Daniel, treated as dissyllables, yielded
in Welsh Meir (now Mair) and Deinjoel (now Deinjol). So in native words such
as lleiddjad, 'a slayer,' from lladd, 'to kill,' edifeirjol, 'repentant,'
from edifar, 'sorry for, full of |
|
|
|
|
|
122 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. regret for,'
creijjon, ' scrapings,' from crqfu, ' to scrape,' and meibjon, ' sons,' from
mob, ' a son.'' Thus it seems natural to conclude that such forms as ffeir
(now ffair), ' a word,' stands ior gar-j-, with a termination — perhaps ja —
which began with j, but which has altogether disappeared excepting that the j
constantly reappears in related or derived forms, such as, for instance, in
the case of gair, the plural geirjau, ' words,' or the derivative geirjad, '
a wording.' This cajjegory would include a very large number of words, and
among others such plurals as brein (now braiii), ' crows,' from bran, ' a
crow,' and the old neuter plurals of which the O. Welsh enuein, ' names,' may
be taken as a specimen — this and the O. Irish plural anmann seem to point to
a lengthened form, an-man-ja. Possibly, also, such third persons singular of
the verb as geill, (^ he, she, it) can,' stands for galljat (= galja-ti),
-with, which compare the Lithuanian galiu, ' I can.' The assimilation in all
the examples here enumerated must have at first consisted in replacing the
sequence a—j-, hye—j-; further preparation for the_; was made by making the
latter into ei—J-. In Breton and Cornish this second step was never taken;
hence it is that to our breicA and geir they oppose brecA and ger. But this
is not unknown in Welsh itself: thus in the Liber Landavensis, BrycAeinjog '
Brecknock- |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE III.
123 shire ' is called Brechenjauc,
from Brychan's name, and the name Meirckjon is there mostly given as Merchjon
or Merchjaun, supposed to be the Welsh forms of the Latin Marcianus; nay even
now cenjog and celjog may be heard in Denbighshire, Anglesey, and probably
other parts of North Wales, for ceinjog, ' a penny,' and ceiljog, ' a cock.'
In a few instances o — -j- also becomes e — -j- and ei — -j~, as in yspeil
{now yspail), 'spoil,' from Latin spolium, and Emreis (less usual than
Emrys), from Ambrosius. I have not yet observed any native instances in
point. And where the original sequence was e—j-, we sometimes find it
superseded by ei —;;;-, as in tdrthon, ' the tertian ague,' from Latin
tertiana, and in unbeinjaeth, which is sometimes to be met with for the more
usual unbennaethy ' monarchy,' and in North Wales, heddyw, ' to-day,' has
passed through keddjm into heiddjw, which is the prevalent pronunciation of
the word there at the present day. As it is beyond the scope of this lecture
to follow the Welsh vowels into all their details, attention will now be
directed to a number of changes which amount to a reorganisation of the whole
system. But a few words must be premised on the tone or syllabic accent in
Welsh, and the quantity or force of the vowels as regulated by it and the
consonants immediately following them.
|
|
|
|
|
|
124 LECTURES ON
VfELSH PHILOLOGY. Welsh monosyllables have an independent accent with the
'exception of about a dozen proclitics. The great majority of longer words are
paroxytones, and most of the exceptions are more apparent than real, being
perispomena, such as glanhdu, ' to cleanse,' from glanhd-u = glanha{g)-u, and
cyfjawnhdd, ' justification,' from cyfjamnhohod = cyfjawnha{g)-ad. Moreover,
a few oxytones may still be heard, such as ymolch, ' wash thyself.' In O.
Welsh, words accented on the final syllable seem to have been much more
numerous than now, and to have included all words which had the diphthong aw
(au) in it: take, for instance, Aestaur, ' a sextarius, a measure of
capacity,' bardaul, ' bardic,' and the like. Welsh vowels, when single, admit
of being pronounced in three ways — they may be either long or short, and,
when short, they may be either open or closed. It will suffice to call them
long, short, and closed respectively. The long vowels are much of the same
quantity as in English: thus our bod is pronounced like English bode with
long O. The short vowels also occur in both languages: the i, for instance,
of dinas, ' a city,' and and the y of myned, ' to go,' sound very nearly like
the English i and o of dinner and money respectively. The closed vowels are
those which are suddenly and forcibly broken off or closed by |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE III. 125 a
succeeding consonant: our pen, ' head,' tan, ' under,' at, ' to,' sound in
this respect like the English words pen, tan, at. A word now as to their
distribution: accented monosyllables have their single vowels long or closed,
short ones being admissible, only in the proclitics. Longer words, which are
not perispomena, admit only short and closed vowels: short or closed in the
tone-syllable, short only in other syllables; and, conversely, all unaccented
syllables have their single vowels short. These distinctions have regard only
to the quantity and force of. the vowels, not to. their quality; for although
k good ear could hardly fail to detect differences of quality between the
a's, for instance, in tan, ' a fire,' tdfiau, ' fires,' tdnjo, ' to. fire,'
the language treats them as the same a varying in quantity and force, and so
they will here be dealt with. The triple pronunciation of the vowel is, as it
has just been pointed out, recognised in English, but in Welsh it has been
stereotyped into a system, the meaning of which it is the business of
phonology to explain. The vowels of the Aryan parent-speech may be regarded
as having come down into Early Welsh with values which may, roughly speaking,
be called constant, whereas the value of those of Mod. Welsh, as far as
regards their quantity and force, depends on their position. The question,
then, is how they came to |
|
|
|
|
|
126 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. exchange their constant values for positional values, and
how comparative uniformity was elicited from the original variety. The cases
to be taken into account range themselves into three groups: those where long
vowels have been shortened, those where short vowels have been lengthened,
and those where no perceptible change of force or quantity is attested. Take
the first: that a long vowel should be shortened when it occurs in an
unaccented syllable seems to us, with our modern way of marking the accented
syllable by a greater stress of the voice, so natural as to require no
remark, and we pass on to the same modification when it happens under the
accent. This concerns the vowels u, i, and the Early Welsh continuator.of
Aryan a. Thus u is shortened in unol, ' united,' and closed- in undeb, '
union,' from un, ' one,' and so in other words. Traces of the operation of
this law, which is general in "Welsh, may be found in English; witness
such words as nose, nostril; vine, vineyard; house, husband, hussy; nation,
national. It is not, however, confined to these more palpable cases, for Mr.
Barlow finds that the syllable ex, for instance, when pronounced by itself,
appears in the diagram described by the marker of the logograph considerably
longer than when it is spoken as a part of such a word as excommunicate; in
the latter it becomes, he says in the |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE III. 127
paper already alluded to, compressed, its length being shortened and its
height increased. The reason for such a law is perhaps to he sought in the
fact that the centre of gravity, so to speak, •of a word is in the accented
vowel: if that happens to he in the final syllable, it may remain long; if
not, there seems to exist a sort of instinctive tendency to share the breath
and time required for uttering that syllable between it and the remaining portion
of the word. The ideal limit of this would be to devote exactly the same
amount of breath and time to the pronunciation, for instance, of tanau and
tan, of national and nation. The comparatively rare occurrence of such cases
of vowel-shortening, due to the influence of the accent in Latin, still rarer
in Greek, as well as the nature of the metres the Greeks and Eomans used in
their poetry, seems to warrant the inference that the ancient accent mainly
implied a difference of pitch, while ours in English and Welsh mainly means a
difference of loudness or force, the change of pitch being mostly considered
secondary, or passed over unobserved. As we go on it will appear by no means
improbable that "Welsh was adopting (or had already adopted) in the 8th
century our modern accent in lieu of that which may be called the classical
accent. The effects of such a change |
|
|
|
|
|
128 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGfT. must have been very considerable on our vowel system,
though they are exceedingly hard to define. But as similar changes have
occurred in the history of the majority of the modern languages of Europe,
comparative phonology may reasonably be expected at some future day to solve
the problem satisfactorily. The next vowel is i, which we failed to detect as
the continuator of Aryan i. It is even doubtful whether it was not sometimes
z in Early Welsh, as well as i. It would be hard, for instance, to prove that
it was at any time long in the word elin: the cognate forms are Ir. tiille,
" ulnas," Eng. ell, el-bow, Lat. ulna, Greek aiKevr}, Skr. aratni;
and it is certain that it never was long in anifel, ' an animal,' from Lat.
animal or one of its oblique cases. However, even where it must have always
been long in Welsh, as in gmr, ' true ' (Ir. fvr, Lat. virus), and dm, ' a
fort, a town ' (Ir. dun, Eng. town), we find the quantity of the vowel short
when a syllable is added, as in anwiredd, ' untruth,' and dinas, ' a city,'
and so in others. .The fortunes of Aryan a in Welsh are still more
interesting: towards the close of the Early Welsh period it had become o,
which by the 9th century had been diphthongised into aw (written au) in
monosyllables and other words where it was accented in the final syllable, as
in O. Welsh |
|
|
|
|
|
LiECTUEE III. 129
lau, now llaw, ' a hand,' and paup^ now pawb, ' everybody/ and the like; but
in those positions, where long vowels are inadmissible, not oijily was its
diphthongisation into aw arrested, but the was reduced sooner or later to o:
so by the side of paup and hestaur (sextS,rius) O. Welsh offers us popptu, '
on every side,' and hestorjou, the plural of kestaur, and so on. So it seems
probable that the reorganisation of the Welsh vowel system came upon the
vowel in question when it was 5, but before it had begun to be diphthongised
into aw. In Bede's liistoria Ecclesiasiica, as edited by Mr. Moberly (Oxford,
1869), the proper names have been printed as they occur in the oldest
manuscript of the work, which is assigned to the year 737, and there the
Abbot of Bangor who met Augustine is called Dinoot. Welsh tradition calls him
Dunaut, later Dunawd. There can be no doubt as to the virtual identity of
Dinoot and Dunaut, nor, as I think, as to both being forms of the Latin name
Donatus, which was not unknown in Britain in the time of the Eoman
occupation, when many more Latin names were adopted by the Britons. Now
Dinoot and Dunaut show that Bede had the same diflSculty in distinguishing
Welsh u from I as the natives of South Wales have in our own day, and that
his 00 probably meant o, which had not been diphthono-- I |
|
|
|
|
|
130 LECTURES. ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. ised. Bede is supposed to have lived from 672 to 734, but he
may have been copying from an earlier writer. However, we should probably not
be far wrong in supposing the- reorganisation of the vowel system to have
been in process during the century from 650 to 750: probably it began long
before, and it is certain that it lasted long after. It is worth while
observing, that the same law which gives us au in monosyllables and o in
longer words, has also been at work in Irish, as in the following words,
which I copy from the Gram. Celtica^ p. 18: — cliah, " corbis,"
cUbene, " sporta; " Jiach, " Aebitam" fechem,
"debitor;" grian, "|Sol," grene, "solis;"
sliah, "mons," slehihj " montibus," to which I would add
dia, ' god,' genitive dii for divi. In the case of ua and 6 more uncertainty
prevails, but Zeuss (p. 23) gives huar, '•' hora," genitive hore, and
suas, " sursum," but i sosib " in altis." Next comes the
group which comprises the cases of vowels undergoing a lengthening. This
happens almost exclusively in monosyllables, and conversely it takes place in
all monosyllables — provided they are not proclitics, or that their vowels
are not already m, I, or a diphthong — which close with any one of the consonants
g, d, b; dd,f; and n and I, where they were not formerly doubled or
accompanied by another consonant. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE III. 131
Take, for instance, the following -words: gmag, ' empty,' tad, "
father,' pib, ' a pipe,' hedd, ' a tomb,' claf, ' ill,' glan, ' clean,' pwl,
' blunted; ' if the word is lengthened by the addition of a syllable, then
the vowel returns to its original quantity, as in beddau, ' tombs,' and
glanach, ' cleaner.' This process of lengthening the vowels of monosyllables
was not complete in the early part of the O. Welsh period: witness the
Capella glosses hepp, now Mb or eb, ' quoth,' and nepp, now neb, ' anybody.'
Neither is it easy to account for; but it may be surmised that, as most of
our monosyllables represent words originally of two (or sometimes more)
syllables, the vowel of the leading syllable was reinforced by way of
compensating for the discarding of the rest of the word, a long monosyllable
being, metrically speaking, a better equivalent for a dissyllable than a
short one. Possibly, also, the mistaken analogy of such forms as paup and
popptu exercised an influence in the same direction. There is another
consideration which is of more weight than the foregoing: in the earlier
stages of the Aryan languages the pitch-accent prevailed, and consequently a
mode of pronunciation was usual which is far less so in those of their modern
representatives, where the stress-accent is dominant. I allude to such words
as Latin pater, bonus. |
|
|
|
|
|
132 LEOTUEBS ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. These were not patter, bonnus, in spite of the French bon,
bonne, nor pater, bonus, in spite of the Italian padre, buono, and the
Anglo-Latin monstrosities payter, bownus. But enough has been said to show
that such a word as bonus had a tendency, under the influence of the
stress-accent, to become either bonnus or bonus. The latter represents the
course with which the student of Welsh is mostly concerned. The same tendency
is well known also in Modern Greek, where Xoyo? is now Xayo?, and it is
widely stereotyped in Mod. High German, which is said to be distinguished
from. Mid. H. German by its lengthening the short tone-vowels followed by
single consonants, as in geben, ' to give,' and haben, ' to have.' We have it
also in English: take the words ape, make, late, lame, which were formerly
apa, macian, lata, lama. The analogy between the English words and the Welsh
ones in question is so complete — both lengthen the tone-vowels, and both
discard the inflectional endings — that one cannot help suspecting their
having been subjected to the operation of the same causes. In the foregoing
enumeration of the consonants requiring long tone-vowels to precede them, no
mention was made — the explanation required being somewhat different — of the
rule, that the vowel must also be long before ch, th,ff, and s, as in |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTUEE III. 133
cock, ' red,' crotA, ' the womb,' rhaf, ' a rope,' and fflas, ' blue, green,
grey.' The antecedents of these spirants were respectively cc (or cs), tt,
pp, and ss (mostly for st): take for instance our cock, which is probably
from coeeum, ' scarlet,' and crotA, which has already been traced to' crotta:
these were no doubt pronounced coccum and crotta, which might be expected to
have yielded in the first place cock and crotL These last would eventually become
each and crotk, owing to the analogy of the other cases already mentioned,
and to the reaction on the vowels of the spirants, which, not being
instantaneous in their pronunciation, are not favourable to a clean cutting
off of the vowels preceding them. And so in the case of the other spirants,
including s, whence a difference between Irish and Welsh in words otherwise
identical, such as fflas; ours being fflds, while the Irish is fflas.
Supposing the steps coccum, cock, coch were made out, we should still find a
difficulty in assigning the time when the .short vowel was lengthened; but
Welsh verge offers a case of assonance which deserves a passing mention.
Dafydd ab Gwilym (1340-1400) makes och, ' oh,' answer such words as cocA,
/ed,' and clocA, ' a bell,' thus: " Och! Ooh! y Ddol Goch wedi
gwyl." Now the interjection is an exception, being pro- |
|
|
|
|
|
1 34 LECTUEES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. nounced not och but och, and such assonances have been
supposed to show that its pronunciation was formerly regular, that is och.
But the question may be put in two ways: has och been shortened contrary to
analogy, or has it merely retained its original quantity of vowel contrary to
analogy? In the latter case it would follow that D. ab Gwilym spoke clock,
cock, and not clock, cock, as we do. So far of the vowels which change their
quantity, and of the conditions under which that happens: a word now on the
third group, where no perceptible change of quantity has taken place. The
instances here in point are of two kinds: words with closed vowels as bdlck,
' proud,' bdlchder, ' pride,' plant, pldntack, ' children,' darn, 'apiece,'
ddrnau, ' pieces; ' and those with short vowels such as kanes, ' history,'
qfal, ' an apple,' maddeu, ' to forgive.' In these no great change of
quantity of the tone-vowels can have occurred from the earliest times, though
no doubt some modification may have followed the passage from the pitch-accent
of the ancients to the stress-accent of our own day. The number of instances
in this third group is probably far in excess of that in the two former
groups put together, if we confine ourselves to the tone-syllable, which
after all is the kernel of all our words: so that our vowel system |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTDEB III. 135
has altogether been more conservative than might be inferred from the somewhat
lengthy remarks to which those other groups gave rise. The processes already
mentioned of reorganising the Welsh vowel system were probably well over by
the end of the Mediteval Period in the history of the language. Before
concluding- this lecture a few more have to be noticed, some of which are not
only later in time than the foregoing, but, to some extent, probably owe
their origin to the influence of the analogy of the latter. Consider for a
moment the individuality so strongly impressed in the ways already pointed
out by Welsh phonology on certain monosyllables as compared with the same
when forming parts of longer words, and take as instances the following: —
coch^ ' red,' superl. cochaf, llath, ' a rod,' llathen, ' a yard,' tad, ' a
father,' tddol, ' fatherly,' mdb, ' a son, a boy,' mebyd, ' boyhood,^ brawd,
' a brother,' brodyr, ' brothers,' tawdd, ' molten,' toddi, ' to melt.' Here
we have a tolerably well-defined contrast which came to be impressed on
another class of words, namely, such as have a diphthong in the
tone-syllable. This was done by adding, so to say, to the weight of the
monosyllable, by diminishing that of the corresponding part of the longer
form, or by both processes at once. The diphthongs, the history of which is
here concerned, are our modern |
|
|
|
|
|
136 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. ai, au, ae, oe, Tcy. Mediaeval Welsh ei becomes ai in modern
monosyllables, as in bd, now hai, ' blame,' pi. beiau, geir, now gair, * a
word,' pi, geirjau, Meir, now Mair, ' Mary; ' tbe proclitics ei, ' his,' ei,
' her,* are of course not subject to this change: the same applies to
independent monosyllables which happen to be already sufr ficiently weighted,
as when they end with two consonants, such as gei/r, ' g6ats,' meirch, '
steeds,' ysceifn, the plural of yscafn, ' light, not heavy.' Med. Welsh eu
becomes au, as in deu, now dau, ' two,' and keul, now haul, ' sun,' heulog, *
sunny; ' the proclitic eu ' their ' remains, like ei, unchanged: the same
applies to neu, ' or.' Old Welsh ai (pronounced probably with the blunted i,
which we now write y or m) becomes ae so early as the beginning of the Med.
Welsh period, as for instance in air, later aer, ' a battle,' and cai, later
cae, 'a field.' The spelling ae, however, is also retained in words of more
than one syllable, as in aerfa, ' a battle-field,' and caeau, ' fields. But
the pronunciation varies between au or ai and eu or ei. In a few words this
relation is optionally indicated by the ordinary orthography, as in aetk, '
ivit,' but euthum, ' ivi,' and euthost, ' ivisti,' maes, ' a field,' meusydd,
' fields; ' in the colloquial, ae in an unaccented final syllable is mostly
reduced into a single vowel, whereby such words |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE III. 137 as
hiraeth, ' longing,' become in South Wales hiretk, and the like. A word which
in 0, Welsh would have had the single form mat, is in Mod. Welsh both mae and
mat: the former means ' is,' the latter is a proclitic with the force of the
English conjunction that: the same use of a verb as a conjunction occurs in
taw, ' that,' commonly used in South Wales instead of mai: taw is obsolete as
a verb, but not so its Irish equivalent td, ' is.' O. Welsh 01 (also probably
pronounced with i = our modern u or y) makes oe in Med. Welsh, and later, as
when O. Welsh ois becomes oes, ' age, generation,' and oid becomes oedd, '
was.' The spelling oe is also retained in other words than those of one
syllable: take for instance the O. Welsh ois oisoud, ' sseculum sseculorum,'
later oes oesoedd, pronounced in North and South Wales respectively oes
ousoudd, oes oisoidd, or still more colloquially with ousodd, oisodd, the
diphthong in the unaccented ending being reduced to a single vowel as in many
other words, such as mynyddodd, ' mountains,' nefodd, ' heavens, heaven,'
written mynyddoedd, ne/oedd. As to the diphthong 7vy, when it occurs in an
accented syllable followed by another syllable in the same word, the accent
under favourable circumstances shifts from the w to the y, whereby the former
becomes a semi-vowel, as in gwydd, 'a, goose,' but gnyddau, 'geese.' This
modi- |
|
|
|
|
|
138 LECTUKES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. fication is probably very modern, and otherwise this
diphthong may be regarded as the most unchangeable, excepting ew, in the
language, as the old spelling ui probably meant exactly the same sounds which
we write wj/. But as m/ and oe represent an early oi which came down into O.
Welsh partly as oi (now oe), partly as ui (our my), the difficult question as
to the cause of this bifiurcation meets us. The following answer is a mere
guess, to be taken for what it is worth. In Mod. Welsh the diphthongs, when
accented, have the accent on the leading vowel (excepting in such cases as
that of gwyddau, where 7oy ceases to be a diphthong), as in gdir, mde, oedd,
and gwydd. But it may well be that it was not always so, and that gair, for
instance, was preceded by geir for geirja and garjd, the advance of the
accent having been gradual — garja, geirja, geir, gdir. Take also such words
as draen, ' a thorn,' plural drain, which may be inferred to stand for drain
sing. drein plural, and these for dragn and dregn-i or dregn-ja: the cognate
Irish is draighen, ' thorn.' Similarly dau would imply deu, and so in other
instances. Should these guesses turn out well founded, one would have to
regard oen, ' a lamb,' for instance, and its plural wyn, as representing oin
sing, and oin plural, for oin-i or oin-ja, with an ending indicative of the
plural number retained |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE III. 139
intact at a time when the singular had been reduced to a monosyllahle. This
agrees tolerably well with the fact that Latin e makes ny in Welsh, as in canwyll,
' a candle,' and afwyn, ' a rein,' from candila and habena, while the oxytone
Aavir\K has in "Welsh yielded Deinjoel, now Deinjol. If the antecedents
of our ai, au, ae, oe, ny were ei, eu, di, 6i, 01, the modification thereby
implied admits of being described simply as the replacing the unaccented
vowel by a nearly related vowel of a lower pitch of resonance, a principle
the working of which is, I am inclined to think, also to be detected
elsewhere in the language: for instance, where Mod. "Welsh replaces eu
in unaccented final syllables by au, as in pethau, ' things,' fforau ' best,'
borau, ' morning.' Compare also the disuse of enwiredd, ' untruth,' engyljon,
* angels,' llewenydd, 'joy,' in favour of the forms anwiredd, angyljon,
llawenydd, and the like. ( 140 ) |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTUEE IV.
"As his craze ia astronomical, he will most likely make few converts,
and will be forgotten after at most a passing laugh from scientific men. But
if his craze had been historical or philological, he might have put forth
notions quite as absurd as the notion that the earth is flat, and many people
would not have been in the least able to see that they were absurd. If any
scholar had tried to confute him, we should have heard of ' controversies '
and ' differences of opinion.' " — The Satuedat Ebview. . It is my
intention now to call your attention to the continuity of the Welsh language;
but before we attempt to trace it back step by step to the time of the Eoman
occupation, it may be well to premise that history fails to give us any
indications which would lead us to infer that the Welsh of the present day
are not in the main the lineal descendants of the people whom the Eomans
found here. No doubt the race received an infusion of foreign blood in those
neighbourhoods where the Roman legions had permanent stations; but its
character ddes not seem to have been much influenced by contact with the
English, at any rate previously to the Norman Conquest. As to the Danes, they
have hardly left behind them a trace of their visits to our shores, and that
the Irish occupied any part of Wales for a length of time |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTUBE IV. 141
still remains to be proved. Certainly the effects of such an occupation, even
were it established, on our language -will be hard to discover. The monuments
to be met with in Wales and elsewhere in the West of Britain alleged to
belong to the Irish will presently come under notice. Thus it would seem that
we are entitled to expect to find our Welsh to have been continued without
any violent interruption from the common language of the Kymric race in the
time of Agricola, to which belonged not only Wales, including Monmouthshire,
but also Devon and Cornwall, a considerable portion of the west and middle of
England, nearly all the north of it, and a part of Scotland. To what extent
the country was occupied by non-Kymric races is a question which will occupy
us as we go on. Subsequently to the decisive battle of Chester in 607, when
the English succeeded in severing the Welsh of Gwynedd from their countrymen
in Lancashire and the North, the Kymric population of the west of the island
found themselves cut up into three sections, the Strathclyde Britons, those
of Wales, and those south of the Bristol Channel. As to the northern section,
it was not long ere English drove the old language off the ground. In
Cornwall it survived to differentiate itself considerably from Welsh, and to
become extinct as a spoken language only in the last cen- |
|
|
|
|
|
142 LEOTUEES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. tury. In the middle section, that is, in Wales, you need not
be told that it is still living and vigorous, though its domain is getting
more and more circumscribed. One may accordingly assume, at any rate
provisionally, that the Kymric people of the North, of Wales, and of
Devonshire and Cornwall, spoke the same language till the end of the 7th
century or thereabouts; so in writing on early Welsh we claim the use of
ancient Kymric monuments, whether they occur in Wales itself, in Devonshire,
or in the vicinity of Edinburgh. Of course one is not to suppose that within
that range there were no dialectic variations; but they were probably not
such as to make themselves disturbing elements within the compass of our
early inscriptions. The case is different when the latter are compared with
those of Ireland, the -linguistic differences between the Kymric and the
Goidelic nations being of a far older standing; but more of this anon. Hitherto
it has been usual to divide the Welsh language, historically considered, into
three periods, namely, those of Old, Middle, and Modern Welsh. This
classification was adopted at a time when very little was known to
glottologists respecting our early inscribed stones, which mark out for us
two periods of the language to which, in default of a better, the term Early
Welsh may be |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTUEE IV. 143
applied. This, however, cannot be' done without rendering Middle Welsh
inadmissible; but, in order to disturb the old terminology as little as
possible, the adjective Medimval may be used instead of Middle. Having
premised this much, we proceed to parcel out the entire past of the language
in the following manner: — 1. Prehistoric Welsh, ranging from the time when
the ancestors of the Welsh and the Irish could no longer be said to form one
nation, to the subjugation of the Britons by Julius Agricola, or, let us say,
to the end of the first century. 2. Early Welsh of the time of the Eoman
occupation, from then to the departure of the Romans in the beginning of the
fifth century. , 3. Early Welsh of what is called the Brit-Welsh period, from
that date till about the end of the seventh century, or the beginning of the
eighth. 4. Old Welsh, from that time to the coming of the Normans into Wales
in the latter part of the eleventh century. 5. Mediaeval Welsh, from that
time to the Reformation. 6. Modern Welsh, from that epoch to the present
day. |
|
|
|
|
|
144 LECTDKES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGy. This would be the order to follow if one had to produce specimens
of the successive periods of the language, but for our present purpose it
will be preferable to trace it back step by step from that stage in which we
know it best to the other stages in which it is not so well known; in a word,
to treat it as a question of identity. The lead, then, is to be taken by
Modern Welsh, which I would distinguish into Biblical and Journalistic Welsh.
By the latter is meant the vernacular, which we talk, and meet with, more or
less touched up, in most of our newspapers. It is characterised by a growing
tendency to copy English idioms, the result no doubt of frequent contact with
English, and of continually translating from English. It is right to add that
the number of the books and journals published in it is steadily increasing.
Biblical Welsh, as the term indicates, is the language of the Welsh
translations of the Bible, and a number of other books, mostly theological,
of the time of the Eeformation and later, and it is still the language in
which our best authors endeavour to write. This overlapping of Biblical and
Journalistic Welsh in our own day will serve to show that, when glottologists
divide, for convenience' sake, the life of a language into periods, one is
not to ask the day of the month when one period ends and the succeeding one
begins. Passing be- |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IV. 145
yond tlie time of the Reformation, we come to the Mediaeval Welsh of the
Bruts or chronicles, so called from the fashion, once common, of
manufacturing a Brutus or Brytus to colonise this island, and to give it the
name of Britain: he was held to have been a descendant of ^neas, and thus
were the Welsh connected with Troy. To about the same time are to be assigned
the romances called the Mabinogion, which consist mostly of tales respecting
Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Here also may be mentioned, as
belonging to the earlier part of the period, the Venedotian versions of the
Laws of Wales, which Aneurin Owen found to be in manuscripts of the 12th
century, and it is to the 12th that Mr. Skene assigns the Black Book of
Carmarthen in the Hengwrt Collection, the property of W. W. E. Wynne of
Peniarth, Esq.: it contains the oldest version extant of much of the poetry
commonly assigned to the 6th century. As to the language of this poetry, it
is certainly not much older, if at all, than the manuscript containing it I
have said the language, for the matter may be centuries older, if we may
suppose each writer or rehearser to have adapted the form of the words, as
far as concerns the reduction of the mutable consonants, to the habits of his
own time, which one might well have done unintentionally, and so, perhaps, K |
|
|
|
|
|
146 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. without the matter being much tampered with. For the details
of this question I would refer you to the fourteen introductory chapters in
Skene's Four Ancient Books of Wales: suffice it here to say, that the poems
ascribed to the Oynfeirdd or early bards belong, as far as concerns us now,
to the Mediaeval period of Welsh, though the metre, the allusions, and the
archaisms, which some of them contain, tend -to show that they date, in some
form or other, from the 9th century, if not earlier. So far we have at our
service abundance of literature for all philological purposes; but when we
pass the threshold of the 12th century, the case . is no longer so, our only
materials for the study of Old Welsh being inscriptions and glosses, together
with a few other scraps in Latin manuscripts. The inscriptions here alluded
to are the later ones, written in characters which archfeologists call
Hiberno-Saxon. As to the manuscript portion of the materials, when a Welshman
reading a Latin author met a word he did not understand, he ascertained its
meaning, and wrote its Welsh equivalent above it, between the lines, or in
the margin: so our Welsh glosses were produced. We have, besides, fragments
of charters and scraps of poetry filling up spaces which happened to be blank
in the original manuscripts. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IV. 147
Most of them are ia Oxford and Cambridgie, and one in Lichfield. Their dates
are ascertained for us by experts, and it is to the 9th century that they now
assign the oldest collection. Altogether they are far under a thousand vords
and contain few complete sentences: so, while they leave us considerably in
the dark as to the syntax of the language, they enable us to ascertain what
phonological and formal changes it has passed through since the 9th century.
Among other things, we are placed in a position to watch the appearance and
gradual spread in it of the more interesting consonantal mutations. The next
move backwards lands us in the Brit-Welsh period of the language, for the
study of which we have, besides a few names in Gildas and other writers of
the time, a pretty good number of epitaphs, but mostly written in Latin. This
is unfortunate, as the Kymric names they contain have, in a great number of
instances, their terminations Latinised. A few, however, are bilingual,
consisting of a Latin version in more or less debased Roman capitals,
interspersed occasionally ■ towards the close of the period with
minuscules, and of an Early Welsh version in Ogam. Several of them will be
noticed as we go on; and I now submit to you a list [this will be found in an
Appendix at the end of thevolume] of them, con- |
|
|
|
|
|
148 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. taiuing all those which have not been reduced to mere
fragments of no special interest, or rendered illegible by centuries of
exposure. As we pass back from the Brit-Welsh period to the time of the Epman
occupation, our data become still more meagre. They consist (1) of a few
proper names which have been identified in Ptolemy's Geography, the Itinerary
of Antoninus, Tacitus' Agricola, and other writings of that time, and (2) .
inscriptions scattered up and down the country occupied by our ancestors. The
number of Celtic names. in these last is very considerable, but we cannot be
sure that they are in all instances Kymric; however, we may assume some of
them to be so if they are found at Caerleon (that is, the Isca Silurum of the
ancients), at York, and other places in the North. They are mostly epitaphs
written in Latin, and beginning with the usual Koman dedication to the Di
Manes, but some are votive tablets to local gods. Any one who has an eye for
Celtic names can pick them out at his leisur-e in the Corpus Inscriptionum
Latinarum, published not long ago in Berlin, under the superintendence of
Professor Hiibner: the seventh volume is devoted to those of Great Britain.
And now that we have thus rapidly scanned the past of our language so far
back as any the slightest assistance is rendered us by ancient |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IV. 149
authors and contemporary monuments, you may ask, What about the question of
identity propounded at the beginning of the lecture? As far as concerns
Modern and Mediaeval Welsh, or Medisevaland Old Welsh, there can be no
question at all, and we need not hesitate to assume the identity of the Welsh
language of the 9th century with that of the 19th; that is to say, the former
has grown to be the latter. Nor is there any occasion at present to prove its
identity in the 1st and 6th century, though, it must be admitted, that would,
owing to the scantiness of our data, be only less difficult than to establish
the negative. At any rate, we may wait until the latter has found an
advocate; for it is not just at this point that the chain of continuity has
been suspected: the links that are now and then challenged occur between the
6th and' 9th centuries, and it is to them that our attention must now be
directed. Here precedence may be granted to the difficulty of those writers
who fail to see how a language once possessed of a system of cases could get
to lose them and appear in the state in which we find the Old Welsh of the
9th century, which hardly differed in this respect from the Welsh of our day.
These may be dismissed with the question. What has become of the cases of
Latin in the languages of the Romance nations of modern times, such as |
|
|
|
|
|
150 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. Italian, French, and Spanish, or how many of the five or six
cases formerly in use in English are current in Modern English? Then there
are those who will have it, that Welsh can never have had cases, because it
is, as they imagine, nearly related to, or immediately derived from Hebrew,
which also has no cases. Neither do literary ostriches of this class deserve
to be reasoned with, at any rate until they have taken their heads out of the
sand and acquainted themselves with the history of the philological world
since the publication of Bopp's Comparative Grammar. As matters stand, it
would in all probability be useless to tell them that Welsh has nothing to do
with Hebrew or any other Semitic tongue. It is, however, not a little satisfactory
to read, from time to time, in the English papers, that this Hebrew
nightmare, which has heavily lain, some time .or other, on almost every
language in Europe, seems to be fast transforming itself into a kind of
spirit of search impelling gentlemen of a certain idiosyncrasy to turn their
thoughts to the .discovery of the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel. Not to dwell on
the fact that Semitic scholars are satisfied that Hebrew itself once had
cases, or, rather, that it never lost them altogether, it may be interesting
to notice that even the Welsh we speak may be made to yield us evidence of
the use |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTUKE rV. 151 of
a system of cases in the language during the earlier periods of its history.
But before we proceed to this we may for a moment consider what traces of the
cases of Latin remain in the Welsh, words which our ancestors borrowed from
that language. Well, if you look through a list of these loan-words, which
amount in all to no less than 500 Latin vocables, you will find that some
show traces of the Latin nominative, as for instance, lendith, ' a blessing,'
ffnrn, ' an oven,' pabell, ' a tent,' from benedictio,fornax,papilio,
respectively, while others are supposed to be derived from accusatives, such
as cardod, ' alms, charity,' ciwdod, ' a tribe,' j)ont, ' a bridge,' from
caritatem, cimtatem, and pontem: compare lorddonen, 'Jordan,' and Moesen, '
Moses,' from 'lopBdvrjv and MouvffTJv. Lastly, it may be left undecided
whether tymp, ' a woman's time to be confined,' comes from tempus nominative
or tempus accusative, and so of corf, ' a body,' from corpus, but tymmhor, '
a season,' must have come from temporis, tempori, or tempore, and so of the
corffor in corj^ori, ' to incorporate,' and in corjvroedd, an obsolete plural
of corj^, for which we now use cyrf. Now, have we any such traces in Welsh
words of Welsh origin? No doubt we have; and they are to be detected by
comparison with other languages, especially Irish. The following are found to
be nominatives: — |
|
|
|
|
|
152 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. bru, ' womb: ' compare O. Ir. nom. bru, gen, brond. car, ' a
friend: ' compare O. Ir, nom. cara, gen. carat, ci, ' a dog: ' compare O. Ir.
nom. cu, gen. con. gof, ' a smith: ' compare O. Ir. nom. goba, gen, goband.
llyg, ' a field-mouse: ' compare O. Ir. nom. luch, gen. lochad. tan, ' fire:
' compare O. Ir. nom. tene, gen. tened. In other instances the comparison
shows us that the Welsh forms are not nominatives, but probably accusatives,
as in the following, pointed out to me by Mr. Stokes: — bon (in henfon), ' a
cow: ' compare O. Ir. accus. boin, nom. bo. breuan, ' a handmill: ' compare
O. Ir. accus. broinn-n, nom. broo, equated by Mr. Stokes with the Sanskrit
grdvan, the Rigveda word for the stone used in sq;ueezing out the- soma
juice. breuant, ' the windpipe: ' compare O. Ir. accus. brdigait-n, nom.
brdge. dernydd, ' a druid: ' compare O. Ir. accus. druid-n, nom. drui {drym
would seem. to be the Welsh nominative).
|
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IV. 153
emi7i, ' a nail of the hand or foot: ' compare O. Ir. accus. ingin-n, nom.
inge. gorsin, ' a door-post: ' compare O. Ir. accus. ursain-n, nom. ursa.
Iwerddon, ' Ireland: ' compare O. Ir. accus. Herenn, nom. Hiriu, mis, '
month: ' compare O. Ir. accus. mis-n, nom. mi. pridd, ' earth, soil: '
compare O. Ir. accus. creid-n, nom.- cri. Add to these the word nos, ' night,'
a nominative for nots = noct-s: compare Latin nox, gen. noctis. If Welsh had
a case with the stem noct as in Latin noctis, noctem, nocti, it would have to
become noeth in "Welsh, and this actually occurs in trannoeth, ' the
following day,' literally ' over^ night,' and in trannoeth the word noeth
must he an accusative, which is the case tra governed, as may he learned from
the fact that its Irish counterpart tar always governs that case. Beunoeth, '
every night,' is also an accusative, and so probably is the O. "Welsh
form henoith (written henoid in the Juvencus Codex), ■ superseded later
by heno ' tonight,' which seems to be a shortened form of he-nos: compare
he-ddyw, ' to-day.' So far of nominatives and accusatives: as to the other
cases, it is exceedingly hard to distin-
|
|
|
|
|
|
154 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. guish them from accusatives or from one another now that their
distinctive endings have been discarded. We have, however, undoubted
genitives in ei, ' his,' ei, ' her,' and eu ' their,' which have already been
mentioned. The dative next: years ago attention was called by Mr. Norris to
the pT/n in er-k/n, ' against,' as the dative of pen, ' head.' Now erbi/n is
in Irish letter for letter arckiunn, composed of the preposition ar and
ciunn, the dative of cenn, ' head: ' the latter is, however, separable,
admitting pronouns between the preposition and the noun, as in armochiunn
" ante faciem meam, coram me; " and so the O. Cornish er y lyn
would suggest that in Welsh also one might at one time say er ei lyn, where
we now have to say yn ei erbyn, or Vw erbyn, ' against him, to meet him.' Mr.
Stokes has pointed out another similar dative in O. Cornish in such a phrase
as mar y lyrgh (= Welsh ar ei ol), ' after him:' the nominative is leryk.
Lastly, we have one certain instance of an ablative, namely, that of pmy, '
who,' in the particle po, of the same origin as Latin quo. You will notice
also that the same use is made of them in both languages in such sentences as
Po anhawddafy gwaith, mwyaf y clod oH gyflawni, " quo difficilius, hoc
prseclarius." Now that we are hurriedly picking up, as it were, a few
fragments of the time-wrought wreck |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IV. 155 of
our inflections, you may expect a word about the Welsh genders. I need not
prove that Welsh once had three genders, that is, not only the masculine and
the feminine, but also a neuter, of which we have a familiar relic in the
demonstrative hjn^ as in hyn o Mysc, ' this much learning,' hyn win, ' this
much wine: ' add to this the O. Welsh pad = Lat. quod, quid. But more
interest attaches to the feminine: put together, for instance, merch, ' a
daughter,' and tlms, ' pretty,' and they have to become merek dlos, ' a
pretty daughter.' Now, why is the t of the adjective reduced into d? Well, if
you remember what was said on another occasion, it can only be because merch
once ended in a vowel, and I hardly need state -that that vowel was probably
a or a. Thus merch dlos represents an earlier merca tlos or rather merca
tlossa, for the a of the adjective is even more certain than that of the
noun, seeing that it is to the influence of that a on the timbre or quality
of the vowel in the preceding syllable we owe our having still two forms of
the adjective, tlws in the masculine and tlos in the feminine. Tlws and tlos
belong to a class of adjectives", already noticed, which conform to the
same rules, and you may take the pair llym, mas. Hem, fern. ' sharp,' as
typical of another, and as supplying us with the principle which guides us in
distin- |
|
|
|
|
|
166 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. guishing the gender of monosylla'bic nouns: thug if you
propose to a monoglot Welshman any monosyllabic nouns with which he is not
familiar, he will treat those with ro or y as masculines and those with o or
e as feminines, and in so doing he thinks he is guided by instinct. This is
probably not the only habit of later growth which has been mistaken for
instinct; and if you wish to find the key to it, you have to trace it back in
the language to a time when the latter was on a level, so to say, with Latin
and Greek as regards the inflection of its substantives, while the origin of
the same habit must be sought thousands of years earlier, when neither Celt
nor Teuton, Greek nor Roman, had as yet wandered westward from the cradle of
the Aryan race in the East. Perhaps it is even more surprising to find in
later "Welsh traces of the dual number, seeing that the very oldest
specimens of its inflections which the Aryan languages afi'ord us look
weather-worn and ready to disappear. But to give you an instance or two in
Welsh: we meet in the Mabinogi of Branwen Verch Llyr with deu rcydel uonllmn,
that is, in our orthography, dau Wyddel fonllwm, ' two unshod Irishmen '
(Guest's Mabinogion, iii. p. 98). Now in the singular we should have Gnyddel
bonllrmn, and in the plural Gmyddyl bonUymion; so it may be asked how it is
that we have |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IV. 157
bonllwm made in our instance into fonllmm. There is only one answer: Gwyddel
must in the dual have once ended in a vowel, and a glance at other related
languages which have the dual, such as O. Irish, Greek, and Sanskrit, would
make it probahle that the vowel in question must have been the ending of the
nominative or accusative dual; but instead of guessing which the vowel or
vowels were in which the dual ended in Early Welsh, perhaps the best thing
would be to ask you to take a look at that number in Greek in which our
instance might be literally rendered: hvo avviroSi]T(a ToiBe\e. Instances are
not very rare in Mediaeval Welsh, but I will only mention one or two more: in
the Mabinogi of larlles y Ffynnawn we meet with deu was penngrych wineu
deledwiv:, " two youths with beautiful curly hair " (Guest's Mab.,
i. p. 35). A still more interesting instance occurs in William's " Seini
Greal," p. 91, where we read of deu deirw burwynnyon, ' two pure-white
bulls.' In Modern Welsh there is one instance which is well worth mentioning.
The Carnarvonshire heights, called by English tourists " The
Rivals," have, from the Carnarvon side, the appearance of three peaks
forming two angles or forks between them: hence their Welsh name is Yr Eifl,
which has been supposed to be plural; but were it so, it would be, not Yr
Eifl, but Y Geifl or |
|
|
|
|
|
158 LBCTUKES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. Y Gq/lau, the singular being ffo/l, ' the fork.' So Tr Eifl
means, I cannot help believing, the two forks, and might be rendered into
Greek Tw "Ayxr], but that we should thereby lose the connotation of the
Welsh name, which in this instance, as ia so many other Celtic place-names,
turns mainly on a metaphorical reference to the configuration of the human
body. Interesting as the foregoing instances may be to us, as persons whose
language is the Welsh, you must not suppose that they enhance materially the
certainty with which glottologists regard the former inflections of Welsh
substantives; for they are satisfied that Welsh is near of kin to Irish, and
that Irish had the inflections in question, not developed in the course of
its own history, but inherited from of old from an older language which was
the common mother of Irish and Welsh. The discovery in Welsh of a few such remains
as have just been pointed out, they would have thought uot improbable
beforehand, but supposing, on the other hand, that that did not occur in a
single instance, they would not have felt in the least dismayed. Where, then,
seeing that Welsh still shows traces of at least five cases, three genders,
and three members, does the improbability lie of its having retained the
endings indicative of some of them — say the nominative and genitive
singular |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTUKE IV. 159
masculine — as late as the 7tli century? Nowhere, it seems to me. But as the
transition of a language from the inflectional to the positional stage is an
importalit one, which could not help registering itself in its literature,
let us turn our attention for a moment to this point. For our purpose the
difference between an inflectional and a positional construction admits of
easy illustration. In Latin there is no material difference of meaning
between rex Romm and Romce rex, that is, if we put N. for nominative, and G.
for genitive, both sequences, N. G. and G. N. are admissible in that
language, while in Welsh we have to be contented with N. G. only, and say
brenhin JRhiifain, as Rhufain hrenhin would not convey the same meaning.
Probably, however, when Welsh had case-endings, it could have recourse to
both N. G. and G. N.; but when the former were discarded one of the latter
had to be given up — that turned out to be G. JH'. But the sequence JS^. G.
could not have beaten the other off the field in a day, and we have to
ascertain if any survivals of G. JST. occur in the Welsh literature which has
come down to our time. A perusal of the poems attributed to the early bards
would convince you that such do occur: I will only quote (in modern
orthography) a few at random from Skene's Four Ancient Books of Wales: —
cenedl nodded, " the nation's refuge ''
|
|
|
|
|
|
160 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. (ii. p. 7); huan heolydd wrfnAdd, " bold as the sun in
his courses " (ii. p. 20); Cymmerau trin, " the conflict of Cj'mraerau
" (ii. p. 24); rhiain garedd, " delight of females " (ii. p.
93); and " Gorchan Cynfelyn cylchwy nylad,^^ " Gorchan Cynfelyn, to
make the region weep " (ii. p. 96). Now, with such survivals as these
and others of a different nature, which could be pointed out in the poems
alluded to, before our eyes, the conclusion would seem natural that Welsh may
well have retained case-endings in common use as late as the 7th century. On
the other hand, it has, it is true, been argued that the original composition
of the poems in question took place long before the 12th century. But what
concerns us here is the fact that the evidence they give us, taken for what
it is worth, affords a presumption that one is right in supposing
case-endings to have been in use in our language as late as the 7th century;
and the outcome of all this is, that thus far we have not met with any prima
facie reason whatever for thinking that the old Celtic monuments still
existing in Wales were not intended to commemorate persons who spoke our
language, or a language which has, by insensible degrees, grown to be that
which we speak. Now we move on to meet those who claim some of our
inscriptions as belonging, not to the Welsh,
|
|
|
|
|
|
LECXUKlli 1> .
lO-l but to the Irish. You will find their views advocated, though not
without eliciting opposition, by some of the writers who contribute to the Arclimologia
Cambrensis. It is by no means irrelevant to our case that you should know
that they are men whose study is archaeology rather than the Celtic
languages. For though the belief in the Irish origin of inscriptions found
here may have originated in the discovery that seme of them are written in
Ogam, a character once supposed to be exclusively Irish, it now rests mainly
on other arguments, which can have no weight in the eyes of any one who has
enjoyed the advantage of a glottological training. Thus, whenever an early
inscribed stone is discovered here bearing a name which happens to be known
to Irish annalists, it is at once assumed that the inscription containing it
is of Irish origin. But this, it requires no very profound knowledge of the
Celtic languages to perceive, is perfectly unwarrantable. For as Welsh and
Irish are kindred tongues, and as their vocabularies of proper names of
persons must, at one time, have been identical, the occurrence of the same
Celtic names in Wales and Ireland is just what one is entitled beforehand to
expect. Neither, supposing a name, to put the case still stronger, forming
part of an early inscription in Wales not to be traceable in later Welsh,
while it happens to occur in L |
|
|
|
|
|
162 LECTUEES ON
"WELSH PHILOLOGT. Irish 1)00118, can the inscription be claimed as
Irish: besides, it would warrant our advancing similar claims. For instance,
we might say, If onr stones with the name Decceti on them are Irish because
we have not as yet succeeded in tracing it in Welsh books, whereas it is
thought to be detected in Irish ones, then on precisely the same grounds we
claim the Irish stone bearing the name Cunacena until the latter can be shown
to occur in later Irish, as we have it in the successive forms Cunacenni,
Concenn, Cincenn, and Kyngen, this side of St. George's Channel. The one
claim is as good as the other, and neither deserves a hearing; for the
question as to which Celtic names have survived in Wales and in Ireland
respectively belongs to the chapter of accidents, and the wonder, perhaps, is
that the instances are so numerous as they are of the same ones having come
down to the Middle Ages or to modern times in both countries. If you were to
press the advocates of the Irish claim for their reasons, the answer would be
of the following type, which I copy from the Archceologia Cambrensis for
1873, page 286: " Were I to find on the shores of Wexford or Waterford a
sepulchral inscription to Griffith, ap Owen, I should be fully as justified
in claiming it to be Irish as Mr. Rhys is in claiming Maccui Decetti [szc]
to |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IV.
163 be Welsh." This is d propos
of an Anglesey inscription reading: Hie lacit Maccu Decceti. Now this
involves the fallacy of assuming that the difference between Welsh and Irish
has always been so great as it is in modern times. If there is anything I
have especially endeavoured to impress on your minds in the previous
lectures, it is the fact that the further back we trace the two languages,
the more strongly are they found to resemble one another. There is one word
in particular which Irish archaeologists, with a turn for what may not
inappropriately be termed simple inspection, have made a great deal of — I
mean the word maqvi, the genitive of the word for son. This, it is said, is the
Irish mace or mac, ' a son,' genitive maicc or maic, and it is held to settle
the question. The truth, however, is that it contributes nothing at all to
the settling of it; for, as all Oeltists know, the Kymric languages
systematically change qv into p, so that the O. Welsh map, now mab, ' a son,'
is as regularly derived in Welsh from maqv-i as mac is in Irish. What would
have been to the point would be to prove that the Kymric change of qv into p
was obsolete before the period of the inscriptions whose origin is in
question. This the writers whose views we are discussing would, I feel
confident, find to be an impossible task to perform, and the attempt |
|
|
|
|
|
164 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. would, moreover, be likely to take them out of the beaten
path of simple inspection, one of the most recent outcomes of which may here
be mentioned, as it will answer the purpose of a reductio ad ahsurdum of this
way of appreciating old epitaphs. In the churchyard at Llanfihangel y
Traethau, between Harlech and Portmadoc, there is a stone bearing an
inscription apparently of the 12th century: one line of it reads Wleder
matris Odeleu, whence we find elicited totus, teres atque rotundus,, the
full-grown Irish name Dermot O'Daly: this, 3'ou will be surprised to learn,
was not meant as a joke — see the Archceologia Camhrensis for 1874, page 335.
Though the reasoning which seems to have led to the conclusion that our early
inscriptions are Irish will not for one moment bear examination, that
conclusion may, nevertheless, be the only one warranted by the facts of the
case; hence it is clear that we must not dismiss it until we have considered
how it deals with them. Well, the first thing that strikes one here is the
arbitrariness of a theory which, from a number of inscriptions, would select
some as being Irish without predicating anything of the remaining ones, or
assigning the principle on which the selection is made. You might perhaps
expect that those written in Ogam would be the only ones claimed as
Irish, |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IV. 165 and
at one time it was so; but eventually it was found convenient to cross that
line; and no wonder, for, as you must have noticed, there is no essential
difference between those partly written in Ogam and those written in Eoman
letters exclusively. So Welsh antiquaries could hardly have been taken by
surprise by a sweeping statement of the Irish claim, such as we meet with. in
the Arch. Camhrensis for 1873, p. 285, in respect of the names Vinnemagli and
Senemagli in a Denbighshire inscription. There we read, '•' Both of the names
in question are Irish, as are most, if not all, the names found on those
monuments hitherto known as Romano-British." This you will keep in mind
as a concession on the part of our Irish friends of the fact that the nanfes
in our inscriptions are of a class, and do not readily admit of being
separated into such as are Irish and such as are not. Then, by supposing some
of the epitaphs to be commemorative of Irish pagans of a very early date,
they involve themselves in difficulties as to the crosses to be frequently
met with on them. This, however, may be a mere instance of chronological
extravagance not essential to the theory, but it would not be so easy to take
that view of an assumption to which few would be found to demur, namely, that
the pagan Irish did not use |
|
|
|
|
|
166 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. the Roman alphabet. We observe, therefore, with some
curiosity how they extricate themselves from the difficulty arising from the
fact that almost all our inscriptions are partly or wholly in Roman letters.
As to those which are exclusively in the latter, the oracles have not yet
spoken; at any rate, I cannot find their utterances. But in the case of
stones bearing inscriptions in both characters, if the one is not a
translation of the other, then the Roman one owes its presence on it to a
Romanised Briton having seized on the monument of a Gael to serve his own
purposes, there being, it would seem, a great scarcity of rude and undressed
stones in those days. If, on the other hand, the one merely renders the
other, the explanation offered is somewhat different. The following, which I
copy from the Arch. Cambrensis for 1869, p. 159, relates to the bilingual
stone at St. Dogmaels, near Cardigan, reading Sagrani Fili Cunotami, and in
Ogam Sax/ramni Maqvi Cunatami: — "The story of the stone looks like
this; that it was erected as a memorial over some well-known chief of the
invading Gaedhal, who for a long period occupied South Wales, and that at
some period after, when thelanguage of the Gaedhal, and the use of Ogham were
dying out, some patriotic descendant of the hero, to perpetuate the memorial,
re-cut the inscription in the Roman characters then |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IV. 167 in
use; the monument is of great antiquity, the Eoman inscription alone, on the
authority of Mr. Westwood, being referable to a date ' not long after the
departure of the Romans.' " Ah uno disce omnes. A still greater
difficulty presents itself in the frequent occurrence on the stones in
question of names which to most men would seem to be Latin, while it is, on
the other hand, acknowledged that the Goidelic race was never conquered by
the Romans, and that they would otherwise have been too proud, as we are
told, to adopt Roman names. How this difficulty is disposed of as a whole I
do not know. However, I find that Turpilli and Victor are made out to be pure
Irish; but whether the same fate awaits such names as Justi, Faternini,
Paulini,. Vitaliani, and the like, remains to be seen; for the possibilities
of O'Reilly's dictionary of Modern Irish are many. Unfortunately, such is the
reputation that work enjoys, and such are the discoveries to which it helps
men ignorant of Old Irish, that an appeal to it on their part has the charm
of the last straw that broke the camel's back. The foregoing are a few of the
difficulties attending the claim made to our inscriptions. Now, I would call
your attention to particular instances of them, which cannot, I think, be
Irish: — (1.) We will begin with a stone at Penmachno, |
|
|
|
|
|
168 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. in Carnarvonshire, which reads: Cantiori Hie Jacit Venedotis
Give Fuit Consobrino Magli Magistrati. Despite the waywardness of the Latin,
it undoubtedly shows that the person commeniorated was a man of importance,
and a Venedotian citizen, whatever that may exactly mean. ' The Venedotians
are not generally supposed to be of the Goidelic race, and, as they are not
likely to have made a foreigner a citizen of their state, the conclusion is
unavoidable that the inscription is not of Irish origin. It is much in the
same way that one may look at another which reads: Corbalengi Jacit Or dous.
The stone stands on an eminence overlooking the Cardigan Bay, between the
convenient landing-places of Aberporth and Traethsaith, in Cardiganshire; but
I am inclined to think that Ordous means that the person buried there was one
of the Ordovices of North . "Wales. If so, whether he came there as an
invader or as an ally, the position of the stone, which seems to occupy its
original site, explains why it was thought expedient to specify his tribe on
his monument. So this also could not well be Irish. (2.) The inscription at
Llangadwaladr, not far from Aberffraw in Anglesey, reads Catamanus Rex
Sapientisimus Opinatisimus Omnium Regum. It is right to state that it is not
in Roman capitals, but in what may be called early |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IV. 169
Hiberno-Saxon characters, and that it is ascribed by archaeologists to the
7th centnry. There are, however, other reasons for ranging it with those of
the Brit-Welsh, rather than with later ones. It is probable that this
Catamanus was the Catmaa or Cadfan whom Welsh tradition mentions as the
father of Cadwallon and the grandfather of Cadwalader, who is usually called
the last king of the Britons; Cadwallon died, according to the Annales
Cambrice, in the year 631, and the year 616 has been given by some Welsh
writers as the date of Cadfan's death. However that may be, we are pretty
safe in assigning it to the 7th cetitury, and the inscription commemorative
of him dates, probably, not long after his death. Whether Catamanus and his
name are likely to be claimed as Irish I do not know, but the latter
undoubtedly bears a family likeness to several of those contained in our
early inscriptions so claimed. The same likeness is also observable in the
names of the kings of the Britons to whom Gildas, writing not later than the
middle of the 6th century, undertook to give a good scolding. They are the
following, all except the first in the vocative: — Constantinus (king of
Damnonia), Aureli, Vortipori (king of the Dimetians), Cuneglase (rendered by
Gildas into Latin as Lanio fulve), and Maglocune, supposed to be |
|
|
|
|
|
170 LECTUEES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. Maelgwn, the king of Grwynedd, who, according to the Annales
Cambrice, died in the year 547. Now these, as well as Catamanns, must be
surrendered as Irish, if our early inscriptions are rightly claimed as such.
(3.) An instance, which has already supplied us withauame of interest, occurs
on a stone near Whitland, Carmarthenshire, which reads Qvenvendani Fill
Barcuni. Now in Irish genealogies one finds the name Qvenvendani matched most
exactly by a Cenjinnan, to which a parallel is offered in the Four Masters'
Annals of Ireland in a name Ceandubkan. These would be, in Mod. "Welsh,
Penmynnan and Pendduan, but as far as I know they do not occur. However
Penmynnan has its analogy in CarnTcennan, ' Arthur's dagger; ' but Cenjinnan
is a derivative from a still more common Irish name, Cenfinn, which would be
in Welsh Penwyn, ' Whitehead: ' it occurs more than once in the Record of Carnarvon,
and we read of a lorwerth Tew ap y Penwyn in Edward the Third's time {Arch.
Cam. 1846, p. 397). The portion of our Qvenvendani (shortened probably from
Qvennavendani) represented by Penwyn and Cenfinn is Qvenvend-, which
accordingly contains curtailed forms of the words for head and white, that
is, gven- and vend-. The modern forms are, Welsh pen, Ir. ceann, ' head,' and
Welsh ywy«. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IV. 171 '
white,' feminine gwen, Ir. Jinn. You will here notice the change of i into e
before a complex of consonants in the Welsh vend-. The i would remain in
Irish, as we see ixoxsxjinn and Ptolemy's BovovivBa, that is Buwinda, ' the
Boyne: ' so in the case of Gaulish names such as Vindos and Vindomagus ( =
Welsh Gwgnfa, as in Llanfihangel y' Ngnynfa in Montgomeryshire; Irish,
Finnmhagh, 'the white or fair field'). This makes it probable that not only
Qvenvendani cannot be' Irish, but also Vendoni, Vendumagli, Vendubari, and
Vendesetli in other inscriptions. Still more decisive is the evidence of
Barcuni, which, I have no doubt, is the same name as the Irish Berchon in
Ui-Berchon, Anglicised into Ibercon, and meaning literally the descendants of
Bercon; but it is now applied, as frequently happens to such names in
Ireland, to a district in the county of Kilkenny. This information I derive
from the entry for the year 851 in the Annals of Ireland. In a note the
editor, 0' Donovan, observes, that within the district alluded to there is a
village known as Rosbercon, anciently called Eos-Ua-mBerchon. Now the Ixish
Berchon may be the genitive of Berchu, involving the word cu, ' dog,'
genitive con. So. the nominative corresponding to Barcuni, which itself stands
probably for an older Barcunis, may have been Barcu. Barcu and Barcuni would
now be in Welsh, if they |
|
|
|
|
|
172 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. ouly occurred, Berchi and Berchwn respectively. If you
compare with the Irish Berchon our Barcuni or Berchwn, you will observe that
there is a phonological discrepancy between them; for Berchwn or Barcuni
ought to be in Irish Bercon, and not Berchon. In other words, the Irish
Berchon could not be derived from Barcuni, but from a longer form, Baracuni.
Here, then, we have a difference between the two languages which makes itself
perceptible elsewhere in such instances as Welsh gorphen, ' to finish,' for
morqvenn, and Mod. Ir. foirckeann (also Scotch Gaelic), ' end, conclusion,'
for woriqvenn or woreqvenn. This, you see, makes it highly improbable that
Barcuni is Irish; hence it would follow that here we have an early
inscription of Welsh origin, in which the place of later jo is occupied by
qv, which in the case of maqvi has been made so much of by Irish
archseologists. (4.) The next pair of instances bears on declension: the text
is supplied in part by a stone at Trallong near Brecon — it reads Cunocenni
Filius Cunoceni Hie Jacit. Here you see that as we have a nominative
Cunocenni and a genitive Cunocenni (for we may venture to supply the omitted
n), the name must be one the stem of which may be regarded as ending in i.
Now glottology teaches us that in the common mother- |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IT. 173
tongue of the Aryan nations /-stems ended in the nominative in -is, and in
the genitive in -ajas. The latter was variously contracted in the various
languages derived from it: thus Sanskrit nom. avis, ' a sheep,' gen, ave^ or
avyas, Grreek ttoXk, gen. ttoXjos or TroXeto?, Lithuanian akis, ' eye,' gen.
ak'is. In very early Welsh and Irish, or in the language from which both have
branched, we may suppose the ending of the genitive of this declension to
have been jas (with ^' =r y in yes) , but not perhaps to the exclusion of the
longer -ajas. The names, then, in our inscription may be restored thus: nom.
Cunacennis, gen. Cunacennjas, of which the latter seems to have undergone
contraction into Cunacennis; so that when the language began to drop final Sj
they became nom. Cunacenni and gen. Cunacennl, a distinction which may not
have been lost at the time when the inscription was cut on the Trallong
stone. Let us now turn to the other side, and see what would become in Irish
of a Goidelo-Kymric genitive of the form Cunacennjas. Clearly, if we are to
be guided by the ordinary rules of Irish phonology, the j would disappear,
which would give us Cunacennas, and when the s followed the example of the j,
the word would be found reduced to Cunacenna, which actually occurs written
Cunacena on an Ogam-inscribed stone found at Dunloe, |
|
|
|
|
|
174 LECTUEES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. in the county of Kerry. It is, however, right that I should
tell j'ou, that in some of the earliest Irish inscriptions both the s and the
J (written?) appear intact; for instance, on a stone found at Ballycrovane,
in the county of Cork, reading Maqvi Decceddas Ami Toranias — the word awi
means grandson, and becomes in Old Irish manuscripts due, or, with an
inorganic k, hdue. Lest you should thiuk that all this has been excogitated
to suit my views, those of you who read German — and I hope that by and by
their number will be considerable — will find that Ebel and Stokes inferred
genitives of this declension in -ajas and Jos for Early Irish in the first
volume of Kuhn's Beitrcege, published in 1854, and that, most likely, without
having heard of the inscription alluded to above. (5.) If it should seem to
you that too much is here built on a single word, there remains one or two
other instances which cannot be passed over. On the Anglesey stone already
noticed we meet with Maccudeeceti, which one might venture to write
Maccu-decceti, as forming one name, although consisting probably of a noun
governed in the genitive by another. Compare also Maccodecheti, on a stone
now at Tavistock, in Devonshire. That Decceti and Decheti are in the genitive
is certain, but our "Welsh data could not enable us to ascer- |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IV. 175
tain the declension to which they belong; so we have to resort to Irish
inscriptions in which the. name in question occurs. The following are
reported: Maqvi Decceddas Ami Toranias, already mentioned; Maqqvi Decedda,
found in the parish of Minard, co. Kerry, now in the Museum of the Eoyal
Irish Academy in Dublin; Maqvi Decceda Hadniconas, found at Ballintaggart,
with six others; Maqviddeceda Maqvi Marin, found at Killeen Cormac. Now Welsh
Decceti and Irish Deccedas taken together prove that we have here to do with
an J-stem; so the genitives may be restored to the forms — "Welsh
Deccetjas, Irish Decceddjas or Deccedjas, for Irish seems to have hesitated
between the provected ddj or d'J and the non-provected dj. The forms which
occur in the two languages give us the three stages Deccedjas, Deccedjas, and
Deccetjas, which require some notice before we proceed further. In Welsh I
know of no closer parallel to tj for dj than that of llj (mostly reduced to
II) in such words as arall, ' other,' Iv.araile, from a stem ar-alj-, to be
compared with Latin alius; oil, ' all,' Ir. uile, from ol^-; pebyll, 'a
tent,' now 'tents,' from Lat. papilio, ' a butterfly, a tent: ' to these may
perhaps be added an instance from one of our early inscriptions, namely,
Turpilli, on a stone near .Crickhowel in Brecknockshire. This, no doubt. |
|
|
|
|
|
176 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. stands for an earlier Turpilji, once the pronunciation, Welsh
or Eoman, or both, of Turpilii, the genitive of the Roman name Turpilius:
compare also jilli for filii or rather jilji. The provection would lead to
the inference that Decceti was accented Deccdti, whence it is clear that
Vitaliani on another stone need not have followed suit. In point of fact, it
seems to have become Guitoliaun, which occurs in a MS. of Nennius, where we
read of Guitmd fill Guitoliaun, as though it had been Viialis fili Vitaliani.
As to the Irish provection into dd, we find a good parallel to it in the U-
declension, which is thought to have once ended in the nom. in -us, and in
the gen. in -awas or -was. Thus Mr. Stokes, in the volume just referred to of
Kuhn's Beitrcege, p. 450, traces two Irish genitives, tairmchrutto, "
transformationis," and crochta, " crucifixionis," to
tarmicru^ejas and cruca^ijas respectively: compare also such genitives as
Lugudeccas, Rettias, Anawlamattias, said to occur on early inscribed stones
in Ireland. "What has been hinted as to the phonology of Decceti is a
mere conjecture, to which I would add another, and, perhaps, a better —
namely, that the Welsh and the Irish forms, taken 'together, may be regarded
as pointing to the still earlier ones Dencendis, genitive Dencendjas. In case
this hits the mark, the word is to be referred to a root dak or dank. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IV. 177
whence we have Greek ZeUvvjii, Lat. dicere, German zeigen. But, not to take
up any more of your time with these .details, the outcome of them, as far as
we are here concerned, is that Cunocenni, Decceti, and Decheti are Welsh,
while the Irish forms are Cunacena, Deceddas^ and the like. Consequently the
inscriptions in which the former occur cannot be Irish. We are now enabled to
return with greater certainty to Corhalengi, which being a nominative, is
likely to be of the J-declension. Hence it .would also follow that Evolengi
and Evolenggi are of that declension, which cannot in Irish make i in the
genitive, as these do; so it is unnecessary to say that the inscriptions
containing them cannot be Irish. The same observations would seem to apply to
those in which the names Vinnemagli, Senemagli, or Senomagli, occur in the
genitive; for that these forms belong to the /-declension is suggested by the
fact that we have Brohomagli in the nominative in an inscription reading
Brohomagli Jam Ic Jacit Et Uxor Ejus Caune. Add to the foregoing, that
although the Early Welsh base whence our cad, ' battle,' must have been caiu,
of the ^/-declension, we have the compounds Rieati nominative, and Dunocati
genitive, .while the Mod. Irish is iDonnchadh, genitive Donnchadha; which
makes it impossible that Dunocati could be Irish. This is M |
|
|
|
|
|
178 LBCTUKES ON
WELSH PHIEOLOGT. the way I would reason, if I felt certain that the
case-endings here in question are not mostly Latin rather than Celtic. The more
I scrutinise them, the more I am inclined to treat them as Latin, especially
such genitives as Dunocati, and such nominatives, as Corbagni and Ctmnoceni,
for Corbagnis and Cunoeennis.. But it is to be noticed that this only makes
our case against the Irish claim still stronger, and that one has only to
regret that so many of the inscriptions are less valuable than could be
wished as materials for the history of Welsh inflections. As the allusion to
Cunocenni, Corbagni, and Dunocati as Latinised nominatives may appear
scarcely intelligible to those who are acquainted only with the Latin
ordinarily taught in our schools, it is right to explain, that from the time
of the Gracchi or thereabouts the ending is appears not infrequently instead
of ius; as, for instance, in Anavis, Ccecilis, Clodis, Ragonis, and the like.
Further, it is a rule in our Early Inscriptions to leave out s final: the
same thing frequently happened also in Roman ones, so that such nominatives
occur in the latter as Claudi, Minuci, and Valeri. For more information on
this point, see the second edition of Corssen's great work on Latin, i. pp.
289, 758; ii. p. 718; also Eoby's Latin Grammar (London, 1871), i. p. 12O.
(6.) Besides the numerous nominatives made to
|
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IV. 179 end
in our Early Inscriptions in the Latin termination us, and the possible
Latinity of some or all' of those in i, there is an instance or two where the
former appears as o for the old Latin nominative ending os. One of these
comes from Carnarvonshire, and reads: Al/iortus Eimetiaco Hie Jacet. The
other is at Cwm Grloyn, near Nevern in Pembrokeshire: it reads in Ogam
Witaliani, and in Eoman capitals Vitaliani Emereto, of which I can make
nothing but nominatives, the Welsh having perhaps never stopped to consider
whether there existed such a Latin name as Vitalianius to be transformed into
Vitaliani. Emereto would be for Emeretos, or, as it would appear in our
dictionaries, emeritus. Similarly we have consobrino for the fuller
nominative consobrinos in the inscription already noticed as reading:
Cantiori Hie Jacit Venedotis Cive Fuit Consobrino Magli Magistrati. (7.) To
the foregoing it should be added that feminines making their nominatives in
e, such as Caune, Tunccetaee, and the like, are also probably indebted for
that e to the usage of somewhat late Latin, which, in its turn, is supposed
to have borrowed it from Greek. In the Roman inscriptions of the time of the
Empire the names of Greek slaves and freedwomen appear in abundance, such as
Agapomene, Euehe, Theophile, and the like: after them were modelled Cassiane,
Juliane, |
|
|
|
|
|
180 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. Sabiniane, written also with ae for e, whence even suah
genitives as dominaes, vernaes, annonaes, were; formed. Nominatives of the kind
in question were also not unknown in Eoman Britain. I have come across the
following in Hiibner's collection already alluded to: — Aurelia Eclectiane,
Hermionae, lavolena Monime, Julia Nundinae (in the museum at Caerleon), and
Simplicia Proce. On the question of Latin nominatives in e and genitives in
es or aes, see Corssen, i. p. 686, and Roby's Latin Grammar, i. p. 12L It is
hardly necessary to repeat that the Latinisation here pointed out is
incompatible with the Irish claim as it has hitherto been put. (8.) In Early
Irish the Z7-declension made its genitive singular in os, liable to be
reduced to o; and in the Early Irish inscriptions, of which accounts have
been .published, amounting to 120 or more, not a single genitive in u occurs,
while those in os, o, appear in due proportion. In our inscriptions, on the
other band, the same genitive is either o or u. So far, then, as one can
judge from this, our inscriptions containing the genitives Nettasagru and
Trenagusu cannot be Irish. (9. ) Maccu -Decceti and Macco -Decheti have been
mentioned together, and it may appear strange that one has cc and the other
ch. The explanation is simple enough: in the interval between their dates the
language may have begun to change cc into ch,
|
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IV. 181 and
probably also tt, pp, into th, ph. Here may be mentioned the inscription
already cited as reading Brokomagli Jam Ic Jacit Et Uxor Ejus Caune, which is
in much the same style of later letters as the Tavistock Stone with Decheti,
There is an apparent inconsistency in Macco- retaining its cc unmodified; but
the cc in Macco- represents an earlier ng or ngh, and it would be contrary to
rule if it passed into ch in Welsh. In Brokomagli the h was undoubtedly
sounded like our modern ch; for in O. Welsh the name was Brochmail, later
Broehuail. The same remark applies to the h in the epitaph reading Velvor
Filia Broho, which seems to be of the same date as the other two. In Broho
and Brohomagli the syllable broh, that is broch, probably represents an
earlier brocc, as in Broccagni, a name said to have been read on a stone at
Capel Mair near Llandyssul, which has since been effaced by a bucolic Vandal.
Broccagni is familiar in the form Brychan, and is precisely the Irish Broccdn
borne by the author of a hymn in praise of St. Brigit contained in the Liber
Hymnorum in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. But how does this bear on
our argument? Simply in this way:" the change from cc into ch is unknown
in Irish, whence it is impossible that the inscriptions containing Decheti,
Brohomagli, and Broho should be of Irish origin. |
|
|
|
|
|
182 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. Now that the Irish claim has been shown to he untenable, we
might he asked to show how the details of the inscriptions, in so far ^s they
are Celtic, fit into the history of "Welsh inflections; but this is
rendered an impossible task by the meagreness of our data. However, we have
at least one inscription which seems to belong to the transition period
preceding the total disuse of cases by the Welsh: I allude to one of the stones
at Clydai, in Pembrokeshire, which reads in debased capitals Etterni Fill
Victor, and in Ogam Ettern W[ic]tor. Here Victori (iox Victoris) is out of
the question, but the discarding of the case termination was in this instance
favoured by the fact that the nominative was Victor, while the genitive might
be Victor. The inorganic doubling of t in Etterni is a feature common to it
and the Old Welsh of the Capella Glosses. I cannot leave this point without
noticing in a few words the fate of the vowel, more conveniently than
correctly called the ' connecting vowel,' as, for instance, the in Dunocati,
which has been completely lost in its modern representative Dinyad,
pronounced Dir^gad. That the connecting vowel in compounds was sometimes
obscurely pronounced even in Early Welsh is proved, as has already been
pointed out, by such pairs of instances as Cunotami and Cunatami; but when
did it altogether disappear? In |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IV. 183 the
last-named instances it cannot have done so until the t had begun to be
softened towards o?, otherwise we should have Cunatam-i, Cuntam yielding
Cynnhaf, whereas the modern form is Cyndaf. Moreover, in a few instances, the
number of which could no doubt be increased by- careful reading, the vowel
comes down in manuscript. The place known to Welsh tradition as Catraeth is
called by Bede Cat&racta; in the Juvencus Codex, the Latin word frequens
is explained by the Old Welsh word Ut'imaur, which, were it still in use,
would now be lUdfawr, with Hid- as iu erlid, ' to pursue,' and might be
expected to have nearly the same meaning as gosgorddfamr, ' possessed of a
large retinue or following: ' in Gaulish it occurs as the proper name
Litumara (G*luck, p. 120). In the oldest MS. of the Annates Cambrice we have
not only Chtenedote to compare with the later Gmyndyd, ' North Wales,' but
also a mention, under the year 760, of Dunnagual filii Teudubr, more
correctly Dumn-Agual or JDuvn&gual. Later he is called Dyfnwal, a name
which in Early Welsh would have been Dumnoval-i or Dubnoval-i. In the Saxon
Chronicle, under the j'ear 1063, we meet with Rhuddlan, called Rudelan, a
spelling which is supported by the Doomsday forms Rothzlanum, and, with the
soft dental slurred over, |
|
|
|
|
|
184 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. Ruelan.- Lastly, Giraldus Oambrensis writes Eudkelan,
Bledkericus (Bledri), Rodkericus (Rhodri), Ythewal (Idwal), Landinegath
(Llandingad). I place no implicit faith in Giraldus' spelling, but it seems
certain that the connecting vowel continued to be pronounced, however
lightly, for a long time after the Welsh had given up the habit of
representing it in writing, and that there can have been no break in this
respect between the pronunciation of the Welsh of the Early Inscriptions and
that of the 9th century glosses. This is also the place to call attention to
the fact that the ordinary formula of our Early Inscriptions, such as Sagrani
Fill Cunotami, came down to later times. Thus, for instance, an elegy to
Geraint, the son of Erbin, in which the Welsh poet, as an eye-witness,
describes Geraint's deeds of valour in the battle of Llongborth, is headed
Gereint Fil Erbin in the Black Book of Carmarthen as published by Skene, ii.
p. 37. This Geraint is probably the Welsh king who, according to the Saxon
Chronicle, fought against Ine of Wessex in the year 71O. Lastly, supposing,
per impossibile, the foregoing reasoning to be inconclusive, we still have a
weighty argument in the fact, for such it seems to be, that the Kymric race
has occupied Wales, Cornwall, Devon, and other parts of England, from the
time |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IV. 185 of
the Roman occupation to oar own day, excepting in so far as their territory
has been encroached upon by the English nation and language. It follows,
then, that the onus probandi remains with the advocates of the Irish claim,
and that they are not at liberty to attempt to prove any of our inscriptions
to be of Irish origin until they have made out that the same cannot be
explained as Welsh. Let it first be shown that they cannot be Welsh, then
they will have a right to make them out to be Irish if they can, and,
logically speaking, not before, as we have a priority of claim, which stands
whether they attribute the inscriptions to Croidelic invaders, or regard them
as proofs that the Goidelic race occupied this country before the Kymry. For,
in either case, the knowledge of letters may be presumed to- have reached the
former, whether in Ireland or in the more inaccessible parts of the west of
Britain, through the latter, who must have learned (if they had occasion for
it) from the Romans how to honour their dead with inscribed tombstones. That
the Kymry should have taught this to the Gaels and so far forgotten it
themselves as to leave us no monuments, while the Gaels are alleged to have
left so many, is incredible. Allusion has just been made to a theory which
not only makes the Goidelic race the first Celtic |
|
|
|
|
|
186 • LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. inhabitants of Wales, but tries to prove tbeir occupation of
most of North Wales to have lasted down to the 4th or the 5th century. As .it
is supposed that the Irish claim to our inscriptions derives considerable
support from this theory, it is necessary to examine it briefly before we
have done with this question. From .what has been said on the classification
of the Celts in a previous lecture, it is already clear that the Goidelic
Celts cannot be said to have inhabited Wales before the Kymry, but it will,
nevertheless, be desirable to ascertain what this theory has to recommend
itself, especially as it is put forth on excellent authority. In the first
place, it is founded, to a considerable extent, on Welsh traditions which are
supposed to refer to the expulsion of Gaels from different parts of Wales in
the 6th century; but the same traditions are admitted, be it noticed, to
speak of them invariably as invaders. However, it derives most of its support
from Welsh place-names, which are supposed to commemorate the sojourn of the
Gael by their containing the word Gwyddel, ' an Irishman,' plural Gwyddyl or
Groyddelod: such are Gwyddelwern, Llan y Gwyddel, Forth y Gwyddel, Twll y
Gwyddel, and the like. But it is not at all clear to me how any such names
can go to prove the priority of the Gael over the Kymro in ' |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IV. 187
"Wales. For a certain number of the places concerned have surely
received their names within this or the last century, particularly on the
coast and- wherever Irish workmen have been employed. A good many more,
probably, of them date during the long interval between the last century and
the end of the 12th. Then, if any of them date still earlier, they may
possibly be accounted for by the various descents made on our coasts in the
10th, 11th, and 12th centuries by Irishmen or Irish Danes, and by the return
of Welsh exiles, such as Gruflfudd ab Cynan and Rhys ab Tewdwr, at the head
of a following of Irishmen. If, perchance, any of them are older than the
10th century, it would be natural to trace them to Irish saints, Irish
traders, and Irish invaders who visited this country; but none of these last
or of the foregoing would help to prove that Wales was wrested by the Welsh
from the Gael. Then there are other deductions to make from the list; for many,
probably the majority, of the names adduced have nothing whatever to do with
Irishmen, there being another word, gnyddel, plural grcyddeli (formerly,
perhaps, also gwyddyV), which is a derivative from gmydd, ' wood.' The
identity of form between it and the word for Irishman is only accidental, as
the Early Welsh form of gwyddel must have begun with a «? or «?, while the
initial of that |
|
|
|
|
|
188 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. of Gwyddel was g, which is proved by the Old Irish Gaedel,
Goidel, Modern Irish Gaoidheal, with a silent dh, which has led to the
simplified spelling Gael. The common noun gwyddel, which is no longer in use,
means a brake or bush, as in one of Englynion y Clywed, which runs thus {lolo
MSS.,^.2m):— " A glywaist ti chwedl yr Enid Yn y gwyddel rhag ymlid?
Drwg pechawd o'i hir erlid." In Dr. Pughe's dictionary, under the word
erdd, this is rendered: " Hast thou heard the saying of the woodlark in
the brake avoiding pursuit? — bad is sin from long following it." Under
the word gTuyddelawg _ he gives tir gwyddelawg as meaning " land overrun
with brambles," and he rightly renders gwyddelwern " a moor or
meadow overgrown with bushes." In the same way no doubt Gmyddelfynydd is
to be explained. So in the bulk of instances like Mynydd y Gwyddel, Gwaun y
Gwyddel, Gwern Gwyddel, Nant y Gwyddel, Pant y Ghfoyddel, Twll y Gwyddel, and
the like, the word gwyddel may be surmised to have no reference to Irishmen.
The outcome of this is, that after making the deductions here suggested from
the list, there can be few, if any, of the names in question which could be
alleged in support of an early occupation of Wales by the Gael. They would
undoubtedly |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IV. 189
fall far short of the number of those with Sais, ' an Englishman,' plural
Saeson, such as Hkyd y Sais, Pont y Saeson, and the like, of which a friend
has sent me a list of thirty instances: by a parity of reasoning, these ought
to go some way to prove the English to have occupied Wales before our
ancestors. It is- needless to repeat, that even were one to admit the Gaels
to have been the early occupiers of this country, it would by no means follow
that our inscriptions belong to them and not to the Welsh. On the other hand,
as it cannot have been so, our priority of claim to them remains untouched.
Lastly, it would not be exactly reasoning in a circle to call attention, in
passing, to a fact which has an important bearing on the question of the
classification of the Celtic ■ nations, namely, that the controversy as
to the origin of our inscriptions rests entirely on the close similarity
between Early Welsh and Early Irish. Had they been less like one a.nother,
and had the primeval difference between them not been altogether imaginary,
it could never have arisen. So far nothing has been said of the. prehistoric
period mentioned in the scheme laid before you of the chronology of the Welsh
language. What happened to it during that period can only be inferred, not to
say guessed. It is, however, by no means probable that the |
|
|
|
|
|
190 LECTURES OS
WELSH PHILOLOGY. Celtic immigrants into these islands found them without
inhabitants, or that they arrived in sufficient force to exterminate them.
Consequently it may be supposed that in the course of ages the conquered
races adopted the language of their conquerors, but not without introducing
some of their own idioms. The question, then, is who these prEe-Celtic
islanders' were, and whether the Celtic languages still have non-Aryan traits
which may be ascribed to their influence. In answer to the first of these
questions, it has been supposed that the people whom the Celts found here
must have been of Iberian origin, and nearly akin to the ancient inhabitants
of Aquitania and the Basques of modern times. In support of this may be
mentioned the testinaony of Tacitus in the 11th chapter of his Agrieola,
where, in default of other sources of information, he bases his statements on
the racial differences which betrayed themselves in the personal appearance
of the British populations of his day. Among other things, he there fixes on
the Silures as being Iberians. The whole chapter is worth reproducing here.
" Ceterum, Britanniam qui mortales initio coluerint, indigense an
advecti, ut inter barbaros, parum compertum. Habitus corporum varii: atque ex
eo argumenta. Namque rutilte Caledoniam habitantium comse, magni artus,
Ger- |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IV. 191
manicam originem adseveraut. Silarum colorati vultus et torti plerumque
crines, et posita coBtra Hispania, Iberos veteres trajecisse easque sedes
occupasse, fidem faciunt. Proximi Gallis et similes sunt; seu durante
originis vi, seu procur- rentibus in diversa terris, positio coeli corporibus
habitum dedit. In universum tamen asstimanti, Gallos vicinum solum occupasse,
credibile est. Eorum sacra deprehendas, superstltionum persuasione: sermo
baud multum diversus, in deposcendis periculis eadem audacia, et, ubi advenere,
in detrectandis eadem formido. Plus tamen ferocise Britanni prseferunt, ut
quos nondum longa pax emollierit. Nam Gallos quoque in bellis floruisse
accepimus: mox segnitia cum otio intravit, amissa virtute pariter ac
libertate. Quod Britanuorum olim victis evenit: ceteri manent, quales • Galli
fuerunt." Accordingly, some of the non-Ayran traits of Welsh and Irish
may be expected to admit of being explained by means of Basque.
Unfortunately, however, that language is not found to assist us much, as it is
known only in a comparatively late form. So we turn to other prse-Aryan
languages still spoken in Europe, namely, those of the Finnic groups. These
last show a number of remarkable points of similarity with the Celtic
languages. Hence it may be sup- |
|
|
|
|
|
192 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. posed — and comparative craniology offers, I believe, no
difficulty — that the British Isles, before the Celts came, were occupied by
distinct races of Iberian and Finnic origin respectively, or else, in case it
could be made out that Basque is related to the Finnic tongues, by a
homogeneous Ibero-Finnic race forming the missing link, as the saying is,
between the Iberians and the Finns. That some such a race' or races once
inhabited all the west of Europe is now pretty generally believed. Proceeding
on the supposition that p was foreign to the idioms of the insular, or, as
they had now better be called to avoid confusion, the Goidelo-Kymric Celts,
one may by means of names containing it point out certain localities in the
British Isles . occupied by tribes which were not of a Goidelo-Kymric origin.
These fall into two groups, with which we may begin from the north-west and the
north-east respectively. Ptolemy, who lived in the time of Adrian and Marcus
Aurelius, and wrote a geography, calls one of the islands between Scotland
and Ireland Epidium, and the Mull of Cantyre ^E-n-iBiov axpov, apparently
from the people, whom he calls Epidii, and locates airo Toi) E-TTiBiov aKpov
(»s Trpos avaToXw;. Further, he gives a town of the Novantae the name
Lucopibia: it is supposed to have stood near Luce Bay, in Wigtonshire. All
these names together with |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTUEE IV. 193
Mons Granpius may well be supposed to refer to localities to which the
unabsorbed remnants of a prse-Celtic race may have been driven by the Celts.
In the next place, he mentions a people in Ireland called the Manapii, and a
town called Manapia, supposed by some to be the site of Dublin. As to this
side of St. George's Channel, he calls St. David's Head ^OKTairiTapov aKpov,
and the old name of St. David's seems to have been Menapia, whence Menevia,
Welsh' Mynym. Now it is known that there were also Menapii on the coast in
the neighbourhood of the Ehine, but although they were a maritime people, it
is hardly probable that they had sent out colonies to Ireland and Pembrokeshire.
So I conclude that these names are vestiges of a non-Ayran people whom the
Celts found in possession on the Continent and in the British Isles. Nor have
I mentioned all, for it is hard to believe that none of the following names
also is of the same origin: Welsh Manaw, ' the Isle of Man,' which Pliny
calls Monapia and Ptolemy MomoiSa; Mona, Welsh lf<?ra, 'Anglesey;' the
Menai Straits or Meneviacum Fretum; Welsh Mynwy, ' Monmouth,' on the Monnow,
in the territory of the ancient Silures; and possibly also Manau Gododin in
the North, and Momonia, Mumhain, or Munster in Ireland. As the outposts of
the other group may be men- N |
|
|
|
|
|
194 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. tioned the Corstopitum or Corstopilum of the Itinerary of
Antoninus, which is supposed to have received its present form in the latter
part of the 3rd century: it is believed that the site is that of Corbridge in
Northumberland. The next is Epiacum, mentioned by Ptolemy as a town of the
powerful tribe of the Brigantes: it is identified by some with Hexham, by
others with Lanchester, and by others, with more probability, with Ebchester.
Whether these two places were ■Giaulish or Teutonic it is not easy to
say, for they cannot be very far from the district where Tacitus detected a
Teutonic population; but whatever settlements there may have been on the
coast from the Tweed to the Humber, the Brigantes are said by Ptolemy to
border on the North Sea. Proceeding south, we come next to Petuaria, the town
of the Parisi, on or near the Humber: it has already been surmised that this
was a G-aulish position. We now «ome to the Iceni in Norfolk, who had a king
whose name, according to Tacitus, was Prasutagus. Next we have Ptolemy's
ToUapis, supposed to be Sheppey, and his Eutupice, identified with
Eichborough in Kent. More inland we meet with a people whom he calls
KaTvev^(Xavol ol kclI Ka-Tj-eXdvoi, possessing the towns of Verulamium or Old
Verulam near St. Alban's, and Salinse, which has been sought for in
Bedfordshire |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IV. 195 and
South Lincolnsliire. More to the west and north, we find in the Itinerary of Antoninus
a place bearing the distinctly Gaulish name Pennocrucium in the territory of
the Cornavii, who may, therefore, be concluded to be Gauls: the site is
identified by some with Peukridge in Staffordshire, and by others with
Stretton. Add to these vestiges of the Gaul the fact that we have Gauls in
the Belgse, who counted among their towns AquEe Salis or Bath, and in the
Atrebatii located between them and the Thames. Compare also what Caesar says
on this point in the 13th chapter of his fifth book. From these indications
it seems to follow that rather more than one half of what is now England
belonged in Csesar's time to tribes of Gaulish origin; that is to say, all
east of the Trent, the "Warwickshire Avon, the Parret, and the
Dorsetshire Stour, excepting a Kymric peninsula reaching as far as
Malmesbury, and widening perhaps towards the south to take in Warehara in
Dorsetshire, where, it is said, there are inscriptions of Kymric origin.
Against this may be set the Cornavii, whose territory consisted of a strip of
land running from the Avon along the east of the Severn and stretching to the
mouth of the Dee. If you want the assistance of a map, turn to Mr. Freeman's
Old English History (London, 1873), where you will find one of |
|
|
|
|
|
196 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. Britaia at the beginning of the 7th century. According to
that, the tract of country which the English- then ruled over south of the
Humber coincided almost exactly with the boundary of the Gaulish portion of
Britain which has here just been roughly defined. This apparent recognition
of Celtic landmarks by the later invaders is a fact the historical and
political significance of which I leave to be weighed by others. This view of
th'e extent of Gaulish Britain, which, it hardly need be said, is a mere
theory, derives some confirmation from the river-names of England, which
contains, for instance, important rivers of the name of S>tour in Kent,
Suffolk, Dorset, Warwickshire, and Worcestershire. Similarly we have others
bearing the name of Ouse, such as the Sussex Ouse, the Great Ouse, with its
tributary the Little Ouse, and the Yorkshire Ouse which meets the Trent on
the borders of Lincolnshire. Lastly, we find a Stratford Avon, a Bristol
Avon, a Little Avon in Gloucestershire, a Hampshire Avon flowing past
Salisbury, and an Avon: entering the sea near Lymington. But these last
rivers are supposed to bear an undoubted Kymric name. It is, however, an easy
matter to show that it is not so. In the Itinerary of Antoninus we seem to
meet with Avon in the form of Ahona; the Modern Welsh for a river is
afon, |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE IV. 197 ■which
we pronounce avon, and this stands for an earlier abona or amona, which would
in the course of phonetic decay have to becorae our a/on. Now it happens that
it was probably not a rule of Welsh phonology to change b or jre into v till
about the 8th century: so it remains that we should suppose this softening to
have taken place in English, or in the language of the British Grauls, whom
the English found in possession of the country drained by the Avons. Possibly
another and an earlier instance occurs in the vn, or, as it is usually
printed, un of such Gaulish names as Cassivellaunus, Vercassivellaunus,
Segovellauni, Vellaunodunum, as well, perhaps, as Alaunus, Genauni, Icaunus,
Ligaunus, and the like. Welsh tradition has, it is true, made Cassivellaunus
into Caswallawn, and Caswallon, which naturally takes its place by the side
of Cadwallon, Idwallon, and Tudwallon; but it is by no means usual for early
aun to make awn, on in Modern Welsh, whence it is possible that only the mall
of the Weigh names just mentioned is to be equated with the veil of such
Gaulish ones as Cassivellaunus, and that the terminations are completely
different. In that case Cadwallon and Cassivellaunus should be considered as
standing for Catuvelldn- and Cassivellamn-, the latter containing a vellamn-
which I would identify with |
|
|
|
|
|
198 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. Walamn-i, a name which occurs on an Irish tomhstone now in
the British Museum; two of its edges read Maqvi Ercias and Maqvi Walamni: we
farther seem to have the Gaulish equivalent in VALLAVNiTS ou a stone at
Caerleon. It is needless to add that mn remained intact both in Early
"Welsh — witness Sagranmi — and in Old Welsh, as, for instance, in the
Juvencus Codex in the verb scamnhegint, " levant," from scamn, now
yscafn, ' light, not heavy.' The softening of m into v is not the only
instance of Gaulish outstripping Welsh in the path of phonetic decay. Another
familiar one of a different order occurs in the of petorritum for ua or mo,
still represented in full by wa in the Modern Welsh pedwar, ' four.' |
|
|
|
|
|
( 199 ) LECTUEE V.
" Y mae Uythyraetli y Gymraeg yn fater lied ddyrys; ao y tnae Uawer o
ysgrifenwyr, yn enwedig y rhai ieuainc, yn Uawer rhy fyrbwyll a phenderfynol
yn ei gylcli, ac yn dueddol i feddwl eu bod yn ei amgyffred yn drwyadl, pan y
maent hwytliau, yn rhy fynych, heb gymmaint a deal! elfenau cyntaf y petli y
maent yn eu hystyried eu hunain yn athrawou ynddo." — Daniel Silvan
Evans. In this lecture it is proposed to give a brief sketch of the fortunes
of the Roman alphabet among the Kymry, and to follow it through the
successive modifications which it has undergone among us down to the present
day. For the sake of not breaking on the continuity of its history, what I
have to say respecting the Ogmic system will be reserved for another
occasion; for the same reason also I have thought it advisable to omit a
number of details, otherwise highly interesting, as well as all reference to
the improved methods of dealing with pronunciations inculcated with so much
success by Mr. Ellis, Mr. Melville Bell, and Mr. Sweet. The Eoman capitals
found in our Early Inscriptions are A, B, 0, D, E, F, G, H, I, L, M, N, 0, P,
Q, E, S, T, V, X. As to their formation, they are mostly more or less
debased, as arch^ologists |
|
|
|
|
|
200 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. term it: — As in Eoman inscriptions, the letter D is to be
found occasionally reversed with or without prolonging the perpendicular, so
as to give it the look of our minuscule d; N and S also occur reversed, and
the I, when final, is frequently placed in a horizontal position, but in the
genitive fili it forms now and then a short stroke tagged on to the short bar
of the F and the end of the L; these are, however, by no means the only
instances in which it is of a smaller formation, as in Roman inscriptions,
than the other letters. Ligatures are not at all unusual; on the other hand,
abbreviations are rare in our inscriptions of the earliest class, and in this
they strongly contrast with Roman ones, as in fact they might be expected to
do, seeing that they are the work of a people who was, to say the least of
it, less given to writing than the Romans were. A general survey of our
ancient monuments would convince one that the style of the letters used was
subject to a steady change, which by the end of the Brit-Welsh period had
reached such a point that they could no longer be conveniently called Roman
letters. Hence it is that they are variously termed Anglo-Saxon, by those who
are familiar with the use made of them in Old English, and Irish by others
who are better acquainted with the Irish language, which is to this day
written in them; while of late it has |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 201 been
usual to make a compromise between the English and the Irish by manufacturing
for them the adjective Hiberno-Saxon. But all this tends to conceal their real
origin; for though this style of letters became naturalised among our
neighbours in Ireland and England, it was among the Kymry that it was
developed and invested with an individuality of its own. Under the
circumstances, we are entitled to speak of it as Kymric, and to call the
individual characters Kymric letters. The following are the forms in which
they appear in printed Irish: <^bctiep5hilmTiop4p-ircux. The change from
the capitals of the Eoman period to the corresponding characters used by the
Welsh in the 9th and 10th century of course did not, as has already been
suggested, happen in a day, and our inscriptions supply us with most of the
intermediate steps. But I could not hope to make this perfectly clear to you
without the aid of good drawings or photographs of the inscriptions
themselves; a deficiency which has quite recently been met by the publication
of them in an easily accessible form by Dr. Hiibner of Berlin, in a work
entitled " Inscriptiones Britannias Christianas (Berlin and London, 1876).
A still more elaborate work on the same subject is promised by the English
palaeographer. Professor Westwood, under the auspices of the Cambrian |
|
|
|
|
|
202 LECTUEES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. Archaeological Association. To ascertain the relative dates
of our inscriptions, that is to say, to arrange them chronologically, is the
one leading problem to the solution of which all investigations into Kymric
epigraphy ought to contribute: a first rude attempt at this might be based on
the style and form of the letters to which your attention has been called.
Thus all our non-Ogmic inscriptions down to the beginning of the 12th century
or thereabouts might be classed as follows: (a) Those cut exclusively in
Roman capitals; {b) those in which some of the letters are found to assume
the Kymric minuscule form; and {c) those which consist entirely of Kymric
letters. However, another step in the same direction would probably bring one
to modify and correct, by means of grammatical and historical indications,
this very rough classification, with some such a result as to distribute (a)
between the Roman and the Brit-Welsh period, leaving (fi) entirely to the
Brit-Welsh period and (c) mostly to that of Old Welsh. The next place must be
given to a short account of the values of the characters which have been thus
far occupying us, and for the present it will be convenient to treat the
inscriptions of the Roman and Brit-Welsh periods as though they were all
entirely written in Roman capitals. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 203 unalloyed and undetased.
Generally speaking, the letters may also be regarded as having the same
values as in Latin; but in a few instances that statement requires to be
explained or qualified. H. In occasionally writing oc
and ic for hoc and hic, the Welsh seem to have only imitated the Romans, who,
as early as the time of Augustus, sometimes pronounced the aspirate and
sometimes not; later the confusion became still more complete: see Corssen's
work already alluded to, i. 107. Some difficulty is offered by the occasional
use of h for the guttural spirant ch; for not only is the sound of h known to
become ch in Welsh, and vice versa, but it seems certain that in Broho and
Brohomagli, the letter h represents the ch of the later Brochmail and
Brochmel, a sound we find so written in Decheti for an earlier Decceti. It
had also probably the same value in Alhortus. But how came the Welsh to write
h for ch? It is probable that h represented both the aspirate and the
guttural spirant in Old English, and it might be said that we owe this use of
it in our inscriptions to early English influence; but even could it be
allowed that all the instances in question date after the beginning of the
7th century, that would hardly seem probable. We have, therefore, to fall
back, perhaps, on the fact proved by
Corssen (i. 97-99), |
|
|
|
|
|
204 LECTURES ON WELSH
PHILOLOGY. that the old guttural spirant
ch, which the Italian nations began at a very early date to reduce to h,
lingered on a considerable time in the Latin language, which, however,
assigned it a very inferior part, and took no trouble to distinguish it in
writing from the aspirate ever encroaching upon it. It is possible that h
pronounced ch continued in popular Latin even later than Corssen would have
admitted, and that it is to this pronunciation continuing in the country
after it had been given up by the more genteel rerum domini in the city of
Rome, that the often-cited words of Nigidius Figulus, a contemporary of
Cicero, originally referred: "Rusticus fit sermo, si aspires
perperam." However that may be, if the guttural spirant continued in
vulgar or rustic Latin down to the time of Julius Agricola — and Italy is a
land where dialects have always thriven — it could hardly fail to have
reproduced itself in the provincial Latin of Britain, and this would explain
how our ancestors came to represent it in writing by h, and not by ch, in
words belonging to their own language. But in what words would the latter be
likely to give them occasion to use it before the departure of the Romans?
Not in such as Brohomagli, for here the spirant only came in some time after
as the continuator of cc; it was late, also, no doubt, that initial sw became
|
|
|
|
|
|
LECTUEE V. 205 hw; whence we have now hw in
S. Wales, and chw in N. Wales. There remain two combinations where they may
have had it — namely, in words where we now have ch or h corresponding to
Irish ss (also written s), mostly for an original ks, as in Welsh dehau,
(also decheu, and even detheu), 'right, south;' O. Ir. des; it is to this
origin I would refer the spirant represented by k in Alhortu. The other is
where we have th, with vowel compensation, answering to Irish cht, as in
Welsh taith, 'a journey;' O. Ir. techt, 'to go;' Welsh wyth, 'eight;' O. Ir.
ocht. The original of this was kt, which the Goidelo-Kymric Celts seem to
have modified into cht, and that possibly before their separation into Kymric
and Goidelic nations. However, after weighing all the difficulties which beset this question, I
am inclined to think that though our ancestors may possibly have heard k
pronounced as ch in a few Latin words, the use of h for ch by them in writing
their own language is to be traced to the influence of the Ogam alphabet, the
discussion of which will give me an opportunity of returning to this point. L. On the stone at
Llanfihangel ar Arth, we have FIVS clearly cut instead of FILIUS. This spelling
is, however, to be traced to a Latin source: see Corssen's work already
referred to, i. 228, |
|
|
|
|
|
206 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. where such
instances as _fiae foTjilim, Corneius for Cornelius, and the like, are cited.
JS'c, Ng. On one stone we have Tunccetace and on another Evolenggi, while the
same name occurs also as Evolengi. The digraphs nc, ng, were probably meant
to represent the nasal gutturals, surd and sonant respectively. Such forms as
nuncquam, conjuncx,juncxit, extincxit, and the like, occur in Roman
inscriptions of the time of the Empire. Names in agn, such as Ereagni and
Maglagni, appear later as Erehan and Maelan; so -agn must haye passed into
-angn towards the close of the Brit-Welsh period, though the spelling in the
inscriptions in point gives us no clue to the change: later angn was
simplified into an. Had the language followed suit with the Irish, which has
reduced -agn into -an, we should have had not Erehan and Maelan, but Erehaen
and Maelaen; possibly in some instances -angn may have yielded -awn by a
change of ng into w, which occasionally occurs: see the Revue Celtique, ii.
192. Np occurs, if I may trust my last attempt to read the Cynffig stone, in
the name Punpeius, more commonly met with in books in the form Pompeius. It
was not unusual, Corssen (i. 263) tells us, in Latin inscriptions of the 3d,
4th, and 5th centuries, to write not only np, nb, but also mt, md, the reason
being, as he thinks, that |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 207
neither n nor m was clearly pronounced in such positions: they seem to have
served merely to give a nasal effect to the vowel going before them, and they
were, accordingly, often left altogether unrepresented in writing. From O.
Latin Corssen quotes as instances Poponi, Seproni, Noubris, Decebris, and
from late Latin cupare (= compare), incoparabile, exeplu, Novebres: It is
curious to find that the epitaph just alluded to has Punpeius rendered in
Ogam hy a form beginning with Pope — the rest of the word is now illegible,
but it would seem to have been Popei, for Pompei. S. Final s is frequently
omitted in our Early Inscriptions, as, for instance, in the Latin words cive,
Ccelexti, Eternali, Nobili, Vitali, for cives, Ccelextis, Eternalis, Nobilis,
Vitalis. The same is the case with nominatives singular of the second
declension when the vowel used is o, as in consobrino, Eimetiaco, Emereto,
for consobrinos, Eimetiacos, Emeretos. But in case the vowel chosen was the
later u, the s is written as in Curcagnus, Ordous, Saturninus, and even in
Eoman inscriptions nominatives in us and o are, as far as I can ascertain,
more numerous than those in u and os. No nominatives in is for ius (see
Corssen, i. 289, 758) retain their final s in our inscriptions, excepting
Venedofis, which I take to mean Venedotius, on one of the Penmachno stones.
In popular |
|
|
|
|
|
208 LECTUEES ON
-WELSH PHILOLOGY, Latin final s probably dropped out of the pronunciation at
an early date, whence it naturally followed that men who nevertheless had an
idea that some forms had a right to it, occasionally inserted it in the wrong
place: among other instances, Corssen (i. 293) gives the genitives meis,
Mercuris, Saturnis, and the ablatives Antios, domus, junior es. We seem to
have an instance of the same kind in the Ti'efgarn inscription, reading
Nogtivis Fill Demeti. X. The combination xs for x is exceedingly common in
Roman inscriptions, and we meet with it on the Trefarchog stone in the Latin
word uxsor, which, however, occurs written uxor on the Voelas Hall stone. At
a comparatively early date x, that is cs, had got to be frequently pronounced
ss or s, whence a good deal of confusion between x and s in writing. Such
instances as vis for vix, visit for vixit, and ye lis tor Jelix, are to be
met with, and vice versa one finds milex for miles, and xancto for sancto
(Corssen i. 297, 298). The only instance of this kind which we have is
Ccelexti, for Ccelestis, on the Llanaber stone, near Barmouth. But that the
reduction of x into ss or s cannot have been general in Latin before the
Romans came in contact with our ancestors, is proved by the fact of its
yielding in Welsh words borrowed from Latin, not s simply, but s preceded by
vowel compensation |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 209 in
cases where a; followed close on the tone-vowel, as for instance in the three
words which follow: coes, ' a leg,' from coxa, ' the hip,' llaes, ' slack,
long,' from laxus, and pais, . formerly pels, ' a coat, a petticoat,' from
pexa, that is pexa testis or pexa tunica, though a somewhat different meaning
is usually ascribed to pexa in Horace's words,. when he says: — • " Si
forte subucula pexse Trita subest tunicse vel si toga dissidet impar,
Rides." J. A word, in the next place, as to the semi-vowels j' and V.
The Romans at one time used to write eiis, Gaiius, peiius, Pompeiius, and to
sound them ej^us, Gajjus, pejjus, Pompejjus with _; (= y in the English word
yes or nearly so); but that does not help us much with our inscriptional
forms Lovernii, Seniargii, and Ma..ani, where the n can hardly have meant i
or ij, but either _/z or iji. Another curious case is that of mvliiek, for
mulier, on the Tregaron stone at Goodrich Court. Here the second I may be due
to thoughtlessness on the inscriber's part, but I see no reason to think so.
It may be looked at another way: possibly it was his intention to represent
correctly his pronunciation of the Latin mulier as a trisyllable, so that
what he meant was mulljer; but that is hardly probable, as the inscription
seems to be by no means one of the earliest, and as it would have- been |
|
|
|
|
|
210 LECTUEES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. more in accordance with the habit of our ancestors to have
treated mulier as muljer. So it remains that we should regard the pronunciation
intended as being muljjer, and ihejj as a parallel to the ww of Ilwweto
written in Ogam on the Trallong stone, near Brecon. V. Latin v was probably
pronounced like English w, and the combination vu was frequently reduced to u
in the popular Latin of the time of the Empire: among the instances given by
Corssen, i. 321, are aus,Jlaus, noum, for avus^Jlavus, novum. We seem to have
an instance of this on the Penbryn stone in Ordous, which probably means
Ordovus, whence Ptolemy's plural OpSovtKe?. We have the V doubled on the Glan
Usk stone in pvteri for pueri, and so in ntvinti at Cynwil Caio. They are
probably to be pronounced puweri and Nuwinti, with the former of which
compare povero mentioned by Corssen, i. 362, 668, as well as Italian rovina as
compared with ruina, and other cases of the same kind. In Anglesey we meet
with ORVViTE, which may mean Oruwite or Ormwite. If the preference be given
to the latter, as I am inclined to do, the spelling Orwite must be regarded
as dictated by the same cause as IlToweto and muliier. Probably both jj and
vv or rem represent peculiarities of pronunciation which cannot now be
correctly guessed, and it is worth |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 211
Doticing that the semi-vowel in pvveei, orvvite, and Ilwveto occupies just
those positions where O. Welsh would give us ffu {—gw). So had we instances
of initial w or ww, nothing would be wanting to convince one that the digraph
represented the phonetic antecedent of our gu, gm. It is curious to observe
that pvveei has its exact parallel on one of the few bilingual stones known
in Ireland: I allude to devvides on the Killeen Cormac stone in the county of
Kildare. The doubling of consonants took place as in Latin, especially where
it was warranted by pronunciation and etymology: this would be the case in
accented syllables. Even when the doubling dictated by the etymology of the
word was not favoured by the presence of the accent, it seems nevertheless to
have been the rule, but it was liable to be forgotten by the inscribers, as
for instance in Enabarri for Ennabarri, Fanoni related to Fannuci, Qvenatauci
for a name I should consider more correctly written Qvennatauci, Tovisaci for
Tovissaci, and Trihni for Trilluni. Towards the end of the Brit-Welsh period
we meet with opinatisimus and sapientisimus, and altogether s is seldom
doubled, but IVenegussi occurs so written, while the Pgam gives it as
Trenagusu. It is possible that the nominative Cunocenni was paroxytone, while
its genitive Cunoceni was a |
|
|
|
|
|
212 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. perispomenon; but no ingenuity could discover reasons for
the spelling Vendubari as compared with Barrivendi and Enabarri, nor can
Sagrani be defended except as a defective spelling of Sagranni, the Ogmic
form being indubitably Sagramni: the reduction of mn to nn was familiar in
Latin as early as Cicero's time, as when cum nobis and etiam nunc were
pronounced cun nobis and etian nunc: see Corssen, i. 265. A. A word now as to
the vowels: short a at the end of the first part of a compound appears to
have acquired an obscure pronunciation. In Ogam it is always written a, as in
Cunatami, Cunacenniwi, Nettasagru, Trenagusu; so also in the Latin version of
the names Catamanus, Corbalengi, Enaiarri, Qvenatauci, Trenacatus. Advantage
seems to have been taken of the obscurity of the vowel in question to give
the compounds somewhat more of the appearance of Latin formations; so we find
it written o and e, as in Cunocenni, Cunotami, Evelengi, with which compare
the Irish Evacattos, of doubtful reading, it is true, Senomagli, Senemagli,
and Trenegussi. The o of Catotigirni, tholigh probably of the same obscure
sound, is of a different origin, standing as it seems to do for an earlier u:
similarly the e of Anatemori possibly represents an earlier i or ja, if one
is to analyse the name, not into Ana-temori, but Anate- |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTUEE V. 213
mcri, with anate representing what is in Mod. Welsh enaid, ' soul,' and to
regard the compound as meaning eneid-fawr, magnanimus, fieyaXo'^lrv^o?. E.
According to Corssen, i. 325, short e had two sounds in early Latin; one of
them approached that of i as in the words fameliai, Menervai, mereto,
tempestatebus. This may be seen, he thinks, from the fact that in the
language of the educated it passed later into i, while that of the people
retained the old sound. This twofold value of Roman e explains to some extent
the hesitation which the early Welsh' display in the spelling of such names
as Catotigirni, Tegernomali, Tegernacus, from a word tigern-, now teyrn, ' a
lord or monarch,' all from tig-, now ty, ' a house; ' compare, however, our
Qvici and the Qweci of an Irish epitaph. As to Emereto on the Cwm Gloyn
stone, it is not Emeritus changed hy the Welsh into Emereto, but written by
them as they learned it from Eoman mouths. Similarly does, which occurs more
than once for civis in the Roman inscriptions of Britain, proves that we owe
the e in dve, for cives, on the Penmachno stone, to no caprice of the
inscriber. And it can hardly be doubted that it was from this country that
the same pronunciation of Latin found its way into Ireland, where it appears
on the Killeen Cormac stone already alluded to. To pass by the |
|
|
|
|
|
214 LECTURES ON
"WELSH PHILOLOGY. Ogam on it, which, according to .the last account of
it, kindly sent me by Dr. Samuel Ferguson of the Eoyal Irish Academy, should
he read Uwanos Awi Ewacattos, the Latin version is ivvene DRTViDES, for
iwENES DEVViDES, to he construed in the genitive as meaning Lapis Sepulcralis
Juvenis Druidis. Of Latin genitives in es for is Mr. Stokes has found traces
in Irish manuscripts; he mentions os turtores for qs turturis, in an old
Irish commentary at Turin; see Kuhn's Beitraege, V. p. 365, and compare our
Res patres for Ris patris, to be noticed later. O. As in the case of e, so
also o had two sounds in early Latin (Oorssen, i. 342). The one was a clear
o, the other approached u, and passed in the dialect of the educated into u,
while popular Latin retained the older sound. Not to go further than the
Eoman inscriptions of Britain, as edited by Dr. Hiibner in the volume already
more than once referred to, it may be noticed that the more formal and
carefully executed of them follow the rule of literary Latin; but when we
come to the names of tradesmen as stamped on their wares, the struggle
between o and m reappears, as in the following names, which are all in the
nominative case singular: Cocuro, also Cocurus, Dometos, Julios, usually
Julius, Malledo, also Malledu, Malluro, also Mallurus, Mercios, and
Viducos, |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE T. 215'
also twice Viducus, whence it would seem that- the fashion tended to the use
of u when the s was retained, and o when it was not. That this hesitation
hetween o and u was bequeathed by the Komans to their Kymrlc pupils is
certain: witness the following instances — consobrino for consobrinus,
Emereto for Emeritus, servatur and amator on the same stone; and Punpeius for
Pumpeius, in ordinary letters, accompanied by Pope- for Pompe-, in Ogam, on
another stone. In the same way as consobrino and Emereto, I would also treat
the early Kymric names Eimetiaco, in ALHORTVSEiMETiAco, OQ the Llanaclhaiarn
stone, and Cavo, in cavoseniaegii, on the stone in Llanfor Church, near Bala.
This, unfortunately, does not materially help us in deciding whether the
vowel which is written u and o in maccu and macco, and in genitives of the U
declension, such as Trenagusu, was long or short, as an interchange of 5 with
u is not out of the question. A. Where we have aw in Mod. Welsh, the language
had at an earlier stage a with a pronunciation to be compared probably with
that of a in the English word hall or am in draw. This would be the sort of
vowel to occasion some hesitation, in writing, between a and o. We have it,
accordingly, written a in Eimetiaco, Senacus, Tovisaci, Tegernacus, Veracius,
and £> in Cone- |
|
|
|
|
|
216 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. toci and Anatemori, where mor-i is perhaps the prototype of
our marm' ' great,' while the a appears unchanged in Cimarus on one of the
Caerleon stones of the Roman period, and invites comparison with such names
as Indutiomarus, Segomarus, and the like. The same sound it is perhaps that
meets us in Daari, the syllable daar in this name being probably of the same
origin as the Greek Sa>pov, ' a gift:' compare JtoSa)/jo9,
'HXi,oSa>po<;, 'AiroXKoBeopo?, and the like. The doubling of the vowel
was an early expedient used by the Romans when they wished to indicate
thatitwas to be pronounced long, but no trace of it appears in the Roman
inscriptions of this country. However, it is an expedient which might suggest
itself to anybody, and besides in Daari we have it in a name beginning with
Cuur in an epitaph of a considerably later date on a stone now in Llangaffo
Church in Anglesey: the same method of indicating long vowels was also
sometimes adopted by the Irish. It would not be safe to compare Lovernii,
Seniargii, and the like. E. The confusion of cs with S and even e was common
in late Latin: we have a good instance of this in one of our inscriptions in
the words Servatur Fidcei Fatrie\_que\ Amator. Your attention was called in another
lecture to the probability of feminine nominatives in e owing that |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 217 ending to a Latinising
tendency. The most trustworthy instances occur in the following inscriptions:
— 1. Tunccetace Uxsor Daari Hic
Jacit, 2. Evali Fili Dencui
Cuniovende Mater Ejus. 3. Hic In Tumulo Jacit
R...stece Filia Paternini Ani xiii In Pa. 4. Brohomagli Jam Ic Jacit Et
Uxor Ejus Caune. 5. Culidori Jacit Et Orvvite
Mulier Secundi. Besides these we have a
fragment reading Adiune; and another stone, the reading of which is extremely
difficult, seems to yield us the feminine nominative Cunaide. Then there
remain two names in e which it would be hazardous to regard as feminine. The
one is a genitive occurring on the Llanwinio stone, which I read, with
considerable hesitation, Bladi Fili Bodibeve. Here, if one treat Bodibeve as
a feminine, the anomaly of the mother being mentioned instead of the father
has to be accounted for: so there seems to be no alternative but to suppose
Bodibeve to be the father's name. The other instance is Nogtene in Ogam, and
accompanied in Roman capitals by Nogtivis Fili Demeti on the Trefgarn stone.
There seems to be no reason to expect a Latinised form written in Ogam, so
that Nogtene |
|
|
|
|
|
218 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. •would appear to be, not a feminine nominative, but a
genitive like Bodibeve. If so, the final e in both is perhaps to be regarded
as a by-form of the i of the genitive of the /-declension, just as we have o
and u in that of the £/-declension. Here it should be mentioned that we have
at least one Early Welsh name containing e which later yielded oe: I allude
to Vennisetli on the Llansaint stone — the name occurs later as Gnynhoedl and
Gwennoedyl, which, teach us that our hoedl, ' life, lifetime,' was in Early
Welsh setl-. A V. Early Welsh u must have had at least two sounds, that of
long u in Italian, German, and English in such words as rule, food, and
another sound resembling French u, or our modern u=^ ii, or perhaps
intermediate between them; but this will require some explanation. Many
languages have shown a steady tendency to let u (and sometimes m) gradually
pass into i. Physiologically speaking, this seems to mean that the pitch of
the resonance chamber formed by the mouth in pronouncing u is gradually
raised by shortening the mass of air extending from the vocal chords to the
lips, in order to let them settle nearer their position of rest, and reduce
the tension of the muscles called into action when the mouth has to be
maintained at its greatest length, as measured from the vocal chords to the
lips. When u passed |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 219 into
i no break is likely to have happened in the transition; it will,
nevertheless, be convenient to fix on one or two intermediate stages
corresponding to the sound of French u or Greek v, which nearly resembled
French u and will here be used for it, and our Mod. Welsh u, which comes near
German ii, which may here represent it. We have thus the series u, v, ii, i,
or perhaps better still, u, 0, V, ii, i. As instances may be mentioned the
following: Aryan au had been reduced into '§, sounded like French u, in O.
English, and by the 13th century it had so closely approached i as to be
confounded with it in writing. Or take the case of Greek, in which <tv,
for instance, Doric TV, ' thou,' stands for tuam, as may be seen from the
Sanskrit form which is tvam; but in Mod. Greek the vowel v is further
narrowed so as to be pronounced now like i, excepting in the Spartan dialect,
where the old sound still seems to be usual, a characteristic which the Greek
who pointed it out to me considered modern and vulgar! In the same way Latin
io has regularly yielded its much narrower French representative, and in
German the sound written ic is to Frenchmen's thinking frequently pronounced
i. Lastly, Early Welsh 5 or m has given us our modern u (= u), which is
mostly pronounced i in South Wales: this may be most readily exemplified
in |
|
|
|
|
|
220 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. the case of words borrowed from Latin, such as durus, '
hard,' and labor, laidris, ' labour,' which have given us our dur, ' steel,'
and Uafur, ' labour, tillage,' pronounced in S. "Wales dir and llajir
respectively. Curiously enough the same process had gone on in Welsh at an
earlier stage in its history, namely in those words where Mod. Welsh has i
corresponding to Irish u: it was complete about the end of the Brit-Welsh
period, as hardly a trace of the older vowel is to be met witb later. This
vowel perhaps never represented an Aryan long u, but an u which became long
in the course of phonetic decay, as for instance in the case of Mod. Welsh
ci, '.a dog,' Irish cu, which stands for a nominative cuans, as may be seen
from the cognate forms Greek Kvtav, Sanskrit qvd, Eng. hound: so in Welsh ti,
Irish tu, Lat. tu, Greek axj, Sanskrit tvam, Eng. thou; and so in another
group of words, which must here be mentioned at somewhat greater length, namely
Welsh din, dinas, ' a fort, a town or city,' Irish dun, O. Eng. tun, Mod.
Eng. town, which point to a Celto-Teutonic base duan of the same origin,
perhaps, in spite of the aspirate, as the Sanskrit verb dhvan, ' to cover
one's self, to shut' There can hardly be any doubt as to the identity of our
modern Dingad with Dunocati on the stone in Glan Usk Park, whence it is
highly probable that |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURB V. 221 the
u in that name was .sounded towards the close of the Brit-Welsh period more
like our i than our w. The change, however, in the direction of i would seem
to have commenced after the time of Ptolemy the geographer, who gives the
prototype of our din, Irish dun, the form Sovvov (with Greek ov = Latin u, or
English u in rule), and that whether the names in point reached him from
Wales, Ireland, or Gaul: witness the following — from Wales, MaptSovvov, our
modern Caerfyrddin, ' Carmarthen; ' from Ireland, the name of a town which he
gives as Aovvov; and from Gaul, AvyovardBovvov, Aovy^ovvov, Ov^eXKoBovvov,
and the like, all of which end in Latin in dunum. The two Welsh series of u
passing into i were not' confounded, because they were not contemporaneous,
as will be seen on comparing our tud, formerly tut, Ir. tuath, ' a people or
nation,' with Gaulish names such as Toutissicnos, Toutiorix (Welsh Tutri),
and the Gaulish word toutius, supposed to mean * a citizen or one of a
tribe,' and found written toovtiov<!, where Greek ov, as standing for the
sound of Latin u, made it neces-. sary to write oov to represent the Gaulish
diphthong ou; it is very probable that Gaulish ou was represented by ou or ou
or some nearly related diphthong also in the 'common language of the
Goidelo-Kymric Celts before their separation.
|
|
|
|
|
|
222 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. Eouglily speaking, then, the two series stood thus as far as
concerns their relative dates: — Goidelo-Kymric. Early Welsh. Old Welsh.
ModernWelsh. U V or u i i. Ou u OT V OX u u and i. We have possihly a trace
of the old spelling of Bingad in Dwncat, in the lolo MSS., p. 96, but better
attested is Gurcu for the name otherwise written Gurci. Whether the u in
Dencui, Dinui, and Sagranui is of the kind here discussed, it will be
impossible to say until one or more of these names have been identified in a
later form. Ai. We have no satisfactory instances of this diphthong; for
Vailathi and Genaius, both from Cornwall, are somewhat late and highly
obscure. Besides these, Cornwall offers us a name of far greater antiquity on
the stone at Hayle, which I am inclined to read Cunaide; but others have been
in the habit of reading it Cunaido or Cunatdo in the masculine. Supposing
Cunatdo to be improbable, we should in Cunaide or Cunaido have a compound of
the pretty familiar cun- of our early names, and of the word which appears
later in Welsh in the form of udd, explained in Dr. Davies's dictionary as
meaning dominus: it would seem to be matched in Irish by the old name Oed-a
(genitive). |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 223
later Aedh, Aodh, Eaodh, Anglicised Hugh, and the late Mr. Stephens of Merthyr
Tydfil was probably right in regarding the Aedd of Mod. Welsh tradition as a
Goidelic importation from North Britain — see the Arch. Cambrensis for 1872,
p. 193. If, then, Cunaide (or Cunaido) is the correct reading we have here an
instance of ai before it was reduced to u. Au. It is probable that this
diphthong in Early Welsh, or at least towards the close of that period,
consisted of a plus the sound of the narrow u already described, which would
not be very far from our modern au. The reason why I think so is that I fancy
that I find it later only as ei and ai. The cases in point are Caune, Cavo,
Qvenafauci, Vedomaui, and Mauoh... To begin with Caune, it can hardly be
doubted that this is the name which later appears in the form of Cein, now
Gain, and as an ordinary adjective cain, ' fair, beautiful,' of the same
origin as Gothic skauns, Ger, schon ' beautiful, handsome, fair,' — our
ceinach, '■ a hare,' is not related, its cein- being, as pointed out by
Mr. Stokes, the continuator of ca{s)in, of the same origin as Sanskrit gaga,
O. Prussian sasin-, Ger. hase, Mod. Eog. hare. Our next instance Cauo can
hardly but be the prototype of the well-known Welsh name Cei, later Cai,
which possibly comes from the same source as Cain. It |
|
|
|
|
|
224 LECTUBES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. is right, however, to add that Welsh tradition mentions a
Cau or Cam, but he is generally mentioned as coming from Prydyn in the North.
Against this should he balanced the facts that, while Welsh hagiology
mentions only one Cau or Caw, we find allusions to at least three persons of
the name of Cei or Cai, that Cai yields the derivative names Caiaw or Caio,
and Caian the name of one of Caw's many sons who settled in Wales, and that
not many miles from Llanfor Church, wherein is the stone bearing the name
Cavo, is the site of Caergai or Cai's Fort. So it seems that the Welsh was
Cei or Cai, while Cau or Cam not only comes from the North, but also
represents, not Cavo or Cavus, but a name which in its Latin form is found
given as Caunus. Qvenatauci has not been identified, but the leading element
in the name is already familiar to you, and tauc-i is possibly to be equated
with Teic-an, a name which occurs in the Liber Landavensis, p. 201. Similarly
in the case of Vedomaui and Mauoh.., it is probable that mau-i and mau-o are
of the same origin as mai in Gwalchmai, and we seem to have them .in the name
Mei and its derivative Meic in the same collection, pp. 199, 221, 260, 261.
In Latin words the sound of au was difi"erent, as that makes in Welsh
successively ou, eu, au, as in Welsh aur ' gold ' from aurum. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 225 and
Foul, Feul, Paul from Paulus—i\i& naturalised Paul, with, u^ii, has been expelled
in Mod. Welsh in favour of Paul pronounced Pol, an attempt to imitate the
English: the Paulinus of our inscriptions should yield in Mod. Welsh Peulin,
but I am not aware that it occurs, but we have a Welsh derivative from
Paulus, and that is PeulaUy as in Llanbmlan, the name of a church in
Anglesey. It is to be regretted that Carausius is n-ot to be traced in any
later form known to Welsh literature. EL We find ei in Eimetiaco, and its
occurrence in Punpeius seems to indicate that it was sounded not very
differently from ei in Mod. Welsh. Provisionally Alhortus Eimetiaco may be
rendered Alhortus ^re-hastatus, the Early Welsh ei being the equivalent of
Latin <es, genitive ceris. In O. Welsh we seem to trace it in the name
Ejudon, probably for Ei-judon, on a stone in the neighbourhood of Llandeilo
in Carmarthenshire; and it is probably the same name, in a still shorter
form, that meets us in the Mabinogion, ii. 206, as Eidon, which was then
probably pronounced Eiddon. Further we have the same ei taking the form ei
and ai in haiarn, ' iron,' keiarnaidd, ' like iron,' However, I could not now
enter into the details of the history of these forms, as they would take up
more of your time than the importance of the single vocable Eimetiaco could p |
|
|
|
|
|
226 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. justly claim in this lecture (see the remarks on the Welsh
names of metals at the end of the volume). If now we review the ground which
we have just travelled over, everything seems to indicate that, although the
polite Latin of Eoman literature made its way, no doubt, into the families of
natives of rank in this country, the ground it gained here was very
inconsiderable as compared with the conquests made by the Humble and motky
dialect of the legions of imperial Eome, and those who followed in their
train. This kind of vernacular, so far as we know it from the marks of
potters and other tradesmen, may be said, both as regards language and
lettering, to pass imperceptibly into the Latinity of our inscriptions of the
Brit-Welsh period. Consequently those who try to estimate the date of the
latter by the extent to which they have been debased, in point of language or
lettering, as compared with the comparatively faultless official inscriptions
emanating from the Eoman army and its officers, cannot help incurring the
risk of dating the Brit-Welsh ones all too late. For it is not an unusual
thing to find that a debased letter, for instance, which does not appear in
official inscriptions, was, nevertheless, in common use among the tradesmen
of the time, Had Tacitus had to write of the later history of the Eoman
occupation, he would pro- |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTUEE V. 227
bably have given more room to questions of .language than he does in his
account of Agricola's successful policy, when he says in the twenty-first
chapter of that work: " Jam vero principum filios liberalihus artibus
erudire, et ingenia Britannorum studiis Gallorum anteferre, ut, qui mode
linguam Eomanam abnuebant, eloquentiam concupiscerent. Inde etiam habitus
nostri honor et frequens toga. Paullatimque discessum ad delinimenta
vitiorum, porticus et balnea et conviviorum elegantiam. Idque apud imperitos
humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset." Another point worthy of
notice here is the fact that our inscriptions seem to prove, beyond all
doubt, that Latin continued to be one of the languages used by our ancestors
for a long time after the departure of the Eomans, and after the British
Church had acquired strength enough to secure it against speedy extinction.
Eventually no doubt the vernacular of the Eoman tradesman passed into a kind
of ecclesiastical Latin; but from the 1st century to the 10th its history in
the west of Britain probably knew no entire break, and Bede's words cannot
perhaps be quite irrelevant, when he says that the island was in his time,
the earlier part of the 8th century, divided between five peoples, the
English, the Britons, Scots, Picts, and Latins. This brings us down to the O.
Welsh period. |
|
|
|
|
|
228 LECTUEES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. The alphabet in use in the specimens of Old Welsh extant
consisted of the following letters in their Kymric form: a, b, c, d, e, f, g,
h, i, 1, m, n, 0, p, r, 8, t, u. X occurs in Nemnivus's alphar bet; 5 and })
only occasionally appear, and m is to be met with only in proper names in
Asser's Latin writings. B. The leading value of this letter was no doubt the
same which we still assign it. But the Eomans began as early as the 2nd
century to write b for v, and from the beginning of the 4th century on their
archives are said to show instances of this in abundance: witness such forms
as Flabio for Flavia, Balentiniano for Valentiniano, Nerha for Nerva, and
salbus for salvus. This habit of course found its way among the Welsh, hence
we find properabit for properavit on a cross at Margam, and lob in the Ovid
Glosses for what was later written lou, now Jau, 'Jove.' But the use of b for
v by the Kymry in O. Welsh and in Latin must have been far more common than
these two instances would suggest, otherwise it is difficult to see how it
could have been regularly adopted in O. Irish in such words ■ as fedb,
Welsh gweddw, ' a widow; ' tarb, Welsh tarw, ' a bull; ' serbe, Welsh
chwerwedd, ' bitterness.' The confusion of b and v in writing makes it very
hard to ascertain when b began to be reduced to v in |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTUEK V. 229
Welsli pronunciation. That such a reduction had beguij very early in the O.
Welsh period is rendered probable by the fact, that the labial is
occasionally elided in our earliest specimen of manuscript Welsh, the Capella
Glosses, as for instance in tu, ' side,' for tub, tuv, O. Ir. toib, and in
luird, i.e. luirth, ' gardens,' for lubgirtk, the plural of a word now
written lluarth, Mod. Ir. lubhghort. C has never had the sound of s in Welsh.
Ch mostly had its present value of a guttural spirant: occasionally it is
found written he, and sometimes the h is not written at all. It is to be
noticed that once it is written for gh, namely, in inhelcha, " in
venando," in the Capella Glosses; but it does not follow that it was
then pronounced as gh, it being possible that gh had been dialectically
provected in pronunciation into ch in this instance. D, d, t, th, dd, 8, J).
The chief use of d in O. Welsh was np doubt to represent the same sound as in
Modern Welsh, Besides that, it had also to stand for the consonant we now
write dd and Englishmen th (as in this), but probably only where that
consonant had taken the place of an original _;. At any rate we have no
indication that d began to be reduced into this sonant spirant until towards
the close of the period. In one instance the Welsh borrowed the O. English «?
with a stroke |
|
|
|
|
|
230 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. through the stem (S) to represent the sound of our dd,
namely, in the Lichfield Codex in }n ois oisou^ " in sseculum
saeculorum," — this is now yn oes oesoedd. Mr. Stokes identifies our
llawenydd, 'joy,' O. Welsh leguenid with O. Ir. Idine, and suggests as a
possibly related word the Lavinia of Eoman legend, all of the Ja-declension:
so -id in the following stanza, which occurs in the Juvencus Codex, stands
for zS: — " Na mereit mi nep leguenid — henoid Is discnir mi coueidid
Dou nam riceus unguetid." Further, as d could represent our sonant
spirant dd, for which we may also use S, it came, by a little sacrifice of
accuracy, to be occasionally used for the corresponding surd th, as in luird,
for luirth, and papedpinnac, for papetkpinnac, ' whatsoever,' in the Capella
Glosses. This confusion points to English, in which the uncertainty as to the
use of d, S, th, and J) has given rise to much discussion. The last mentioned
character, a D with the stem prolonged both waysj was also occasionally
borrowed by the Welsh to do duty for the digraph th, as in joej) in the
Juvencus Glosses, and once in the Oxford Cornish Codex we find S used for th
in lai^-mer, Mod. Welsh llaeth, 'milk.' Now as (^ = S could do duty for th,
so vice versa, th could be used for a? = S, and further, as th was |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTUKE V. 231 used
by some as a mere equivalent for t — more strictly speaking it meant an
aspirated t, as in O. Welsh hanther, 'half,' from a manuscript which also
shows jomjo^e^, 'fifth' — especially in writing Latin, we find t also
occasionally standing for the spirants th and 8, as for instance in the Ovid gloss
gurt, for jurth, ' against;' and in the tract on weights and measures in the
earlier Oxford Codex we have both petguared part and petguared pard for
petguare'6 parth, now pedwerydd parth, ' fourth part; ' but still more
interesting is the marginal gloss in the Juvencus Codex, which is read issit
padiu itaw gulat, and should be treated as iss iS pad iu i'Sau gulat, meaning
literally, est id quod est illi patria: the words meant to be explained form
the relative clause in the following: — " Cunctis genitoris gloria
vestri, Laudetiir, celsi thronus est cui regia caeli." But elsewhere in
the sanae manuscript we have irkinn issid crist, ' what Christ is,' with d
for S. Accordingly the Welsh stanza just-mentioned would be a little more
accurately written thus: — Na mereit mi nep legueniS — iienoith. Is discnir
mi coueithi^ , Dou nam liceus unguefcS. , The habit alluded to of treating t
and th as equivalents is plentifully illustrated by Giraldus Cambrensis in
the way he transcribes Welsh |
|
|
|
|
|
232 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. names such as his Thaph or Tapfi, ' the river Taf,'
Llandinegath for Llandinegat, ' Llandingad,' Rothericus for Eotericus, '
Ehodri,' and the like; but he was so far impartial that he occasionally also
wrote ck for c as in Gueneloch, ' Wenlock,' and Oscka, ' the Usk: ' similarly
Uicemarch in his life of St. David writes Theibi for Teibi, now Teifi,^ ' the
river Teivi.' The same habit is conspicuous in the Cornish Vocabulary printed
at the end of the Grammatica Cdtica. We trace it still earlier in
Contkigirni, now ' Cyndeyrn,' in the oldest manuscript of the Annates CaTnbrice,
the writer of which more frequently, however, asserts the equivalence of th
and ^by writing t and c for the spirants th and ch, as in Artmail and
Brocmail for Arthmail and Brochmail. The latter is also written without h, as
is likewise Eutychius, in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, where, on the other
hand, we have • Meilochon, a form of the name Maglocunus intermediate between
it as used by Gildas and our modern Maelgwn — in fact the person referred to
by Bede is called by Irish annalists Maelcon (see Keeves' edition of
Adam-man's Life of St. Columba, pp. 148, 371). Add to this Cluith and
Alcluith, which Bede so writes for Cluit and Alcluit. In all these instances
and the like, ck, tk, pk were either aspirated c, t, p, as in brick-house,
pent-house, and uphold, or simple c, t, p.
|
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 233 F
would seem to have had the same soimd in O. Welsh as our jf now. It occurs
mostly in words horrowed from Latin,' and as the initial of Welsh words which
originally must have begun with sp: take for instance ^er, 'the ankle,' Greek
a^vpov, Jraetk, 'eloquent, loquacious,' Ger. sprechen, O. Eng. spr^can, now
speak. G had the value of our modern g, which is never that of Eng. J. It had
besides that of the corresponding spirant, as heard in some of the dialects
of North Germany in such words as sagen, lage, and the like: possibly also
that sometimes heard in the German words liegen, degen, and the like. To avoid
mistakes I should further specify that the sounds I mean are those
technically written j/^ and y respectively by the German phonologist Briicke
and his followers, and g^ andj by Sievers in the Bihliothek Indogermanischer
Orammatiken (Leipsic, 1876). That g between vowels or after 1, r had been
pretty generally reduced to a spirant in O. Welsh is rendered highly probable
by the fact, that later it disappeared altogether in those positions, and
that in the oldest manuscript Welsh it is sometimes written and sometimes
omitted. Thus we have telu (for teglu), now teulu, •' a family,' as well as
nerthheint, "armant," by the side of scamnhegint, "
levant," all three in the Juvencus Codex; and te (in dolte), now tai, '
houses,' in- |
|
|
|
|
|
234 LECTUEES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGT. stead of teg, the plural of tig, now ty, ' a house/ in the
Capella Glosses, among which we meet also with paulloraur, a kind of
collective plural explaining pugillarem paginam, and appearing without the g
of the h&tm pugillares, ' writing-tablets.' But in this last case it
would perhaps be more correct to suppose that a y or g/i (=y^ —3^) has become
u just as we have had to point out instances of another g ov gk (=g^=j)
becoming^ in such words as arjdn and Morjen: for more instances of u for g
see the Revue Celtique, ii. 193, iii. 87. Gh is actually once found so
written in Ovid's ArtofLove, namely, mhelghati, "venare,"for helgha
ti, now helja 'di, hela di, or hel di, ' do thou hunt.' Mention has already
been made of the spelling helcha, to which a kind of parsiUel is offered by
the Latinised form Pembroehia, whence probably the English Pembroke: the O.
Welsh must have been Penbrog or Penbrogk, which is now, of course, Penfro. H.
This was, no doubt, the representative of .the aspirate in O. Welsh as it is
in Mod. Welsh; but was it also used for ch in O. Welsh? We meet certainly
with the words hui and suh, of which, however, the latter is Cornish, as it
comes from the later Oxford Glosses: in the Juvencus Codex it is duly spelled
such, " vomis," and as Cornish was in the habit later of eliding
h—ch, it is not |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 235 at
all certain that it was intended to pronounce suh as if it had been -written
such. Then as to hui, the probability is that in O. "Welsh it was
pronounced with A, and that the latter has since been provected into ch, as
the word is now chwi, ' you.' The reason for such a change would be the
pneumatic pressure alluded to in connection with initial ffh passing into ch.
But chmi, for O. Welsh hui, is exceptional in that it belongs to all Wales,
while in most other instances cAw is confined to N." Wales, and km holds
its ground' in S, Wales, Eeturning, then, to the use of h as the exponent of
the aspirate in O. Welsh, I may here cite a remark made by Mr. Ellis in his
work on Early English Pronunciation, ii. p. 598 — it is to the following
effect: "Uneducated speakers, especially when nervous, and anxious not
to leave out an h, or when emphatic, introduce a marked k in places where it
is not acknowledged in writing or in educated speech." Now this,
especially the allusion to emphasis, although written with regard to the
treatment of k in English, calls attention to a principle which has played a
part of some importance in the formation of words in our own language, seeing
that it loves to aspirate the accented vowel in the middle of a word, as for
instance indihdreb, ' eb^voyevh,' diarhdbol, 'proverbial.' Some, it is true,
wish to ignore this k in writing. |
|
|
|
|
|
236 LECrUEES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. cuinhaunt, '
deflebunt/ nerthheint, " armant/'scawM- hegint, " levant/' are as
old as the Juvencus Codex, and nobody perhaps would now object to glanhau, '■
to cleanse,' eyfjawnhau, ' to justify,' although the h in them also is merely
the accessory of the stress-accent, while such words as coffdu, ' to call to
memory, are altogether left out of the reckoning, although their ^ only
stands for an earlier y>^, so that coffdu represents eqfhdu. The case is
the same where the accent has since retreated, as when we have coffa instead
of coffdu, or lloffa, ' to pick up with the hand, to glean,' for llof-hd,
from llof—Uaw, ' hand,' as in llofrudd, also Uawrudd, ' a murderer,'
literally ' red-handed.' Still older, perhaps, is the case of pedol, ' a
horseshoe,' from the Latin pedalis, ' a slipper,' which appears in the Welsh
of the 12th century as pedhaul, that is, ped-hdul, whence later petaul and
pedol. By the side of pedol may be ■^l&c&A. paradmys,
'paradise,' which in that case cannot, be derived from -n-apaBeiao?, but from
a Latin paradlsus, if the latter may be supposed to have been pronounced
paradeisus by those from whom the Welsh borrowed the word. But for the h
evolved by the accent, we should now have not pedol and paradnys, but peddol
and paraddwys. And it is as the accompaniment of the stress-accent |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 237 that I would regard the aspirate
in the following words: — Casulheticc, "penulata," in the Capella
Glosses, where we have also ellesheticion, "mela," where the writer
had perhaps at first intended only to write elleshetic, and afterwards added
a syllable on finding that mela was plural — at any rate that this enigmatic
word was accented elleshéticion is in the highest degree improbable. The
Juvencus Codex has crummanhuo, "scropibus," ceroenhou,
"dolea" (which suggests that plurals in ou were formerly oxytones),
and a passive plural planthonnor, "fodientur," as well as the
cuinhaunt, nerthheint, scamnhegint already mentioned. Among the Ovid Glosses
we have guorunhetic, "arguto." The later Oxford Codex (Cornish)
offers us brachaut {= brac-háut) as well as bracaut, "mulsum," and
hinham, 'oldest.' The effects of the same accentuation is, perhaps, to be
traced in the y of its Mod. Welsh equivalent hynaf, as well as in the surd
mutes of the degrees of such adjectives as teg, 'fair:' at any rate, until a
better explanation offers itself, I would regard teced, 'as fair,' tecach,'
fairer,' tecaf, 'fairest,' as standing for teg-hédr, teg-hách, teg-háf,
though the latter do not occur, and the former are only known in Mod. Welsh
as paroxytones. It is in the same way, no doubt, forms of the so-called
future perfect should be analysed, such as gwypo, ('that he) may know,' |
|
|
|
|
|
238 LECTCEES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 239
which mtist have belongetJ to the word in an earlier form mergidhagam, with
which one may compare the O. Welsh scamnhegint, " levant," later
yscafnheynt; or else the pronunciation intended was mergidhdm, with a long
and, perhaps, jerked or perispomenon. The other instances in the manuscript
in question appear with only one of the two /j's: thus etncoilhaam, "
auspicio auspex," lemhaam, " acuo," but datolakam, ' I select.'
"With a few reservations, already indicated, one may say that the best
collections of O. Welsh words, namely, the glosses on Martianus Capella and
those in the Juvencus Codex, are on the Tvhole accurate as far as conce'rns
the letter k: the latter, it is true, shows h once misplaced in hirunn, for
irhunn, now yr Awn, ' who,' and once omitted in anter for hanter, ' half.*
But the writers of the glosses in the other codices, besides indulging in an
occasional heitham (for eitham, now eithaf, 'utmost'), which seems to point
to the Grwentian dialect of parts of Glamorganshire and Monmouthshire where
no h is now pronounced by the uneducated, either in Welsh or English, unless
it be in the wrong place, show a decided objection to beginning certain
particles with vowels: thus they write mostly, but not exclusively, ha for
the expletive a before verbs; ha, hac, for a, ac, ' and, with ' — the h is
still written |
|
|
|
|
|
240 LECTUEES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 241 it
occurred as an initial or in contact with a preceding n and, possibly, r: at
any rate, that seems to have been the case in O. Cornish, and I am inclined
to think O. Welsh followed suit, though it is the equivalent of II, and not
Ih, that we seem to have in the Capella gloss mellhionou,
"violas,", Mod. Welsh meilljon, ' clover, trefoil.' In O. Cornish
It had become lit, and the t had been assimilated, as proved by such forms as
celleell from cukellus, Mod. Welsh cyllell, ' a knife,' with which compare
the French couteau: similarly O. Cornish elin, " novacula," stands
for ellin, Mod. Welsh ellyn, ' a razor,' Irish alfan. . But besides these O.
Cornish had initial M as in hloimol, " glomerarium," and we have
probably the same hi or Ih in ehnlinn, which I take to mean enhlhinn: the
Mod. Welsh is enllyn, already alluded to. If O. Welsh as well as O. Cornish
had both U and Ih, then it follows that II has since extended its domain in
Welsh at the expense of Ih, which is unknown in the language now, excepting
perhaps when yn mho, le, ' in quo loco? where? ' is dialectically cut down
into ymhli? mhle? or hie? which is also liable to become lie. That the
spirant surd which we write II existed in O. Welsh, has been shown in a
former lecture; but it is probable that it was confined to words in which it
represented earlier l-l, or where it preceded t. In the latter Q |
|
|
|
|
|
242 LECTUEES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 243
dojjon, which is not to be confounded with dofjon the plural of dof, '■
tame; ' for the latter implies an earlier dam-, Aryan dam-, while daw, dawf stands
for dam- of the same origin as the Sanskrit forms ddmd, -ddma, ddman, ' a
band, bond, fetter, tie.' This enables one to account for what would now
appear a curious use of the word daw, in Brut y Tyrcysogion (London, 1860),
p. 118, where we meet with the words y daw gan y chwaer, or, as we now write,
ei ddaw gan ei chwaer, ' his connection by his sister,' that is in other
words ' his brother-in-law: ' compare the Ger. schnur, ' a cord, twine, tie,'
and schnur, ' a daughter-in-law,' which glottologists, it is true, are in the
habit of regarding, for reasons not very evident to me, as in no way
connected. So much of the word dam: my account of its origin in Kuhn's
Beitraege, vii. p. 231, is utterly wrong. Whether the u of O. Welsh arm or
enu, now enw, 'a name,' was arrived at by reducing m into a nasal vowel, or
by an exceptional substitution of w for m, is by no means clear: the Irish
forms corresponding to O. Welsh anu, plural enuein are anm, plural anmann.
Ng, in O. Welsh, as in Mod. Welsh, represented the guttural nasal. The
digraph got this value all the more firmly attached to it when, in the course
of phonetic decay, nd, mb became nn, mm, and lyg or ng-g in the same way lost
its mute. |
|
|
|
|
|
244 LECTUEES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 245 nus,
signum, and the like; in fact, we have signo written singno on the cross on
Caldy Island. But as to the habit of writing g for ng, it was once so common,
that one or two words of learned borrowing from Latin must have been
permanently misread: I allude to the Latin Jlagellum, which the Welsh treated
as Jlangellum, and thence derived the modern forms fflangell, ' a scourge or
whip; ' another of the same kind was legio, treated as lengio, whence our
Biblical lleng, ' a legion.' This was, of course, impossible in the familiar
name Castra legionum, which duly became Caerlleon, ' Chester, Caerleon; ' we
have also places called Carreg y Lleon and Hafod y Lleon in the-
neighbourhood of Bettws y Coed. Ph had the same sound as at present, but it
seems to have been rarely used, f being preferred. In a few instances p is
written for ph, as in the name Gripiud, for Griphjud, now Gruffudd, '
Griffith,' in the Lichfield Gospel. jR had no doubt the sounds of our r a,nd
of our rA initial or following n, and the habit of writing rh as if it were
simply r will explain the spelling of Hir-hoidl, as Hiroidil in the Gwnnws
inscription, which must be reckoned as belonging to this period. The earliest
written evidence to the existence of initial rh is perhaps the name Hris in
the Saxon Chronicle (in a manuscript marked Cott. |
|
|
|
|
|
246 LECTURES OK WELSH
PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LKCTURE V. 247 In
speaking of the vowels as they appear in writing, you will have to bear in mind
that their sounds have undergone modifications, in point of quantity,
depending on the nature of the consonants immediately following them.
"With this reserve you may, on the whole, regard O. Welsh a, e, 2, 0, ii
as pronounced like our modern a, e, i, 0, w. Among the points which require
to he dealt with a little more in detail are the following: — (1.) O. Welsh?
would seerfi to have had, as far as concerns quality, the same sound as our y
in hyr, ' short,' and dyn, ' man.' This sound of i may, for the sake of
distinction, be called broad i, and it would appear to have been hardly such
as could be easily distinguished from that of e and i already noticed as
sometimes indiscriminately written in inscriptions of the Brit-Welsh period.
Hence, perhaps, it is, that it was written in O. Welsh not only i but also e,
as, for instance, in the prefix cet, now cyd, in the Juvencus Codex in the
stanzas beginning with Niguorcosam; prem, now pryf, 'a worm,' in Cormac's
Glossary; Res patres, for the genitives Ris patris, ' of his father Rhys,'
and speretus on a stone at Llantwit Major. With Res patres compare what was
said in reference to cives for civis. Besides speretus we have also speritus,
namely on a stone at Merthyr Mawr; both seem to be the echo of |
|
|
|
|
|
248 LKCTUEES ON
-WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTUEE V. 249 now
yn ' in,' ir, now yr ' the,' is, now ys ' is,' mi, now /y ' my.' So in the
Juvencus Codex, the Lichfield Gospel, and the earlier Oxford G-losses. On the
other hand, O.Cornish gives the preference to e,as in the following instances
in the later Oxford Glosses: celleell, Mod. Welsh cyllell, ' a knife,'
creman. Mod. W. cryman, 'a sickle,' O. Welsh crummanhuo,
"scropibus," delekid, Mod. W. dylaith, ' a door-fastening,'
heueild], Mod. W. hywaith, 'docile,' modreped. Mod. W. modryhedd (also
modrabedd), ' aunts,' peteu, Mod. W. pydeu, 'a pit,' from the Latin puteus,
treated, it would seem, as though it had been accented putdus. But this use
of e for the neutral or obscure vowel was by no means confined to O. Cornish,
for we find it in that capacity frequently also in the Venedotian versions of
the Laws of Wales. Lastly, it is curious to observe that in the two words in
point in Cormac's Glossary the vowel in question is rendered by ui: I allude
to muin, Mod. W./y, ' my,' or myn (in oaths), and cuisil. Mod. W. cysyl, '
consilium,^ and one may regard it as an instance of the same thing when Irish
writers, call Mynyw, or St. David's, Kilmuine. (3.) However we have an exception
to the obscuring of « or M into i in O. Welsh in the enigmatic gloss
crummanhuo already cited from the Juvencus Codex, and a good many more in the
names in the Liber Landavensis, and other old manuscripts, |
|
|
|
|
|
250 LECTUEES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTUKE V. 251
Welsh with its sound unohscured we have one indubitable item of evidence: I
allude to the word do, meaning ' yes ' in connection with the past, as when we
say: Afuefe yma? Do, " Has he been here? Yes." Here the answer do
is elliptical, standing for what must once have been dobu, which would now be
dyfu, had it not at an early date become the rule to omit the verb and retain
the particle. Having thus become an independent word, doing duty as it were
for an entire sentence, it was of course proof against any further phonetic
decaj'^, whereas in those cases where it still served as a prefix it
eventually yielded that one which we write dy. It is possible that we have
the still earlier form in the Capella Gloss dubeneticion, "
exsectis," the plural of dubenetic in Mod. Welsh difynedig, ' cut up,
dissected,' and not, as might be expected, dyfyr^dig, which only means '
cited, summoned ': it is right, however, to state that considerable confusion
as to the use of the prefixes dy and di prevails in Mod. Welsh. O. Welsh du-,
our do ' yes,' the prefix dy, and O. Welsh di, ' to,' which has, through an
intermediate ddi, matched in Cornish by dki ' to,' yielded our smooth-worn i
' to,' — all these forms on the one hand, and the Irish preposition du, do,
'to,' on the other, point to a common Celtic du of the same origin as the
English to, Ger. zu, which, like the Welsh dy-, is extensively used as a
prefix. |
|
|
|
|
|
252 LECTDEES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTUEB V. 253 i in
guichir, *' effrenus" (once also guichr, " effera," and so in
Nemnivus's Alphabet), Mod, Welsh grcychr, ' valiant,' shortened and
desynonymized into gmych, ' hrave, good,' in centhiliat (also centhliat),
" canorum," which would now be cetkliad, ' a singer,' but I do not
know the word, and in lestir (written several times lestr in the Capella
Glosses), now llestr, 'a vessel;' and so in the Ovid gloss cefinet, which
would now be edned, but that edn now makes in the plural ednod, ' birds or
any winged things.' There was, further, not much difference probably between
the irrational vowel and the thematic or connecting vowel in compounds: so,
as the former was not usually written, it would be vain to expect to find the
latter treated differently, and it is worth noticing that it is the Juvencus
Codex which gives us guichir, centhiliat, lestir, and lobur, that also treats
us to an interesting instance of the connecting vowel exceptionally attested
in litimmir " frequens." (5,) O. "Welsh u was probably nearly
as narrow in sound as our modern u, and must have very closely resembled the
sound of broad l, but their difference of quantity might have prevented any
confusion between them, but the reorganisation of the Welsh vowel system made
narrow u liable to be shortened, and broad i liable to be lengthened. Thus
narrow u (short) and |
|
|
|
|
|
254 LECTUEBS ON
WELSH PHILOLOGT. broad t might be possibly confounded witb one another, or
narrow u with broad i. (long). In Mediaeval and Modern Welsh there is no lack
of such cases, and one or two are to be found in the glosses: thus the
Juvencus gloss scipaur, ''horrea" is now yscubor, ' a barn,' and the
Capella gloss crunnolunou, " orbiculata," gives us olunou, "
wheels," the singular of which is written olin, " rota," in
the Ovid Glosses — the modern form olvyyn coincides with neither. On the
other hand, the tract on weights and measures in the earlier Oxford Codex
gives us ovxpump, 'five,' and pummed, ' fifth,' in the form ot pimp &nA.
pimphet with the i retained, to which they had an etymological right not to
be invalidated by the O. Irish form of the same numeral, namely, coie, where
the lengthening of the diphthong is due to the suppression of the nasal, and
the <? is a relic of the v of the common Celtic form which must have been
qvinqvin or qvinqven. At first sight Gaulish would seem to show a similar
trace of the v retained as o or m in the well-authenticated Poeninus and
Puoeninus of the numerous votive tablets nailed in old times to the walls of
the Alpine temple of the deity Perm or Jupiter Poeninus (Revue Celtique, iii.
3), whence we might be tempted to conclude the Celtic stem implied by the
forms Poeninus, Penninus and Ilevvo-ovivBo';, the Early Welsh Qven- |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 255
vendani, and our modern pen, ' a head or top,' O. Ir. cenn, to have Lean
qvenn-, but the form Puoeninus compels one to assume the Gaulish to have
been, at least dialectically, a dissyllable pu-inn- from a common Celtic
qvu-enn- representing a prse-Celtic qvup-enn~ or qvapartja-s of the same
origin as Lat, caput (for cvaput like canis for cvanis), Gothic Aaub-ith,
Mod. H. Ger. kaup-t, O. Eng. hedf-od, Aedf-d, Mod. Eng. hea-d: besides
qvup-dnn-, the Kymry must have had a diminutive qvu(j>)-ic-, qvu-ic-,
qu-tc, qvic-, which has become our modern feminine pig, ' a point,' and in
Early Welsh we seem to detect it in the proper name Qvici referred to in
another lecture. But to return to u and broad i, there can be no doubt as to
their having had nearly the same sound in O. Welsh, but how soon they became
identical I am unable to say: in Mod. Welsh at any rate there is no
difference between u and one of the sounds (that of broad i) now written y,
so that kun, ' a sleep,' and ki^n, ' older,' cannot any longer be
distinguished in pronunciation, and the words efe a lysg y cerbydau a than
(" he burneth the chariot in the fire:" Psalm xlvi. 9) have ere now
been cited as explicitly foretelling the invention of locomotive
steam-engines. As to the diphthongs of O. Welsh, it is probable that ai, ei,
eu, iu, ui had much the same |
|
|
|
|
|
256 LECTUEES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 257 the
corruption of an earlier form of hraut into hroth (given also as hrof) in the
traditional form of St. Patrick's oath, muin doiu hraut: both date, in all
probability, too early for our purpose, and should rather be placed by the
side of Bede's Dinoot, noticed in a former lecture. 0." Cornish had au
as in O. Welsh, but it is remarkable that the Breton Glosses in the
Luxembourg Folio show no trace of it, but always o, even where the diphthong
appears later; whence it seems that the glosses in question were compUed at a
time when the diphthongisation was incomplete or not distinctly heard in
Breton: perhaps something is also due to the orthographical conservatism of
the scribe. However, we find an instance in the Eutychius Glosses in the
mouosyllable laur, " solum," which is in Mod. Breton leur, Mod.
Welsh llawr, Irish Idr, Eng. Jloor; and the same manuscript at first sight
appears to ofier us an instance also of eu, the later form of Breton au, in
the gloss, eunt, " asquus." But this is not conclusive, as the
modern form of the word is eeun or eun, which Le Gonidec explains as meaning:
" Droit, qui n'est ni courbe, ni penche; juste; equitable; direct;
directement; tout droit," while the- Mod. Welsh is jamn, ' right,
correct,' whence unjawn, ' straight,' and jawnder, ' equity, justice,' all of
which would find their explanation in a prse- B |
|
|
|
|
|
258 LECTUEES OJr
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTUKE V. 269
Welsh, and dh, which was introduced probably for S, only served to enhance
the confusion. But dh never appears to have gained a firm footing in
"Welsh any more than in English: had it been adopted in English, Welsh
would probably have followed suit, As far as this state of the orthography
may be said to have simplified itself, the result, to judge by the old
manuscripts extant, was to use t, d, th to represent the sounds which we
write . so still, and to express S by means of d or t.: on the whole, d seems
to have been more generally employed in this last capacity than t, and even
in manuscripts where t for 8 is the rule, we find (^ = S occasionally
cropping up. At length the difficulty as to a symbol for S was met by the
awkward expedient of writing it dd, to which the false analogy of II and^ may
have led the way. Zeuss in the Grammatica Celtica, p. 139, notices the use of
dd as early as the 14th century, and instances from manuscripts which are
perhaps not very much later, occur in documents printed in the first volume
of Haddan and Stubbs's Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents Relating to
Great Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 1869). Thus in a form of agreement made
between Richard, Bishop of Bangor, and Llywelyc, Prince of Wales, by Anian,
Bishop of St. Asaph, and others as arbiters in the year 1261, we have |
|
|
|
|
|
260 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 261 that
in tlie Black Book of the 12tli century, jff was also frequently used iQ^f=-
v. However the respective domains of ff and fh were by no means accurately
defined, and u (also v and n>) continued to be optionally used instead of
_/ = v. Here it may be asked how_/ came at all to be used to represent the
sound written v in English. The answer which at once suggests itself is
that_/= pA was reduced in the course of phonetic decay to the sound of w,
while the old symbol was retained unchanged: in that way V would come to be
considered as having the value ofy". In Welsh, however, such a reduction
is conspicuous by its absence, while in the Teutonic languages and, among
them, in English, the history of y and that of v are, so to say, inseparable:
so we turn to English for our answer. Now O. English words like heafod, '
head,' keo/on, ' heaven,' ncefre, ' never,' had their / pronounced v, and
sometimes it was also written u or v, and not /. Farther, we are told by Mr.
Ellis {Early Eng. Pro., ii. 572) that, in English manuscripts of the 13th
century and later, ^was used for the sound of ph, and he gives extracts from
Orrmin dating from the end of the 12th century. Prom the latter it is clear
that he observed the same sort of distinction between/ and ^ as we do in
"Welsh: his / between vowels was mostly v, while his ff was, of course,
/=^/^. Neither is it altogether |
|
|
|
|
|
262 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTUKE-V. 263
Later we find Salesbury also treating R and rr in the same way; and perhaps
in some of the proper names written with ff, such as Ffoulkes, Ffrench, and
the like, the digraph is neither Welsh nor modern. It is worth adding that
English manuscripts of the 13th and the 14th century show instances of ss,
initial as well as medial, for sh, and that Welsh dd has also been traced
back into the 14th century, G continued to be written for g and very commonly
for ng: so ngc was reduced in writing to gc or gk as in Jreigk for F/reingc,
' Frenchmen.' However the omission of the n does not seem to have ever been
the invariable rule, and it reappears in the 15th century. LI medial remained
in use as in O. Welsh, and not only that but it appears as an initial in the
12th century in the Black Book and the Venedotian Laws of Wales. This
extension of the domain of II took place possibly in consequence of a change
of pronunciation, that is from initial Ih to II. R and rh were used in
Salesbury's time much in the same way as they are now. But how much earlier
rh came into use I am unable to say. In North Wales rr and R were used for
it, and Salesbury himself indulges in all three as the initials of Welsh
words now written with rh only. |
|
|
|
|
|
264 LECTUEES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGT. I,y,y. In the latter part of the 11th century we find y
coming into optional use for i in the Welsh names in the Historia Brittonum
of Nennius, and in the oldest manuscript of the Annates Cambrice; but in them
it is all but confined to the diphthongs, especially oy and ey for oi and ei.
This is as nearly as possible the case also, with y in the 13th century
specimens of Norman French, published by Mr. Ellis in his Early Eng. Pro.,
ii. pp. 434-6, 500-4. But in Welsh manuscripts of the 12th century y knows no
such limits, and here we discover a point of contact with English rather than
Norman French. For in the earlier part of that period of Old English, which
is commonly called Anglo-Saxon, y was used to represent a sound which is
supposed to have been nearly identical with that of French m, which is
considerably broader than Mod. Welsh u; but the O. English vowel was
gradually narrowed, which went so far that, as Mr. Ellis tells us (ii. 580),
it was used from the 13th to the 16th century indiscriminately with { as of
precisely the same meaning. Thus, at a certain stage in its history, it must
have sounded precisely like one of the values of i in Old and early Mediaeval
Welsh, and this, I think, is the reason why its English symbol y was so
readily adopted by the Welsh. At first sight, however, its introduction |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 265
wonld seem to have only created more confusion than already existed, y and i being
apparently nsed indiscriminately for all the four values of Welsh i. These
last were — (1) the semi-vowel j; (2) the narrow i, formerly i, as a rule,
but liable, since the reorganisation of the Welsh vowel system, to become l;
(3) broad i, formerly always short, but li&ble since the reorganisation
to become long in monosyllables; and (4) the neutral vowel sounded like m in
the English word but. To pass by the Venedotian versions of the Laws of Wales
in which i is not a favourite letter, and in which other peculiarities of
orthography are noticeable, not to mention the fact that in the Record Office
edition of them the manuscripts have been diligently mixed np instead of
printed in parallel columns, the materials before us range from the end of
the 11th century to the 14th, and is mostly contained in the Black Book, the
Book of Aneurin, and that of Taliessin, as printed in the second volunie of
Skene's Four Ancient Books of Wales. Now a careful examination of these three
books in which the confusion of y or y with i is at its worst, would, I am
inclined to think, show that confusion to have never been complete: in a
majority of instances i forj and for narrow i would seem to have held its
ground against y or y, while y and i indiscriminately represented the broad i
and the |
|
|
|
|
|
266 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 267 but
we miss it in the Book of Taliessin and the Red Book of Hergest of the 14th
and the 15th century, as well as in all later manuscripts. U, V, w. In Old
Welsh we found u representing Old Welsh u and m (vowel and semivowel), but
very rarely the sound of v, whereas in the Black Book this appears as one of
its ordinary values. Add to this that the letter v comes in as a mere graphic
variety of u: later another variety resembling 6 was used, especially in the
Book of Taliessin and the Red Book. Further, w (written also vv) was
introduced from English, though not in the time of Asser, who used it in the
spelling of Welsh names in his life of Alfred. It appears in the Black Book
for v, u, and the semivowel, whereas in English it was eventually confined to
the semivowel and the diphthongs. However Mr. Ellis prints wde, ' wood,' in
the Cuckoo Song, dating from the year 1240 or thereabouts, and Chaucer has
such forms as wilm, ' willow,' yolm, ' yellow,' sorm, ' sorrow,' and morm, '
morning.' In all the confusion already suggested u appears in the majority of
instances to have retained the right of representing the sound of Old Welsh
u, as it still does, and by the end of the 15th century w occupied much the
same position as at present, while 6 had gone out of use and the struggle
between v and/ for the |
|
|
|
|
|
268 LBCTtJKES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 269 by
the publication of Bishop Morgan's Bible in 1588, and of the Welsh Homilies
in 1606: so when Dr. John Davies of Mallwyd came to publish his Welsh
Grammar, which was printed in 1621 under the title (as given in the second
edition of 1809) of " AntiqusB Linguae Britannicae Nunc Communiter
Dictae Cambro-Britannicae, A Suis Cymraecae, Vel CambricEe, Ab Aliis
Wallicae, Eudiinenta," he found in use the alphabet we still use: A, b,
c, ch, d, dd, e, f, ffj S, °g» ^, h Ij llj m> ^, o, p, ph, r, s, t, th, u,
w, y. ' Here you will notice the exclusion of ^ and v, and the insertion of
n^, not after n, but after ^, which had so often done duty for it in the
Middle Ages. . In his grammar, as reproduced in the second edition, Dr Davies
distinguishes between the two sounds of Welsh y by slightly varying the
printed form of that letter; but that he confines to his alphabet, and the
Welsh instances quoted in the course of that work. Lastly, in 1707, Edward
Llwyd published his Archceologia Britannica, a work devoted to the grammar
and vocabulary of the Celtic languages, in which he makes use in his Welsh
test of an alphabet of his own. In the latter he avails himself of the Irish
6 for our dd; and that, formed |
|
|
|
|
|
270 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE V. 271 10th
century have been more carefully studied and chronologically arranged. As it
is, one has to be content -with a rough guess as to the date of the principal
changes, which have taken place in "Welsh spelling, without being always
able to say what led to them or to give other details respecting them which
it would be interesting to have. I have to add that most of these remarks had
been put together before Mr. Bradshaw had convinced me by means of the
paleeographical evidence he adduces, that the Luxembourg Fragment and the
Eutychius Glosses are of Breton origin, and not Welsh. It has .not, however,
been thought expedient to omit all reference to them, as they serve purposes
of comparison between Old Welsh 'and Old Breton. For the same reason use has
frequently been made of the later Oxford Glosses which are in Old Cornish. The
fact of these three collections not being Welsh does not seriously diminish
their value even for the student of that language, while it undoubtedly rids
him of a good many difficulties which would remain puzzles and
inconsistencies had he still to accept them as Welsh. ( 272 )
|
|
|
|
|
|
LEOTUEE VI.
"The circumstance, that genuine Ogham Inscriptions exist both in Ireland
and "Wales, which present grammatical forms agreeing with those of the
Gaulish linguistic monuments, is enough to show that some of the Celts of
these islands wrote their language hefore the 5th century, the time at which
Christianity is supposed to have been introduced into Ireland."— Whitlbt
Stokes. As monuments in Ogam are known only in the British Isles, we seem to
be warranted in provisionally regarding them as invented in them; but in
which of them, in Great Britain or in Ireland? If we may venture to follow
the supposed westward course of civilisation, the answer must be m Great
Britain. • And assuming that, one must admit that it was some time before the
coming of the Eomans, as it is highly improbable that after the introduction
of the Roman alphabet into the island, another and a far clumsier one should
not only have been invented, but brought into use from the Vale of Clwyd to
the south of Devon; not to mention that in that case it would be hard to
conceive how it came to |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE VI. 273
pass that it betrays no certain traces of Eotaan influence. The Ogam, as
given in Irish manuscripts of the Middle Ages, runs thus: — I II II I i-iii m
il ' " ' " "" '"" - b, 1, f, s, n; h, d, t, c,
q; I II III nil Hill I II Ml im iiw m. g, ng, ^. r; a, o, u, e, i. Here the
continuous line merely represents the edge or ridge of the stones on which
the Ogams are found written; for as a rule they are not confined to one plane
excepting when represented in manuscript. As to the values of the digits, the
following points have to be noticed: — the presence of -•-, -j-j-j-, and
jjj-j- in inscriptions cannot, unfortunately, be said to be a matter of
certainty. There is, however, no reason to doubt the accuracy of Irish
tradition in attributing -j-j-j- the power of ng; but as to jjj-j, it is more
commonly given as st (or sd) by our Irish authorities, which is, however, the
result of the Irish habit of treating z as st in the Middle Ages and earlier;
thus the letter itself is called steta, and such spellings as Elistabeth and
Stephyrus for EUzaieth and Zephyrus are to be met with in Irish manuscripts.
So on the ground of tradition the conclusion' seems warranted that the early
value of j-jjj was that of z. But where,
|
|
|
|
|
|
274 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE VI. 275
matter of tradition, at the same time that it would confirm the view already
stated as to the antiquity of the alphabet. When Irish tradition ascribes -•■
the value of h, this also requires explanation. For in Irish h is mostly
inorganic and devoid of all claim to be regarded as known to the language in
its earlier stages. Turning to Welsh, where its footing is not so precarious,
we find h to be of a threefold origin. (1.) It is evolved by the accent in
the tone-syllable; this kind of h may be traced back into O. Welsh, (2.)
Initial h for an earlier s may be traced back as far probably as the 6th cfentury,
but hardly further. (3.) But we are here only concerned with h for ch, and
first of all, where that ch itself has replaced cs, reduced in Irish by
assimilation into ss, s. The date of the change of cs, ss, into eh cannot be
assigned, but it is probably anterior to the Eoman occupation, as it never
happens in words borrowed from Latin, such as coes ' leg,' llaes ' long,
trailing,' and pais ' petticoat,' from coxa, laxus, and pexa (tunica)
respectively. Similarly the English, who, as West Saxons, must have first
become known to our ancestors not later than the 6th century, are called not
Sachon but Saeson or Seison. The change of ch into h, much better known in
the Teutonic languages, would also seem to have begun |
|
|
|
|
|
276 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE VI. 277
Neither is probably much later than the 6th century, and the latter was never
pronounced with h, as may be seen from the later form Brockmail. As we may
suppose the Ogam alphabet had only one symbol for ch and h, it was quite
natural for the Ancient Kymry when using Eoman capitals to make h stand for
ch, especially as Latin could not help them out of their difficulty, Latin ch
being not their spirant, but merely an aspirated c like English ch in
public-house. The nearest sound to this last in Early Welsh must have been
that of cc as in Decceti, and this is probably one reason for the. later
spelling Decheti. So when, towards the end of the Brit-Welsh period, the cc
passed into our spirant ch, the digraph ch continued to represent it j so in
the case of th, and ph had to follow suit. There is another ch which must
have occasionally yielded h: for instance, our word croen, ' skin,' must have
gone through the steps crochen, crohen, before assuming its present form, as
may be seen from the Breton hrochen, Ir. crocenn " tergus,"
croicend " pellis," of the same origin probably as O. Norse hryggr,
gen. hryggjar, O. H. Ger. hrucci, Mod. H. Ger. rilcken, O. Eng. hrycg or
hrycc, Mod. Eng. ridge. The book-word creyr, ' a heron,' retains its history
better: in N. Wales it has become cryr, crydd, and cry, while the
Southwalian |
|
|
|
|
|
278 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LBCTtTRE vr. 279
doubt of our coch ' red,' which is also used as an epithet after proper
names: so this inscription probably indicates that re (or rf) had become rch
(or rtK) at a time when cc had not yet became a spirant ch: about the same
time that re became reh no doubt le also became leh. But whether this reaches
sufficiently far back to explain the Ih on the Llanaelhaiarn stone is still
doubtful. The inscription is: ALHORTVSEIMETIACO HIC lACET. It is remarkable
as the only instance which has icieet so written, and not iacit, and as
showing a Latinised nominative in o for the more usual us. If the supposition
that oHh here stands for an earlier ale should turn out to be inadmissible,
it may be regarded as represei^ting ales of the same origin as a\e^- in such
Greek names as!4A.efai/S/)o?, 'AXe^ifievvv, and the like. According to some,
the name is to be read not Alhortus but Ahortus. This is less probable, but
easier to explain; for it would be ' the prototype of our adjective ehorth or
eorth ' active, assiduous.' In any case, the value of the H seems to have
been that of ch spirant. The sum of all this is, that though ch was in all
probability the original and only value of ^,
|
|
|
|
|
|
280 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY, it acquired also that of h before the end of the Brit-Welsh
period, or, more exactly speaking, before the date of the inscriptions
showing Broho and Brohomagli; so that Irish tradition is correct, as far as
it goes, in giving ■•■ the value of h., seeing that the Welsh
themselves, when using Eoman letters, wrote h for both the Welsh spirant ch
and the Latin h. It is next to be observed, that the value of j-yj given as /
is peculiar to Irish, and the result of a phonetic change whereby initial m
in Irish passed through v into f. Thus in Irish we have fin, ' wine,'
corresponding to gmin in Welsh, both borrowed probably from the Latin vinum:
so also in native words, e.g. O. Ir. fnn ' white,' Welsh gwi/n, and many more
of the same kind. The Irish y is found in the oldest manuscript Irish, that
is, of the 8th or the end of the 7th century, but at that time the
pronunciation may possibly have been as yet that of English v, though in
later Irish it was no doubt that of / or pk. Adamnans Life of St. Columba
gives us Virgnous (Fergna) and Vinniano (Finnian). But in our inscriptions we
have no trace of such a change; ' for in them the Ogam in question -y-pp is
invariably treated as the equivalent of Latin v, as for instance on the
stones at Pool Park, Clydai, and Cwm Gloyn. But what was the value of Latin |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE vr. 281 V
consonant? After weighing with some care a good deal written on the subject
lately in this country, I am persuaded that it must have been that of w as in
the English words war, work, well, and the like: the next sound in the order
of probability would, I think, be that of u in the German words quelle,
quick. As to -LLLU-, which is given as q, it is to be noticed that this is
commonly treated as though u were to be supplied; but that cannot be correct,
and -LLLLi is the full representation of the sounds which in Roman letters
are always written Q F in our inscriptions, and never Q only as sometimes
happens in Roman documents. So we have Qvenvendani, Qvenatauci, Maqveragi,
Maqvirini. The Irish seem to have begun rather early to drop the v, and so to
confound qv with c, which became the rule in all later Irish. Thus Irish
inscriptions give us not only the correct genitive Cunagussos, but also a
later Qunagussos, which cannot be correct, as is proved by the O. Welsh
equivalent Cinust. By way of exception, an Irish inscriber who, perhaps,
wished his i-LLU- not to be read as though it were a -'-'-'-'-, took care to
write after it a jjj in the name mn m 1111 H" l llll , i.e., Qweci,
which seems to be the same which occurs as Qvici on the stone taken from
Fardel in Devonshire to the British Museum. This last has |
|
|
|
|
|
282 LECTUEES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTUEE vr. 283 the
q in qv differed to a considerable extent, the one being palatal and the
other guttural or velar, as it is sometimes termed. This would be one reason
why a separate symbol for qv was adopted: another reason would be, that,
possibly, the sound which followed q occurred nowhere but in this
combination, as is the case with the u in quelle and quick in some of the
Grerman dialects — to indicate that it was probably neither +++ nor jjj I
write it v. I am not sure but that I should go further, and say that the
German u in quelle, quick, is historically identical with our v in qv. For
German qu stands for pree-Teutonic gv, which in the Goidelo-Kymric languages,
probably before the separation of the Welsh and the Irish, yielded h as the
result of the V occasioning the replacing of g by the labial. So it is
probable that the v of qv, which produced a precisely similar result ending
in the replacing of qv by p in Gaulish and, later, in Welsh, was exactly the
same sound. The reason why it effected the labialisation of gv sooner than of
qv is that the weaker consonant, the sonant g, could not offer so much
resistance to its influence as the surd in the other combination. The sum of
the foregoing remarks is that the values of the letters of the Ogam alphabet,
as |
|
|
|
|
|
284 LECTUEES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTUKE VI. 285
written: so long a time did it take ch, th, ph to lose their Latin values of
aspirated mutes, and to become the regular symbols for our spirants so
written. The case of _/ is different, as it occurred initially in Brit-Welsh
naines such as fanoni and fannvci. Now Welsh _/ is of threefold origin; it
stands for p preceded by r, and it is sometimes the product of jojo; in both
cases it dates after the transition of qv into JO, and is now mostly written
ph. Elsewhere, that is, when used as an initial, it represents an Aryan sp,
which the Irish have reduced into s; thus from the same origin as O. Norse
spjot, O. H. Grer. spioz, Mod. H. Ger. spiess, ' a spear,' Mr. Stokes derives
our woTd^on, " baculus, hasta," Ir. sonn, ' a stake,' the chief
difference between the Celtic and Teutonic forms being that the latter come
from spud, while the former postulate a nasalised spund. The simplest account
I could give of the Celtic treatment of sp would be the following: Aryan sp
became in Celtic s^, which was further reduced into ^, whereby is here meant
a spirant surd differing from f only in its being pronounced by means of the
two lips and not the teeth and lower lip. In Gaulish it appears asy" in
the supposed Gaulish name Frontu; in Welsh it has been changed into the
labiodental y, which we now write ^, while in Irish it has yielded s. |
|
|
|
|
|
286 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE VI. 287
have not been as yet made to yield us the results which their numerical force
would lead one to expect. On Kymric ground it is otherwise; here only
twenty-three are known, of which twenty-one are still legible to a greater or
less extent; but, on the other hand, their date is far easier approximately
to ascertain; for while only two of the Irish ones are known to be
accompanied by legends in Latin, only two of ours are without such legends,
some merely rendering more or less freely the Ogmic ones, and others
standing, as far as one can now see, in no immediate relation to them, while
in one instance the Ogam and the ordinary letters seem to form but one
inscription. The forms of the Kymric letters used in this last would seem to
warrant our assigning it, roughly, to the 9th century: I allude to the
Llanarth Cross in Cardiganshire. In another instance, namely, the cross in
the Chapel on Caldy Island, the person who wrote on a stone already bearing
an inscription in Ogam, leaves it to be inferred that he recognised the Ogam
as writing: this would also be about the 9th century. But reasons of language
and palaeography appear to point to the 5th and 6th centuries as the period
to which most of them are to be ascribed. If this guess is wide of the truth,
it probably errs in dating them too late rather than too early. It appears
highly probable, for in- |
|
|
|
|
|
288 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE VI. 289
together with the more complete ascendancy of Latin in the same portions of
the island during the Roman occupation, that naturally accounts for the absence
of inscriptions in Ogam in most of England excepting Devonshire. For the
benefit of those who may wish to study the subject of Ogams for themselves, I
may here mention that on those of Ireland they will have to consult the
Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, and the Journal of the Kilkenny
Archceological Society. The Scotch Ogams figure in Stuart's Sculptured Stones
of Scotland, and in the proceedings of various antiquarian societies. The
"Welsh ones will be found discussed in the Archceologia Cambrensis, a
journal started in 1846; they also find their places in Dr. Hiibner's work on
our Christian inscriptions, and Prof. Westwood's forthcoming work entitled
Lapidarium Wallice. In the meantime the following brief account of them will
be found useful: — 1. Denbighshire. — The first stone to be noticed stands in
front of the house at Pool Park, near Ruthin: it is said to have been brought
thither from a barrow on Bryn y Beddau, ' the hill of the graves.' The Latin
legend is perfectly legible, excepting the first three characters of the
first line: — |
|
|
|
|
|
290 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE VI. 291
This is one of the best-preserved Ogams I have seen; but some of the letters
forming the Latin legend are rather faint — the latter reads: TEENACATVS 10
lACIT FILIVS MAGLAGNI. 3, On a cross-inscribed stone at Llanarth, near
Aberayron, we read -'-'-'-'- on the left arm of the cross, and down its shaft
the name Qurhir(e?)t in the ordinary Kymric letters nsual from the 8th to the
10th century. If one reads the Ogam downwards with the name, we have C.
Gurhiret, possibly meaning Croc Gurhiret or Gr.'s Cross: if it is to be read
upwards we have S. Gurhiret, which suggests Sanctus Gurhiret; but I confess I
have never heard of such a saint. 4. At Oapel Mair, in the parish of
Llangeler, not far from Llandyssul, there used to be a stone bearing two
inscriptions. The Ogam has been described to me as reading Deccaibanwalbdis,
and the Latin as being Decabarbalom Filius Brocagni: the first name has also
been given as Decaparbeilom: but not one of these versions is, probably,
quite correct. The stone is supposed to have been wilfully effaced by a
farmer, who thought it induced visitors to trespass; however that may be, the
stone shown me showed no trace of letters of
|
|
|
|
|
|
292 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGT. any kind, but I doubt that I have seen the right one. 5.
Pembrokeshire. — A stone now lying in the Vicar's grounds at St. Dogmael's,
near Cardigan, reads:* — Mi l I /////// I / M i ll i Nii / I '""
mil Sag r a,mn iMaqv i + I' l l 1 11 m i l 1 III I / Mill C u n atam i The
Latin legend is: SAGEANI FILI CVNOTAML Every letter is legible, although the
stone has ' been used as a gate-post, and fractured right through the middle.
6. A stone standing in Bridell churchyard, about a mile from Cilgerran, is
almost singular in its bearing no Latin inscription; however one side is
inscribed with a small cross contained in a circle. The Ogam reads:■ —
t^-^^-^-+tttW/-/////-^/-^-^-+^ N e ttasag|,r uMaqv i + /-fH-L'-L'-fl-fH-H
-H-H-l l ll 11 1 II M u CO i (br?) e c i The only letters, which. I consider
doubtful, are * Where an Ogam continuously written is too long to be printed
in one line a -f is prefixed to the second part, as here. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE VI. 293
those enclosed in parentheses: they may possibly be br, mr, or si; gr has
also been proposed. 7. A stone in the churchyard at Cilgerran reads in Ogam,
which is now very faint: — ^^-SW//-++++-iTm-+-//-w-rm-w-/-+-^-^ Tr e
nagusuMaqv i + /-+-mTT-++w-^- ///// II I ll -Il l I I mil Maqv i tr e n i The
Latin legend, which is in mixed capitals and Kymric letters, is TRENEGUSSI
FILI MACUTRENI HIC lACIT. 8. In Clydai churchyard, in the neighbourhood of
Newcastle Emlyn, there is a stone with a double inscription, but owing to its
top having been trimmed off to receive a sun-dial the Ogam is incomplete —
what is left of it reads: — mi-^-^-im-m-TTm- ■ ■ • -jrr-^-^-m E t
t e r n V 1 o r This, no doubt, stands for Etterni .... Victor, probably
Etterni Maqvi Victor; for the Latin reads: — ETTERNI FILI VICTOR. 9. A stone
at Dugoed Farm, near Clydai, Las on it in Roman capitals: — DOB .... I
[f]ilivs evolengi. |
|
|
|
|
|
2.94 LECTUKES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTUEE VI. 295
take to mean anything; but whether I was right or not, the reading Witaliani
is certain. 11. A stone recently described by Mr. J. K. Allen in the Arch.
Cambrensis (1876, pp, 54, 55), and since examined by me under rather
unfavourable circumstances, is used as a gate-post near the farm-house called
Trefgarn Fach (pronounced in English Truggarn, for Trewgarn, a form to be
compared with Trewdraeth for TrefdraetK), about a mile and a half from
Trefgarn Bridge on the Fishguard and Haverfordwest road. The capitals, make
the following legend: — HOGTIVIS FILI DEMETI. The Ogam consists of one name
only, which seems to be m i l II // '" III! mil 1 1 " N o g t e n e
However, it is right to add that I supply the Ogam for n from a rubbing taken
by Mr Allen, and that I was not convinced that I could detect it^on the stone
when I looked at it; but even in the rubbing the five digits, which were
certainly there, were so faint that Mr. Allen did not think himself warranted
in reproducing them in his woodcut in the Arch. Cam. Further, I read the H of
the ' Latin version as N, as in some other instances: thus two readings are
possible of these |
|
|
|
|
|
296 LECTUEES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE VI. 297 On
the face of the stone there is a cross under which stands the following
inscription in somewhat early Kymric letters: — et singno crucis in illam
fingsi: rogo omnibus ammulantihus ibi exorent pro anima catuoconi. Lately Dr.
Haigh has had the stone removed from the wall, and he finds the Ogam to have
read upwards on both angles near the top of the stone. He supposes the legend
to have been the following; but he acknowledges it to be, however, far from
certain: — / I // Ml I I Mill '" im I I ///// Magol i t eBar II II
H-f- ' I nil — c e n e On the
other face there are crosses, and on the shaft of one of them there are
sundry notches or marks, which remind one to some degree of the cross on the
Dugoed stone near Clydai: in both instances their meaning is unknown. It
would be a matter of no great difficulty to offer an explanation of the names
suggested by Dr. Haigh, but it is not so easy to say in what relation the two
inscriptions stand to one another. But it would not be too much to say that
the inscriber of the Latin recognised the Ogmic digits as writing, otherwise
one cannot see why he began with et. |
|
|
|
|
|
298 LECTURES ON
WELSH PHILOLOGY. |
|
|
|
|
|
LECTURE vr. 299 16.
A stone from Llanwinio was lately traced by Mr. Roberts to Middleton Hall
near Llanarthney, where I have since seen it. The Roman letters are very hard
to read, but they seem to make the following legend: — BLABI FILI BODIBEVE.
Various other readings of the first name have been proposed, and fili has
been read aci and AVI. The Ogam is incomplete owing to the top of the stone
having been cut off and lost: from what remains I infer that it reads up the
two front edges, and commemorates individuals of the Bevi family — this is
what remains of it: — 1 II I III mil I I I "" mil T^ Aww i bodd i
b... ^^TTT^-W B e w w . . . The doubling of the w and d is exceptional, but
compare Etterni on one of the Clydai stones: it is, however, right to say
that one would not think of reading -I-'-'-'- as dd but for the d in the
Latin legend. Now bod would in later Welsh be either bodd or budd, both of
which occur in proper names: the other element occurs in Con-bev-i, which is
in Mod. Welsh Cynfyw. The word ayemi or ami occurs in Irish Ogam in the sense
of grandson, O. Irish due. Whether the first line of the |
Rhan 3 Tudalennau 300-458
www.kimkat.org/amryw/1_testunau/testunau-saesneg_175_welsh-philology_john-rhys_3_1877_0374k.htm
Sumbolau:
a A / æ Æ / e E / ɛ Ɛ / i I
/ o O / u U / w W / y Y /
ā Ā / ǣ Ǣ / ē
Ē / ɛ̄ Ɛ̄ / ī
Ī / ō Ō /
ū Ū / w̄ W̄
/ ȳ Ȳ /
ă Ă / ĕ Ĕ / ĭ Ĭ / ŏ Ŏ / ŭ Ŭ /
ˡ ɑ ɑˑ aˑ a: / æ æ: / e eˑe: / ɛ ɛ: / ɪ
iˑ i: / ɔ oˑ o: / ʊ uˑ u: / ə / ʌ /
ẅ Ẅ / ẃ Ẃ / ẁ Ẁ / ŵ Ŵ /
ŷ Ŷ / ỳ Ỳ / ý Ý / ɥ
ˡ ð ɬ ŋ ʃ ʧ θ ʒ ʤ / aɪ ɔɪ əɪ uɪ ɪʊ
aʊ ɛʊ əʊ / £
ә ʌ ẃ
ă ĕ ĭ ŏ ŭ ẅ ẃ ẁ Ẁ
ŵ ŷ ỳ Ỳ
g
yn 
aith
δ δ
wikipedia, scriptsource. org
Y TUDALEN HWN /THIS PAGE
/ AQUESTA PÀGINA:
www.kimkat.org/amryw/1_testunau/testunau-saesneg_175_welsh-philology_john-rhys_2_1877_0372k.htm
Ffynhonnell / Font
/ Source: archive.org
Creuwyd / Creada/ Created: 11-01-2018
Adolygiadau diweddaraf / Darreres actualitzacions / Latest updates: 30-01-2018, 11-01-2018
Delweddau
/ Imatges / Images:
|
Freefind: |
Ble'r wyf i? Yr ych chi'n ymwéld ag un o dudalennau'r Wefan CYMRU-CATALONIA
On sóc? Esteu visitant una pàgina de la Web CYMRU-CATALONIA (=
Gal·les-Catalunya)
Where am I? You are visiting a page from the CYMRU-CATALONIA (=
Wales-Catalonia) Website
Weə-r äm ai? Yüu äa-r víziting ə peij fröm dhə CYMRU-CATALONIA
(= Weilz-Katəlóuniə) Wébsait