The Welsh Language

A History

Janet Davies

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781783161294
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

The existence of the Welsh-language can come as a surprise to those who assume that English is the foundation language of Britain. However, J. R. R. Tolkien described Welsh as the 'senior language of the men of Britain'. Visitors from outside Wales may be intrigued by the existence of Welsh and will want to find out how a language which has, for at least fifteen hundred years, been the closest neighbour of English, enjoys such vibrancy, bearing in mind that English has obliterated languages thousands of miles from the coasts of England. This book offers a broad historical survey of Welsh-language culture from sixth-century heroic poetry to television and pop culture in the early twenty-first century. The public status of the language is considered and the role of Welsh is compared with the roles of other of the non-state languages of Europe. This new edition of The Welsh Language offers a full assessment of the implications of the linguistic statistics produced by the 2011 Census. The volume contains maps and plans showing the demographic and geographic spread of Welsh over the ages, charts examining the links between words in Welsh and those in other Indo-European languages, and illustrations of key publications and figures in the history of the language. It concludes with brief guides to the pronunciation, the dialects and the grammar of Welsh.

1

The Origins of Welsh

The Indo-European family of languages

The Welsh language, like most of the languages of Europe, and many of those of Asia, has evolved from what linguists term Indo-European. Indo-European was spoken at least 6,000 years ago (4,000 BC) by a semi-nomadic people who lived perhaps in the steppe region of southern Russia, or perhaps in Anatolia. (Anatolian personal names with Indo-European associations have been found in Assyrian texts of the twentieth century BC.)

COGNATE INDO-EUROPEAN WORDS

WELSH	LATIN	ENGLISH	SANSKRIT
ieuanc	juvenis	young	yuvan­
dant	dens	tooth	danta­
tenau	tenuis	thin	tanas
gweddw	vidua	widow	mi vidhava
tri	tres	three	trayas

Speakers of the language migrated eastwards and west­wards; they had reached the Danube valley by 3,500 BC and India by 2,000 BC. The dialects of Indo-European became much differentiated, chiefly because of migration, and evolved into separate languages. So great was the variety among them that it was not until 1786 that the idea was put forward that a family of Indo-European languages actually exists. In the twenty-first century, Indo-European languages are spoken in a wide arc from Bengal to Portugal, as well as in countries as distant as New Zealand and Canada, to which they have been carried by more recent emigrants. The Indo-European family is generally considered to consist of nine different branches, which in turn gave rise to daughter languages. Welsh evolved from the Celtic branch, as did its sister languages – Breton, Cornish, Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx – although it was not until 1853 that the Celtic languages were fully accepted as members of the Indo-European family.

The present extent of Indo-European languages
in Europe and Asia

The Celts

The Celts were perhaps the first Indo-European people to spread across Europe. It is widely believed that a material culture specifically associated with the Celts originated in the eastern Alps in the eighth century BC, but that area was not necessarily the wellspring of the Celtic language. There are those who believe that Celtic had its origins along the Atlantic seaboard, and that it seeped into much of Europe in the wake of the vigor­ous economy of the late Bronze Age. The great variety of views held about the origin of Celtic makes it necessary for any statements on the subject to be hedged around with doubts and qualifications. As Barry Cunliffe put it: ‘Specialized works should only be approached by those of a resilient disposition.’

Genetic studies may offer further evidence, but the vicious theories that have been underpinned by simplistic accounts of prehistoric linguistic origins have made many scholars reluctant to rely upon biological archaeology.

However, it can be stated with confidence that by the later Iron Age, Celtic speakers were widely present in Spain, Britain, Ireland, Gaul, Germany, Italy, the Danube Basin and in parts of Anatolia. They left their mark upon the place-names of Europe. The names of the rivers Rhône, Rhine and Danube are Celtic, as are those of the cities of London, Paris and Vienna. Gallipoli on the shores of the Dardanelles is the city of the Gauls or the Celts, and there is a town called Bala (a Celtic word meaning the efflux of a river from a lake) in the heart of Anatolia in modern Turkey. Linguists identify at least four forms of Celtic spoken on the European mainland and in Asia Minor in the last centuries of the pre-Christian era – the Galatian of central Anatolia, the Gallo-Brittonic of Gaul and much of Britain, the Celtiberian of Spain (where other Celtic languages may also have been spoken) and the Lepontic and perhaps the Cisalpine Gaulish of northern Italy.

COGNATE CELTIC WORDS

WELSH	BRETON	IRISH	GAELIC
tŷ (house)	ti	teach	tigh
ci (dog)	ki	cu	cu
du (black)	du	dubh	dubh
cadair (chair)	kador	cathaoir	cathair
gwin (wine)	gwin	fion	fion

The Brittonic language

The language introduced into Britain was similar to that spoken in Gaul; indeed, the Celtic speech of Gaul and Britain at the dawn of the historic era can be considered as one language, frequently referred to as Gallo-Brittonic. A different form of Celtic – Goidelic – became dominant in Ireland and, in later centuries, in Scotland and the Isle of Man. Goidelic, the ancestor of Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx, is known as Q-Celtic, because it retained the kw sound of Indo-European, writing it as q and later as c. In Gallo-Brittonic, the ancestor of Welsh, Breton and Cornish, the kw developed into p, and Gallo-Brittonic is there­fore known as P-Celtic. The distinction is apparent in the Irish ceann and Welsh pen (head). The distinguished Irish historian Myles Dillon argued that Celtic speakers reached Britain and Ireland as early as 2,000 BC, but the most generally held opinion tends to date their arrival to the centuries following 600 BC. Of the forms of Celtic outside Britain and Ireland, Galatian had been supplanted by others of the languages of Anatolia – Greek in particular – by the beginning of the Christian era; the Lepontic of northern Italy and the Celtiberian and other possible Celtic languages of Spain succumbed to Latin some­what later. Gaulish proved more resilient; by about AD 550, however, the Gaulish speakers of eastern Gaul had been over­whelmed by German speakers and, over most of the rest of the country, Gaulish had been replaced by Latin. Some Gaulish influence may have survived in Brittany, but the existence of the Breton language is largely the result of migration to Brittany from Britain over a period extending from about AD 450 to about 650.

WORDS OF LATIN ORIGIN IN WELSH

WELSH	LATIN
pont (bridge)	pons
eglwys (church)	ecclesia
lleng (legion)	legio
ystafell (room)	stabellum
trawst (joist)	transtrum
bresych (cabbage)	brassica

The impact of Rome

The Romans invaded Britain in AD 43 and, by about AD 70, those parts of the island which were to be England, Wales and southern Scotland formed the Roman province of Britannia. Latin became the language of law and administration, but Brittonic continued to be spoken by the mass of the population, especially in the western parts of the island. The citi...