English and Welsh

But these dogs that the prince had driven off were the hounds of Arawn, King of A

A very practical man, with a keen feeling for bright colour, was this Pwyll, or the writer who described him. Can he have been a 'Celt'? He had never heard of the word, we may feel sure; but he spoke and wrote with skill what we now classify as a Celtic language: Cymraeg, which we call Welsh.

That is all that I have to say at this time about the confusion between language (and nomenclature) and 'race'; and the romantic misapplication of the terms Celtic and Teutonic (or Germanic). Even so I have spent too long on these points for the narrow limits of my theme and time; and my excuse must be that, though the dogs that I have been beating may seem to most of those who are listening to me dead, they are still alive and barking in this land at large.

I will turn now to the Celtic language in Britain. But even if I were fully qualified, I should not now be giving a sketch of Celtic philology. I am trying only to indicate some of the points in which this study may offer special attraction to the speakers of English, points which have specially attracted me. So I will pass over 'P and Q': I mean the difficult and absorbing problems that are presented by the linguistic and archaeological evidence concerning the immigrations from the European mainland, co

The first point that I think should be considered is this: the antiquity in Britain of Celtic language. Part of Britain we now call England, the land of the Angles; and yet all the days of the English in it, from Hengest to Elizabeth II, are short on an archaeological scale, short even on a Celtic scale. When our speech-ancestors began their effective linguistic conquests – no doubt much later than their first tentative settlements in such regions as the Sussex coast – in the fifth century a.d. the Celtic occupation had probably some thousand years behind it: a length of time as long as that which separates us from King Alfred.

The English adventure was interrupted and modified, after hardly more than 300 years, by the intrusion of a new element, a different though related variety of Germanic coming from Scandinavia. This is a complication which occurred in historically documented times, and we know a good deal about it. But similar things, historically and linguistically undocumented, though conjectured by archaeology, must have occurred in the course of the celticizing of Britain. The result may be capable of a fairly simple generalization: that the whole of Britain south of the Forth-Clyde line by the first century a.d. shared a British or 'Brittonic' civilization, 'which so far as language goes formed a single linguistic province from Dumbarton and Edinburgh to Cornwall and Kent'. [5] But the processes by which this linguistic state was achieved were no doubt as complicated, differing in pace, mode, and effect, in different areas, as were those of the subsequent process, which has at length achieved a result which 2,000 years hence might be generalized in almost the same terms, though referring to the spread not of 'Brittonic' but of English. (But parts of Wales would have still to be excepted.)

For instance, I do not know what linguistic complications were introduced, or may be thought to have been introduced, by the' Belgic' invasion, interrupted by Julius Caesar's ill-considered and deservedly ill-fated incursion; but they could, I suppose, have involved dialectal differences within Celtic as considerable as those which divided ninth-century Norse from the older Germanic layer which we now call 'Anglo-Saxon' [6]. But 2, 000 years hence those differences which now appear marked and important to English philologists may be insignificant or unrecognizable.

None the less, far off and now obscure as the Celtic adventures may seem, their surviving linguistic traces should be to us, who live here in this coveted and much-contested island, of deep interest, as long as antiquity continues to attract the minds of men. Through them we may catch a glimpse or echo of the past which archaeology alone ca

Of this I may perhaps give an illustration, though it is well known. There stands still in what is now England the ruinous fragment of an ancient monument that we have long called in our English fashion Stonehenge, 'the suspended stones', remembering nothing of its history. Archaeologists with the aid of geologists may record the astonishing fact that some of its stones must certainly have been brought from Pembrokeshire, and we may ponder what this great feat of transport must imply: whether in veneration of the site, or in numbers of the population, or in organization of so-called primitive peoples long ago. But when we find 'Celtic' legend, presumably without the aid of precise geological knowledge, recording in its fashion the carrying of stones from Pembroke to Stonehenge, then we must also ponder what that must imply: in the absorption by Celtic-speakers of the traditions of predecessors, and the echoes of ancient things that can still be heard in the seemingly wild and distorted tales that survive enshrined in Celtic tongues.

The variety of Celtic language that we are at present concerned with was one whose development went on at about the same pace as that of spoken Latin – with which it was ultimately related. The distance between the two was greater, of course, than that separating even the most divergent forms of Germanic speech; but the language of southern Britain would appear to have been one whose sounds and words were capable of representation more Romano in Latin letters less unsatisfactorily than those of other languages with which the Romans came in contact.

It had entered Britain – and this seems to me an important point – in an archaic state. This requires some closer definition. The languages of Indo-European kind in Europe do not, of course, all shift at the same pace, either throughout their organization or in any given department (such as phonetic structure). But there is none the less a general and similar movement of change that achieves successively similar stages or modes.

Of the primitive modes of the major branches – the hypothetical common Indo-European wholly escapes us – we have now no records. But we may use 'archaic' with reference to the states of those languages that arc earliest recorded. If we say that classical Latin, substantially the form of that language just before the begi

That even so limited a record is preserved, at this stage, of any Germanic language, even of one comparatively well advanced in change, [7] is of great importance to Germanic philology. [8] Anything comparable that represented, say, even one of the dialects of Gaul would have profound effects on Celtic philology.

Unfortunately, for departmental convenience in classifying the periods of the individual languages of later times, we obscure this point by our use of 'old' for the earliest period of effective records. Old Welsh is used for the scanty records of a time roughly equivalent to that of the documents of Anglo-Saxon; and this we call Old English.

But Old English and Old Welsh were not on a European basis old at all. English certainly, even when we first meet it in the eighth century, is a 'middle' speech, well advanced into the second stage, though its temporary elevation as a learned and cultured language retarded for a time its movement towards a third. [9] The same might be said for Old Welsh, no doubt, if we had enough of it. Though the movement of Welsh was naturally not the same as that of English. It resembled far more closely the movement of the Romance languages – for example, in the loss of a neuter gender; the early disappearance of declensions contrasted with the preservation in verbs of distinct personal inflexions and a fairly elaborate system of tenses and their moods.

5

Jackson, op. cit., p. 156.

6

The 'Belgic' invasion did not resemble the Scandinavian invasions in routes or points of impact. Actually in these respects it strikingly resembled the invasion of those elements in the 'Anglo-Saxon' immigration to whom the debatable name of 'Jutes' is given.

7

In the days of Ulphilas the language of Scandinavia must have been in many respects far more archaic.

8

Especially aesthetically. In Gothic we are afforded specimens of a real language, and though unfortunately these do not represent its free and natural use, we can perceive in them a language of beautiful and well-ordered word-form, well fitted for the liturgical use to which it was at one time put.

9

The shifts of language naturally do not present sharp boundaries between 'periods', but this second or 'middle' period of English ended in the thirteenth century; after which the third period began. Though this is not the division usually made.