THE LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF BRITTANY. 77 



brat means a cloth, a cloak, or a sail, and hrattan a little cloak. *'It 

 would then appear that the word Brython and its congeners meant 

 a clothed or clotii-clad peo])]e." "Who then," he asks, " were the 

 people whom the Brythons did not consider cloth-clad, or properly 

 cladl They could hardly have been Celts of any kind, as the art of 

 making cloth of some sort was known even to the earliest of them 

 that ever landed here. They were probably some of the aboriginal 

 tribes whose country they, i.e. the Brythons, invaded on the con- 

 tinent."* The Bretons give to themselves the appellation Breiziaded, 

 and to their language the appellation Brizonek. England has among 

 them the name BroZaos, the Saxon land; and France bears the 

 name Bro-Chals, the land of Gaul. The word hro which is thus 

 employed is the Gaelic bree, and is to be found in hruthaich, a hill. 

 Breiz veur is the name which the Bretons apply to Great Britain. 

 Their own province bears the name Breiz vihan. Upper Brittany is 

 known among them by the designation Breiz uchel, or Gorre vreiz ; 

 and Lower Brittany by the designation Breiz isel, Gmelled vreiz. 



The Welsh, the Cornish and the Breton form the Cymric family 

 of the Celtic languages. Armorica, which is another name for 

 Brittany, reveals its etymology at a glance, signifying as it does a 

 country that borders on the sea, and exhibiting an unmistakable 

 resemblance to the Gaelic words air muir, or air a' mhuir, on the sea. 

 In Welsh, Brittany bears the name Llydaw ; the people of Brittany 

 are known as Llydawiad, and the language of Brittany is known by 

 the designation Llydawaeg . 



The Bretons and their language date from a very remote antiquity. 

 Niebuhr thus writes : — "The Venetians were a Belgic tribe, and so, 

 without doubt, were all the inhabitants of Lower Brittany, whose 

 Cimbric character seemed so evident in the time of the Romans, 

 when all the country round about was peopled by Gaels, that a late 

 immigration from Britain was invented to explain it. The Celts 

 occupied tli(5 extent of country from Lusitania in Spain to the country 



about the Tanais in the East At an earlier period the 



Cymri inhabited a much greater part of Gaul. In Lower Brittany 

 alone they maintained themselves against the invading Celts, while 

 Normandy and the other countries were conquered by the Gael."t 



* Celtic Britain, pp. 207-210. 



t History of Rome, Vol. 2, p. 522. Ethnography and Geography, Vol. 2, p. 304. 



