

WELSH LANQUA-.r \M> LITERATURE. 



WT.I.SH LANGUAGE AND I.1TKUATUKE. 



-i- 



print It would appear, therefore, that while in the reign of Queen Klir.v 

 beth, the Lowlands of Scotland spoke a language diitinct from Kngliah ai 

 evidenced in the printed work* of Knox, th Highland! spoke a Ian 

 . guage identical with Irish, an evidenced by the translation of K mix's 

 Liturgy, and that while the language of the Lowlands has gradually 

 assimilated to that of England, the language of the Highlands has 

 gradually separated from that of Ireland. A similar process of disin- 

 tegration appears to be still going on with tin- Iriah language in Ire- 

 land itself a separate version of the New Testament in the dialect of 

 Munster was issued in 1858, and it is not improbable, therefore, that 

 in the 20th century, there may be a larger number of Celtic languages 

 stated to be in existence than in the mh. The dialects of Irish vary 

 so much, that it is said that Irishmen from different provinces who 

 are acquainted even imperfectly with English, often (make use of 

 Kngliah in conversation with each other. An Irish clergyman, who 

 had been a missionary to Shang Had, informed us that he had been 

 a witness to the use of English as the most convenient medium of 

 intercourse by the natives of different provinces in Ireland, and the 

 natives of different provinces in Chins, Campion, an English writer 

 of the year 1571, says, that " the true Irish indeede differeth so much 

 from that they commonly speake, that scarce one among five-score 

 can either write, read, or understand it." The Gaelic is now itself 

 divided into two dialects, which seem to have a tendency to diverge 

 more and more. Forms of speech which are frequent in the version of 

 the Scriptures printed in 1801, are not found in the curious collection 

 of Gaelic stories taken down from the lips of Highland narrators, and 

 published by Mr. Campbell of Islay in 1861, one of the most careful 

 records of oral language in existence. The so-called Manks language 

 is a kind of corrupted Gaelic, more different to the eye than the ear, 

 from being written in a less artificial system of spelling. The system 

 of " orthography " of Irish and Gaelic is so excessively complex and 

 difficult, that those who speak them are often unable to read them 

 even when they have learned to read English. 



The three forms of the Gaelic branch of the Celtic family of languages 

 are thus intelligible with a little trouble to any person who is a thorough 

 master of one ; but this is not the case with the three forms of the 

 other branch. The affinity between Welsh and Bos-Breton is much less 

 than has been sometimes asserted. The best evidence on this point is 

 that of the Rev. Thomas Price, a distinguished Webb scholar, who made a 

 tour through Brittany in the summer of 1829. " I may," he says (' Cam- 

 brian Quarterly Magazine,' vol. ii. p. 197), "be asked a question which 

 I should myself have proposed to another upon a similar occasion, had 

 I never visited Brittany, and that is, if the Welsh and Breton languages 

 bear so near a resemblance to each other as is generally understood, 

 where was the necessity of having recourse to the French as a medium 

 of communication ? Why not converse with the Bretons in the Welsh 

 at once T To this I answer that, notwithstanding the many assertions 

 which have been made respecting the natives of Wales and Brittany 

 being mutually intelligible through the medium of their respective 

 languages, I do not hesitate to say that the thing is utterly impossible; 

 single words in either language will frequently be found to have corre- 

 sponding terms of a similar sound in the other, and occasionally a short 

 sentence deliberately pronounced may be partially intelligible, but as 

 to holding a conversation, that is totally out of the question." 



One of the earliest and most valuable books of research and infor- 

 mation on the Celtic languages in general is the ' Archscologia Britaunica, 

 giving some account additional to what has been hitherto published of 

 the languages, histories, and customs of the original inhabitants of Great 

 Britain, from collections and observations in travels through Wales, 

 Cornwall, Bas-Bretague, Ireland, and Scotland, by Edward Lhuyd, 

 M.A., of Jesus College, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.' 

 The first volume, a closely printed folio on ' Glossography ' appeared 

 in 1707, and was never followed by a second, the continuation of the 

 work being prevented by the death of the author in 1 709. Lhuyd 

 had travelled in all the Celtic countries to collect materials, and 

 was only driven from Brittany by the outbreak of Marlborough's war. 

 He unfortunately adopted a peculiar system of orthography for the 

 Welsh, and took a singular whim of displaying his knowledge of Irish 

 and Cornish, by writing prefaces in Irish and Cornish to parts of his 

 book; the first of which is censured by Irish scholars as full of sole- 

 cisms, and the second was a 'sealed book,' till portions of it were 

 lately translated into English by Mr. Edwin Norris. But his work com- 

 prises a valuable comparative collection of vocabularies, and a large 

 body of miscellaneous information on the manuscript literature of the 

 Celtic languages, T<miUr to the information on the northern languages 

 which was brought together by his friend Dr. Hickes in 1705, in the 

 celebrated ' Linguanitn Septentrionalium Thesaurus.' Lhuyd left 

 behind him a large collection of manuscript materials for the con- 

 tinuation of his work, which have unfortunately perished by three 

 separate accidental fires in London and Wales. The next student of 

 Celtic on an equally extensive scale appears to have been the famous 

 and infamous Eugene Aram, who refers to the subject in an auto- 

 biographical letter written in 1759, while he was in confinement in 

 York Castle, not long before his trial and execution. " I investigated the 

 Celtic," says Aram, " as far as possible in all its dialects ; begun collec- 

 tions, and made comparisons between that, the English, the Latin, the 

 Greek, and even the Hebrew. I had made notes and compared above 

 three thousand of these together, and found such a surprising affinity, 



even beyond my expectation or conception, that I was determined t > 

 proceed through the whole of all these languages and form a com- 

 parative lexicon, which I hoped would account for numberless vocables 

 in use with us, the Latins, and Greeks, before concealed and unobserved. 

 This, or something like it, was the design of a clergyman of great 

 erudition in Scotland, but it must prove abortive, for he died before he 

 rxectited it, and most of my books and papers are now scattered and 

 lost.'' This laurel was not destined for a Hritish head. Nearly a 

 hmi.lied years later, in 186S, appeared at Leipsic the most important 

 contribution yet made to Celtic philology, the ' Grammatica ( ' 

 i>f l'r< .fessor Johann Caspar Zeuss of Bamberg, who had devoted 

 thirteen years to the necessary preliminary studies. The book, which 

 extends to two volumes, comprising more than eleven hundred pages, 

 embraces a grammar of the Celtic languages in a mass, the Irish, 

 Welsh, Cornish, Annorican, and ancient Gaulish, constructed on an 

 unusual plan. The author takes the parts of speech separate; 

 the languages one after the other, trailing, for instance, the art 

 Irish, in Welsh, in Cornish, ftc., before he proceeds to examine tho 

 substantive in any one of those languages. As in some other German 

 works on philology, the method of treatment is laborious and mi.it 

 tractive, wanting in generalisation, and calculated to repel all but the 

 determined student. The author adopted the medium of Latin as the 

 general language of the learned, but his Latin is unfortunately the 

 reverse of elegant. The value of the work, which is great, consixts 

 in the minute and careful scrutiny to which Zcuss has subject 

 manuscript materials for a knowledge of the early state of the Celtic 

 languages, which are scattered in the libraries of England and the 

 continent, and which he for the first time brought together. These 

 materials mostly consist of ' Glosses,' or translations of single words 

 or passages in the margins, or between the lines of old Latin copies 

 of the classics. Specimens of intnl.ii> .uy Welsh of this kind are 

 to be found in a manuscript of Eutychius and Ovid in the Bodleian 

 Library at Oxford, of the conclusion of the 8th or commencement 

 of the 9th century, while the ' Black Book of Caernarvon,' and 

 the ' Red Book of Hergest," the oldest manuscripts of unbroken 

 Welsh, are ascribed by the best judges to the iL'th niul the 1-lth 

 centuries, and are thus later in date by no less than four and six 

 hundred years. A steady light was also thrown by Zeuss on the 

 ancient Irish from study of the ' Glosses ' in manuscript, which 

 lay unnoticed in the libraries of Germany and Italy ; in some cases, as 

 in the library of St. Gall in Swit/erlnml, founded by the Irish monks 

 who converted the Swiss to Christianity, buried and forgotten for a 

 thousand years. The suggestion which he threw out that .1 minute 

 examination of the manuscripts in English and Irish libraries might 

 probably lead to the discovery of further stores of the same kind 

 has already borne its fruits in the discoveries made by Stokes at 

 Dublin, and Bradshaw at Cambridge, and in all probability much still 

 remains to be dug out. Zeuss himself was unfortunately lost to 

 science by his premature death in 1856, at the age of fifty. In an 

 interesting biographical sketch of him by his learned countryman, 

 Dr. Siegfried, now of Dublin, in the ' Ulster Journal of Archfeology," 

 for 1859, his illness is ascribed to over study. 



A great and striking merit of Zeuss's laborious work, and one which 

 makes its publication an epoch in Celtic studies is/rthat it presents a 

 total contrast in its tone and spirit to that which had too lung 

 prevailed in this branch of investigation. The students who follow 

 the track opened in the ' Gmmmatica Celtica ' have no pleasant path 

 before them it leads amid " Glosses," and other such literature an 

 only the severest philologists can tolerate and none can relish but 

 their footing is on firm dry ground. Zeuss is not indeed averse to 

 speculation any more than his German colleagues in general, one of his 

 views being that Irish and Welsh were identical not long before the 

 invasion of Caesar, as Irish and Gaelic were identical a few hundred 

 years ago. But there is a wide difference between such views as these, 

 open to discussion as they are, and the wild hallucinations to which 

 Celtic scholars have been too often subject Pezron, the Breton in- 

 vestigator, maintained in 1703, in perfect good faith, that Welsh and 

 Breton, which he considered the same language, had been " the lan- 

 guage of the Titans, that is, the language of Saturn, Jupiter, and the 

 other principal gods of heathen antiquity." The Rev. Joseph Harris, 

 a respectable Baptist minister of Swansea, editor of the ' Seren Gomer,' 

 observed in 1814, very gravely, that " it is supposed by some, and no 

 one can disprove it, that Welsh was the language spoken by Adam and 

 Eve in Paradise ; and if so, what can be more natural than to suppose 

 that it will be the language of the celestial Paradise where all the 

 nations of the earth shall be of one tongue." Unluckily for the force 

 of his observation, not only has tho honour of being the language of 

 Paradise been positively claimed for other languages for Basque by 

 several authors, for Dutch by (ioropius Becanus, for Gaelic by Mr. 

 Maclean, author of a ' History of the Celtic Language,' in 1840 

 there is a Welsh tradition, unknown to Mr. Harris, which expressly 

 states that Welsh was not the language of Paradise, but th. 

 language spoken out of it. The Kev. John Williams ab Ithel, editor 

 of the 'Cambrian Journal ' for the Cambrian Institute, in his preface 

 in an ancient grammar of Edeyrn, which he edited in 1856 for the 

 Welsh Manuscript Society, speaks in a tone of assent of the as.- 

 that there are only three languages of divine origin, that of Adam, that 

 of Moses, and the Welsh ; and also of an assertion grounded on bardic 



