819 



WELSH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. 



WELSH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. 



850 



tradition respecting the word by which the world was created, and its 

 embodiment in the first letter of the ancient Welsh alphabet. Passages 

 like these, which are but too common in the works of some Celtic 

 scholars, have had the effect of disgusting many with the study o: 

 Celtic antiquities. 



Some of the more important conclusions to which Zeuss's researches 

 conduct, are embodied by Mr. Edwin Norris, of the Foreign Office 

 in the valuable observations on the Cornish language, appended to his 

 edition of the remains of the ' Ancient Cornish Drama,' printed at the 

 University Press at Oxford in 1859. " The superior antiquity of the 

 Irish over the British language is now," says Mr. Norris, "scarcely 

 doubted ; it is seen as well in their grammatical as in their glossariai 

 relations. The declension of the Irish noun is even yet in existence, 

 and it is shown with much probability to have been closely allied to 

 that of the oldest Indo-European forms at an early period ; of the 

 British, the only remnant left is a Cornish genitive, and a scarcely 

 discernible trace in Welsh." He then produces several instances in 

 which, as in teayh and ti, Irish and Welsh for " a house," and nochd 

 and not, Irish and Welsh for " night," letters are dropped in Welsh 

 that remain in Irish, and argues for the greater antiquity of the fuller 

 form. " It may look like the partiality of an editor," he continues, " to 

 ascribe a greater antiquity to Cornish than to Welsh, in the face of the 

 universally adverse opinion, but the writer confesses that he is inclined 

 to consider the Cornish the older of the two ; " and he gives his grounds 

 for so doing, principally founded on the fact that it is shown by the 

 glosses produced by Zeuss, that " in the 8th century Welsh had Cornish 

 forms and words which were lost or altered in the 12th." From these 

 premises Mr. Norris infers that " Cornish is the representative of a 

 language once current over South Britain at least." If these views be 

 correct, the Welsh will lose then 1 claim to the honour they have so 

 long retained of being considered the representatives of the " Ancient 

 Britons." 



A good comparative dictionary of the Celtic languages would be 

 an acquisition to philology, and is much required. The Rev. Robert 

 Williams, of Llangadwaladr, author of the ' Lives of Eminent Welsh- 

 men,' announced in 1860 that he had completed a labour of the kind, 

 the publication of which would be commenced as soon as a sufficient 

 number of subscribers could be obtained. One of the publications of 

 Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte supplies material for a comparison of 

 the different dialects not otherwise attainable. It is entitled ' The 

 Celtic Hexapla' (London, 1858, 4to), and comprises the Song of Solo- 

 mon in eight languages, which are all presented to view at the opening 

 of any page French and English, Irish and Welsh, Gaelic and Manx, 

 Breton of the ordinary form, and Breton of the dialect of Vannes. 

 The two latter translations were first printed in this volume ; the others 

 are taken from the authorised versions. 



The degree of prevalence of the ancient Celtic element in Europe, 

 the area over which the various dialects were spoken, and the remains 

 of them which may be still traced out, is a subject upon which much 

 has been written, but which still awaits its Zeuss. It is however an 

 antiquarian subject alone ; it is certain that no Celtic language is now 

 spoken on the continent beyond the limits of Brittany. The Basque 

 of the Pyrenees, so often asserted to belong to the Celtic family, is as 

 distinct, both in words and construction, as can well be imagined. The 

 notion of Dr. Owen Pughe that the Wendish of Lusatia was a language 

 akin to Welsh, is as wide of the mark as the strange notion which 

 found its way by a series of blunders into Adelung's ' Mithridates,' 

 that a Celtic dialect was spoken at Maldon in Essex. The small value 

 of Dr. Owen's statements on such a subject is shown by his declara- 

 tion hi the preface to the edition of Llywarch Hen, published in 

 1792, that he had "a collection of evidence sufficient to convince as 

 great sceptics as any that will see this" that "the Nadowesses, a 

 people west of the Mississippi in America, known to the Indian 

 traders by the name of the civilised Indians and the Welsh Indians, 

 do now actually speak the Welsh language." "These people," he 

 confidently added, " are the descendants of the emigration under the 

 conduct of Madog ab Owain Gwynedd in the year 1170." The remains 

 of the extinct Celtic languages of the continent are singularly scanty. 

 A few scattered words are all that is preserved of the speech of ancient 

 Gaul the language that prevailed in France at the time that Cicero 

 wrote in Italy. These words bear so close a resemblance to those of 

 the same meaning in Welsh, as to justify the assumption that there was 

 little distinction between the dialects of France and England at the 

 earliest dawn of history. Whether we ought to believe that the 

 "Celts" who are mentioned by different writers of antiquity hi 

 different parts of Europe were all closely connected with one another, 

 or all even rightly named, is a perplexing question. The most reliable 

 evidence now attainable on the subject appears to be that of the names 

 of places, and these must be very cautiously sifted. Dr. R. G. Latham 

 reminds philologists that there is no connection beyond a mere resem- 

 blance in name between Gallicia in Spain and Galicia in Poland. 

 A large collection of materials of this kind has been amassed by 

 Dieffenbach in his ' Celtica,' and a work on the subject by Contzen, 

 ' Die Wanderung der Kelten,' which received a prize from the Academy 

 of Munich in 1856, has (iu 1861) just issued from the press. 



The question of the affinity of the Celtic languages to the other 

 language* of the world is one that has given rise to considerable debate 

 since the epoch that was made in comparative philology by the intro- 

 AIIT3 AXD SCI. DIV. VOL. VIII. 



duction of the study of Sanskrit, about the commencement of the 19th 

 century. In preceding centuries Welsh had been often compared with 

 Hebrew. "It is commonly observed," says Llewellyn in his 'His- 

 torical and Critical Remarks on the British Tongue,' " that the British 

 and the Hebrew are similar languages," on the ground of their being 

 alike in many peculiarities of construction, especially in permutation 

 or the change incident to several letters in the beginning of words, 

 and also in the paucity and confusion of tenses in the conjugation of 

 verbs, and in the binding together in one word of some prepositions 

 and pronouns. This degree of resemblance is certainly not sufficient 

 to place the Welsh and the other Celtic languages in the Semitic family, 

 but in these respects it does resemble the Hebrew and differ from the 

 Greek and Latin, which form a portion of the Indo-European family to 

 which it is now adjudgeoVto belong. The Indo-European family, or 

 rather tribe, is now so extended that it comprises many languages 

 formerly regarded as entirely disjoined, such as Greek and Persian, 

 Russian and English, while the Semitic only comprises a very small 

 circle of languages bearing a close resemblance to each other a circle, 

 in fact, no larger than that of the Celtic family alone. 



The history of the controversy is an instructive one. For the first 

 thirty years of the 19th century the Celtic languages were supposed, 

 to quote the words of the Rev. Richard Garnett, " to form a class 

 apart, and to have no connection whatever with the great Indo- 

 European stock. This was strongly asserted by Colonel Vans Kennedy, 

 and also maintained, though in more guarded terms, by Bopp, Pott, and 

 Schlegel. The researches of Dr. Prichard in his ' Eastern Origin of 

 the Celtic Nations,' and of Professor Pictet of Geneva, in his truly 

 able work, ' Sur 1'Affinite' des langues Celtiques avec le Sanscrit," may be 

 considered as having settled the question the other way. The demon- 

 stration of Pictet is so complete, that the German scholars who had 

 previously denied the connection, now fully admit it, and several of 

 them have written elaborate treatises, showing more affinities between 

 Celtic and Sanscrit than perhaps really exist." The work of Dr. 

 Prichard, himself a Welshman, is entitled ' The Eastern Origin of the 

 Celtic Nations proved by a comparison of their dialects with the Sanskrit, 

 Greek, Latin, and Teutonic Languages.' The first edition appeared in 

 1831 ; a second, with extensive and important additions by Dr. R. G. 

 Latham, in 1857. On the subject of the Celtic languages in the 

 British Islands, there are some valuable and really instructive papers by 

 the Rev. R. Garnett, in the ' Quarterly Review,' and the ' Transactions 

 of the Philological Society,' which are collected in the posthumous 

 volume of his ' Philological Essays,' edited in 1859 by his son. 



The Welsh language is one of the oldest in Europe : the Irish and 

 Welsh are in fact among spoken languages the most ancient of 

 which any written monuments are preserved, unless we regard the 

 modern as identical with the ancient Greek. The Welsh has poems 

 now in existence, the origin of which is believed by the beat critics to 

 date back to the 6th century, to a period little after the time when 

 the Romans left the country, in which of course, while they held 

 it, the dominant language was Latin. It is true that Zeuss has 

 shown that the language of these poems, when originally composed, 

 must have differed in a considerable degree from that of the form in 

 which they are preserved to us, and that one of the most learned 

 Welshmen of a century ago, the Rev. Evan Evans, says in his ' Speci- 

 mens of the Bards,' published in 1763, that he had shown the most 

 genuine remains of Taliesin to the best Welsh antiquaries and scholars 

 then living, and that " they all confessed they did not understand one 

 half of any of his pieces." It is true also that Price, in his ' Hanes 

 Cymru,' a book intended for ordinary readers, found it necessary to 

 jive a modern Welsh version of an ancient Welsh poem, which he 

 quoted from Gwalchmai, a bard of the 12th century, who is said to 

 have accompanied Cocur de Lion to the Crusades. Still from about 

 the Norman conquest downwards, there exists a mass of literary matter 

 in a language which is readily intelligible to those who are acquainted 

 with the modern Welsh after a slight degree of study. A similar 

 observation is perhaps applicable to no other living European language 

 :xcept the Icelandic. The language of the Saxon contemporaries of 

 Taliesin has been a dead language for centuries, and even in the time 

 of Gwalchmai the present English was as yet unborn. 



The Welsh has long been an object of study to those who speak it. 

 ' There are," says Owen Pughe (' Archooologia,' xiv. 220), " about 

 thirty different old treatises on Welsh grammar and prosody preserved. 

 Of these, one is particularly deserving of notice as a curious relic : it 

 was composed by Geraint about 880, revised by Einiou about 1200, and 

 again by Edeyrn about the year 1270, and regularly privileged by the 

 different sovereigns who then exercised authority in Wales." This work 

 was first printed by the Welsh Manuscript Society in 1856, under the 

 editorship of the Rev. John Williams ab Ithel. A portion of a grammar 

 which appeared in 1567, from the pen of Griffith Roberts, and of which 

 mention will be made hereafter as remarkable on other accounts, is 

 remarkable also as containing some proposals on the subject of Welsh 

 orthography of an ingenious character, which were not however adopted. 

 Two Latin grammars of the language followed, the ' Cambrobrytan- 

 nicjc Linguae Rudirnenta ' of Dr. David Rhys, in 1592, and the ' Antiquse 

 jinguse Britannicse mine communiter dicta) Cambro-Britannicas Rudi- 

 menta' of Dr. John Davies, in 1621, both of them much esteemed. 

 There are now several grammars of the Welsh language in English, of 

 hich that bv the Rev. Thomas Rowland, the second edition of which 



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