Likewise, habēna ‘rein’ and historia are behind Welsh afwyn ‘rein’ and ystyr ‘meaning’, while hospes ‘guest’ is the Latin root of ysbyty ‘hospital’. Yet in Welsh too, Latin hōra developed into the H-less awr. This is how hōra ‘hour’ has become Italian ora. We know from the written record that the consonant /h/ (as in English hat) was lost from Latin words at an early point. Did Latin therefore inspire the Welsh rule, as well as donating words that it affected? Granted, we cannot rule out the possibility of two separate developments of prothesis, but I think that from the evidence of Latin loanwords like ysgol, we may assume that British Latin too had this rule of vowel addition that we see in Romance.Īnother feature of Latin loanwords in Welsh is that they don’t seem to have come with their H’s still attached. In fact, Welsh displays this addition of y- even for words that once started /sC/ but are not of Latin origin, such as ysgwydd ‘shoulder’. The Main Arts Building of Bangor’s prifysgol – university, or prīma schola in Latin. The first three of the words above have the Welsh counterparts ysgol, ystad and ystafell. The thing is, Welsh loanwords from Latin show it too. Since we find this phenomenon across French, Catalan and Spanish (and Italian used to have it too), we can assume that the rule has early origins in the Late Latin period, when the different Romance dialects were yet to emerge. A well-known case of this comes from the Romance languages, in which we see how a vowel was added to words in Latin that began with /s/ (as in English sun) followed by another consonant. Prothesis is a sound change, in which a new sound over time is added to the beginning of a word or set of words. What can Welsh tell us about what British Latin, spoken in southern Britain c. This piece looks at seven features that will together provide my answer to the following question: In particular, my target is British Latin immediately after the end of imperial governance, when it was perhaps at its geographical peak. This route back to British Latin helpfully avoids the complications of written sources.ĭiscussing what we can learn about British Latin from the languages it had influences on, namely Welsh, is my task today. From its lasting silhouette, we may identify some specific features of the Latin spoken by ordinary people based in Roman Britain, since presumably it was these people who were transferring words from one language into the other. I’ve written previously about the great legacy of Latin within Welsh words, but only briefly touched on what kind of Latin the Pre-Welsh language was in contact with. This was the main Celtic language in Britain in those ancient days, and it would become Breton, Cornish and Welsh. One way in which British Latin left a big impression was in the development of Brythonic. For an article that exemplifies this, I recommend Schrijver’s The Rise and Fall of British Latin (2002). Where then does our evidence for British Latin come from? It comes indirectly, from seeing its influences on other languages and from trying to fill in the gaps in the story of language in Britain. Distinctive features in this Latin may not necessarily be British- isms.Ī letter from Octavius to Candidus, from Vindolanda. Besides, sources like the Vindolanda letters come from a military context, and the Roman army was a multinational and multilingual organisation, conscripting and moving soldiers around the empire. Writing has its own rules, and may not accurately reflect everyday language, sticking instead to an expected formal, perhaps archaic register. Furthermore, texts like the Vindolanda tablets and the Bath curse tablets are amazing and insightful, but they are not unproblematic sources for the analysis of a distinctly British Latin. I don’t hold this opinion because of lots of direct evidence our sources for Latin of this era in Britain are minimal. However, in Britain, popular Latin was not to endure, since the incoming Angles and Saxons would upset the linguistic lie of the land. Elsewhere, Latin would over time produce the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Catalan, Italian and so on). I disagree with the alternative view that the Romans brought Latin to Britain and then took it all home with them, leaving the barbarian Britons none the wiser. This is to say, at least in the south of what is now England, Latin had become the majority mother tongue of the population, just as it had on the Continent. 410 AD), Latin had become a common language of the population of Britain. One opinion I, as a linguist, hold is that by the end of the official Roman administration of Britain ( c.
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