The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain by Oppenheimer Read Free Book Online Page B

change and movement since Roman times.
Britain: direct linguistic evidence
     
    Most of the known recent celtic languages of the island of Britain form a group known as
Brythonic
. As far as Wales and western England are concerned, it is fairly safe to assume that Brythonic celtic languages have been in continuous use since Caesar’s time, and most likely before. Apart from Welsh, Cornish is the only other living Brythonic language on the British mainland. Cornwall (or Kernow) was also known by Romans as Dumnonia and by the Saxons as the Kingdom of the West Welsh. Cornish (Kernowek) was spoken continuously until three hundred years ago. From then it declined, and just before the twentieth century it became extinct. The last monoglot Cornish speaker may have died in 1676, but there were still a number of fluent native speakers available for Lhuyd’s work, and he included the language in his study. As the result of work by a number of enthusiasts in the twentieth century, reconstructedCornish has now made a dramatic revival, with an estimated 3,500 speakers today. Cornish is now officially recognized by the United Kingdom Government as a minority language under the European Charter for such.
    There is good evidence that Brythonic celtic languages, probably South-west Brythonic, were also spoken elsewhere in the West Country, in Devon. After the Romans left, the Kingdom of Cornwall persisted during the Dark Ages.
Other surviving Brythonic remnants
     
    As may already be clear, Breton, the celtic language of Brittany, was no ancient Gaulish remnant stranded on the horn of the Continent (as was mistakenly thought by Pezron) but a Brythonic tongue, closely related to Cornish, which at some point over the past several thousand years moved across the short stretch of water between Britain and Brittany. Evidence for Old Breton, dating from the eighth to the eleventh century AD , can be found in lists and glosses in documents and as names in Latin texts. There is evidence for some borrowing from Gaulish into Breton, which is either an indirect sign of its longevity in Brittany or of the presence of Gaulish so far north and so late. Although not recognized officially by the French Government, Breton has half a million speakers, thus rivalling Welsh as the most flourishing of all the modern celtic languages.
    Another Brythonic language, now extinct, can be fairly safely inferred: Cumbric, which was similar to Welsh. Pictish, formerly spoken in northern Scotland, is claimed to have been Brythonic, but whether this claim covers all languages present there in the first millennium AD , apart from Scottish Gaelic, is still disputed by a few (see below). 21
    Except in Cornwall and Wales, there is little evidence from the spoken word remaining today to support the view that Brythonic languages were spoken throughout England in Roman times. However, even today, remnants can be found of a Brythonic-celtic language previously spoken in Cumbria and elsewhere in north-west England. When I was a child, the only celtic words spoken north of Wales were from dialects of a language closely related to Welsh, known generally as Cumbric. Even now, I can recall my brother being taught by a friend at school how to count from one to twenty in numbers used by North Country shepherds to count their sheep. As far as I remember it went something like this:
yan
,
tan
,
tether
,
mether
,
pimp
(5),
sether
,
hether
,
hother
,
dother
,
dick
(10),
yan dick
,
tan dick
,
tether dick
,
mether dick
,
bumfit
(15)
yana bumfit
,
tana bumfit
,
tetherer bumfit
,
metherer bumfit
,
giggot
(20). Many distinct variants of this sheep-counting system are recorded from the Lake District (Cumbria) and the Pennine Hills, north from the west coast right through to Ayrshire in the western lowlands of Scotland: in Keswick, Westmoreland, Eskdale, Millom, High Furness, Wasdale, Teesdale, Swaledale, Wensleydale and Ayrshire. 22
    This method of counting things in four tallies of five up to