Reference on Numbers of Saxons

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

In a message dated 12/3/00 3:45:11 PM Mountain Standard Time,
roz-frank at uiowa.edu writes:

>Can anyone provide other bibliographic references concerning this
>shepherd's counting vocabulary?

-- article in the July edition of _British Archaeology_, to which the
following reply was made in the October issue (#48):

"The Brythonic branch of Celtic spoken in Britain at the time of the
Anglo-Saxon settlement subsequently divided into three branches - Breton,
Cornish and Welsh. Had the sheep-counting numerals been an independent
survival from the P-Celtic speech of northern Britain, they might be expected
to retain aspects of the original system. The inclusion in the sheep-counting
scores of features which, although occurring in Modern Welsh, are not found
in the cognate Celtic languages, and which can be shown in fact to have
developed only in Middle Welsh, shows that the scores must share a common
ancestor with Modern Welsh but not with Cornish and Breton.

The strongest evidence for this comes from the second decade of the scores
listed by Mr Gay. Welsh numerals of the second decade are formed by adding to
the two fixed points of `deg' (ten), and `pymtheg' (fifteen), and this is the
method also employed by the sheep-counting scores. It is not, however, the
system found in Cornish and Breton, whose only fixed point is `ten', and it
appears that this was also the case in Old Welsh. Moreover, the use in Welsh
of the preposition ar in the formation of the second-decade numeral is a
later innovation which again is echoed in the sheep-counting numerals.

Various dialects in northern England do retain hints of the British language,
but these traces are confined to a few individual words in the vocabulary,
such as the use in Yorkshire of the term `brat' for a rough working apron,
derived from the British term bratt (cloak). The sheep scores must be
attributed to more recent contacts with Celtic speakers, such as the Welsh
lead miners of Yorkshire."