approach - methodology - history

Gordon Selway gordonselway at gn.apc.org
Wed Mar 1 13:17:42 UTC 2000


Sorry if this is tangential, but the working behind some recent
proposition/assumptions on the list seems potentially (and maybe fatally)
flawed.  I tend to use as a working hypothesis the notion that the past was
in many respects (which we may well disregard as the result of a crude
pseudo-Darwinian approach picked up at an early stage in our education when
we we were also fed guff about mediaeval people thinking the world was
flat) the same as the present, and in particular that it was always
'modern', and that the effects of an event or series of events then are
likely to follow a pattern conforming to the effects of a similar event or
series of events now.  The assumption may be wrong in a specific case, but
it should require good evidence (which might be circumstantial) to overturn
it, and without the evidence an alternative should be no more than an
immediately weaker hypothesis.

At  04:56:20 UT 29 ii 2000 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:
[>Miguel wrote:]
>>I consider Welsh (including its Latin component) to be pretty solid
>>linguistical evidence.

>-- of a Celtic language _in Wales_.  In the absence of written records, it
>would be virtually impossible to >show that there had ever been such a
>language in most of England.  Even the place-names of minor >landscape
>features are mostly Germanic; those Celtic names that do survive are few
>and often the >product of misunderstanding -- eg., a number of western
>English rivers are called "Avon", which >means... 'river'.

I think that this conflates two (or more) issues - why the rivers in the
west are called 'Avon', and the relations between the 'British' and the
'English'.

There is no a priori reason why the rivers in question should not have been
called 'the river' (ie abona/abana) by the 'British'.  It is common for
streams to be innominate, though the Avons are larger than mere rivulets,
brooks, becks or burns.  Some small lakes even - there was a proposal to
give a Lake District tarn the title 'Innominate Tarn' because it had
somehow not acquired a, or had lost an earlier,  name.  Of course, there
are cases of sounds being wrongly interpreted as _names_ (a bit of
reification there, perhaps) of a namable thing an inquirer wishes to know
the local/native name for.  But these are not mutually exclusive
situations.  [And there is a Welsh port called 'aberafan' - 'mouth of the
river' as well.  Perhaps it's an example of Major Major :-)]

The early dark age history of Wessex (and all the English rivers I can
think of called 'Avon' were at one time or another in Wessex) is obscure,
but it may well be an example of a British principality becoming Saxonised,
ie acquiring a North Sea rather than a Romanised cultural background.  The
founder of the dynasty had a Welsh name, and in some parts of its territory
there are few signs of any population displacement co-inciding with the
arrival of the 'English'.  Indeed in my part (which was snatched from
Wessex by Mercia in the mid-7th century) there is fair evidence for
cultural continuity, and for Welsh still being spoken in the 8th and 9th
centuries at some distance east of Offa's Dyke.  This contrasts with the
situation further north along the Welsh border, where Mercia defeated Powys
c. 635 CE and acquired the bulk of what is now Shropshire as a result.

And there is no reason to think that the 'English' did not know that
'abana/abona' (-> 'afan/afon') meant river.  The famous meeting between the
Celtic bishops and Augustine or his emissary took place not far from where
I am writing a generation after the region was added to Wessex, and I do
not imagine that the bishop of Aquae Sulis (or Corinium, Gleuum or
wherever) did not recognise in the first case what the 'English' were
calling the stream a few hundred metres from his episcopal seat.

There is a discussion by JRR Tolkein in his O'Donnell lecture
(unfortunately I do not have a copy to hand) of the role of the 'wealhstod'
(?sp), the person who served as an interpreter between Welsh speakers and
English speakers when one was needed, but we cannot be sure how
incomprehensible each group was to the other - the word is the title of an
official.

And the examples of the history of English spelling against it connection
with the sounds of the language give me qualms.

My understanding is that there was no systematic spelling in the time of
Chaucer, but that central government established its own standards during
the 15th century.  An individual's spelling might well remain idiosyncratic
until the 18th century, perhaps until Johnson's dictionary.  The problem of
the mismatch between the number of characters available and the number of
phonemes in English (and the phonemes themselves no doubt varied between
dialects as well as between idiolects) was never addressed, while habits
based on the 'little knowledge' which Pope declared 'a dangerous thing', eg
changing spelling more conforming with the pronunciation to one which
follows the believed history of the word (an example which comes straight
to mind is 'iland' being replaced by 'island' because of an alleged
connection with 'insula' -> 'isola/isle(ie île)'.

Gordon Selway
<gordonselway at gn.apc.org>



More information about the Indo-european mailing list