the Wheel and Dating PIE

[Gordon Selway]

At 1:25 EST yesterday morning, Joat Simeon <JoatSimeon at aol.com> wrote:
>>sonno3 at hotmail.com writes:
>>The largest percentage of Brittonic elements are in Western England,
>>including Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire as well as Shropshire,
>>Worcestershire, North East Herefordshire, Western Gloucestershire and, of
>>course, Devon and Cornwall.

>-- true, the process of Germanization seems to have been both slower and
>less complete in these western areas (Cornish surviving into the 17th
>century, and the provisions for "Welsh" persons in the early Wessex law
>codes).

>Even there, however, there are placename features which show
>incomprehension -- besides the "river river" ones, there are the "hill
>hills".

[and at 19:39 PST on Thu, 02 Mar 2000 Stanley Friesen <sarima at friesen.net>
wrote:
>And then there is the place called (after translation) "Hillhill Hill".

Whoa, again, and back to methodology and the quality of the argument.

One of the hill-hill-hill examples is close to the bald hill (not hill
bald) example.

I suppose that the bald hill (ie British) rather than hill bald (ie Welsh)
name might be prayed in aid as proof of limited or non understanding, but
bear in mind that Glasgow (with a body of speakers of the language which
gave the city its name resident there throughout, though changing from all
the residents to a minority of incomers over the period) has the same
manner of formation and has retained it for 1,500 odd years, and that there
is a community in Powys not far from Offa's Dyke which is called Glascwm,
though you may elsewhere find Brynglas, iirc.

We should not suppose that place names remain transparent, or more
precisely are heard transparently.

One 'hill-hill' is in or adjoins what was until the 19th century a
Welsh-speaking area (it's on the English side of the border, but Welsh was
spoken on both sides not far away (Oswestry/Croes Oswallt), not sure about
the area east of Trallwng.Welshpool).  The second 'hill' in the Bredon
group of names (of which four or five come to mind straightaway without
looking them up, Somerset 'Brendon', Worcs 'Bredon' and 'Breedon', Salop
'Breidden', Leics 'Breedon') could be British or Germanic (dinas in Mod
Welsh is 'city';
Clifton Downs in Bristol, North and South Downs in Surrey/Sussex/Kent &c
are presumable OE)

I've already disposed of the 'river river' claim.  And people are happy to
speak about 'Lake Windermere', 'Lake Derwentwater' and so forth (thought
the OS map mames have no 'Lake', and it's common to comment that there is
only one lake in the Lake District - Bassenthwaite Lake, but that's by the
by).

>You often get these types of names in situations of limited bilingualism.

That is certainly true, but that is not a transitive proposition, and no
evidence that the names in western England (or indeed on the extreme SE
corner of GB at *Dubra:s > Dover

>One can imagine a Saxon grunting out something and pointing, at which the
>bewildered Briton says "That's >the _river_," or "That's the _hill_".

We can each imagine what we like, but there's no evidence it's what
happened here, and there are place names which are transparently Welsh in
modern Welsh, as well as the calques where the English names may have
replaced a Welsh one with the same or a similar meaning (eg *yr Helynau ->
Wich) and hybrids where there are elements of both Celtic and Germanic and
they are not repetitious.

And why on earth should a Briton tell a Saxon pointing at a nearby hill,
'That's a hill'?

As Tony Andrewes (I think - it may have been the AH don at Trinity and not
the professor at New College) said of the C8-ish BCE bucket from Laconia
with the inscription 'Alpheiou eimi' (or whatever the Arcadian/Doric/Elian
form of the words should be, claimed to have the name of a river on it, 'it
doesn't hold water'.

><snip>

Gordon Selway
< gordonselway at gn.apc.org>