Reference on Numbers of Saxons

[anthony.appleyard@umist.ac.uk]

On Fri, 1 Dec 2000 04:06:38 EST, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:
>  Eg., shepherd's counting vocabulary
> in many parts of northern and western England is transparently Welsh ...
> but the form of the numerals shows that these are loans from medieval
> Welsh, not survivals from Brythonic!

Or, Brythonic in what is now England managed to go through all or some of
the same changes as in Wales (consonant lenition, vowel shifts) as in Wales
before its speakers forgot their language and learned Anglo-Saxon. E.g. an
Anglo-Saxon record says that the Selwood forest in Wessex was called Silva
Magna in Latin and Coitmaur in "British", whereas the old Common Celtic
word for "big" was "mo:r-" (and in Gaelic still is).