English and Welsh by Jonh Ronald Ruel Tolkien

Author:Jonh Ronald Ruel Tolkien [Tolkien, Jonh Ronald Ruel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sci_linguistic

Edgar says, or is made to say, in King Lear (III. iv).

The modern Englishman finds this very confusing. He has long read of British prowess in battle, and especially of British stubbornness in defeat in many imperial wars; so when he hears of Britons stubbornly (as is to be expected) opposing the landing of Julius Caesar or of Aulus Plautius, he is apt to suppose that the English (who meekly put themselves down as British in hotel-registers) were already there, facing the first of their long series of glorious defeats. A supposition far from uncommon even among those who offer themselves for 'honours' in the School of English.

But in early times there was no such confusion. The Brettas and the Walas were the same. The use of the latter term, which| was applied by the English, is thus of considerable importance in estimating the linguistic situation of the early period.

It seems clear that the word walh, wealh which the English brought with them was a common Germanic name for a man of what we should call Celtic speech. [17] But in all the recorded Germanic languages in which it appears it was also applied to the speakers of Latin. That may be due, as is usually assumed, to the fact that Latin eventually occupied most of the areas of Celtic speech within the knowledge of Germanic peoples. But it is, I think, also in part a linguistic judgement, reflecting that very similarity in style of Latin and Gallo-Brittonic that I have already mentioned. It did not occur to anyone to call a Goth a walh even if he was long settled in Italy or in Gaul. Though 'foreigner' is often given as the first gloss on wealh in Anglo-Saxon dictionaries this is misleading. The word was not applied to foreigners of Germanic speech, nor to those of alien tongues, Lapps, Finns, Esthonians, Lithuanians, Slavs, or Huns, with whom the Germanic-speaking peoples came into contact in early times. (But borrowed in Old Slavonic in the form ulachu it was applied to the Roumanians.) It was, therefore, basically a word of linguistic import; and in itself implied in its users more linguistic curiosity and discrimination than the simple stupidity of the Greek barbaros.

Its special association by the English with the Britons was a product of their invasion of Britain. It contained a linguistic judgement, but it did not discriminate between the speakers of Latin and the speakers of British. But with the perishing of the spoken Latin of the island, and the concentration of English interests in Britain, walh and its derivatives became synonymous with Brett and brittisc, and in the event replaced them. [18]

In the same way the use of wealh for slave is also due solely to the situation in Britain. But again the gloss 'slave' is probably misleading. Though the word slave itself shows that a national name can become generalized in this sense, I doubt if this was true of wealh. The Old English word for 'slave' in general remained theow, which was used of slaves in other countries or of other origin.

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