Old Welsh

Old Welsh
Hen Gymraeg
Spoken in	Wales
Era	Evolved into Middle Welsh about the 12th century
Language family	Indo-European Celtic Insular Celtic Brythonic Old Welsh
Writing system	Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-3	owl

Old Welsh (Welsh: Hen Gymraeg) is the label attached to the Welsh language from about 800 AD until the early 12th century when it developed into Middle Welsh. The preceding period, from the time Welsh became distinct from the British language around 550, has been called "Primitive Welsh".

Many poems and some prose have been preserved from this period, although some are in later manuscripts, for example the text of Y Gododdin. The oldest surviving text entirely in Old Welsh is probably that on a gravestone now in Tywyn church, thought to date from the early 8th century. A text in the Book of St. Chad called the Surrexit Memorandum is thought to have been written in the late 8th or the 9th century but may be a copy of a text from the 6th or 7th centuries.

Old Welsh is only intelligible to a modern-day Welsh speaker with the aid of extensive notes.

Old Welsh texts

Surrexit Memorandum

Text

surrexit tutbulc filius liuit hagener tutri dierchi tir telih haioid ilau elcu filius gelhig haluidt iuguret amgucant pel amtanndi ho diued diprotant gener tutri o guir imguodant ir degion guragon tagc rodesit elcu guetig equs tres uache, tres uache nouidligi namin ir ni be cas igridu dimedichat guetig hit did braut grefiat guetig nis minn tutbulc hai cenetl in ois oisau

Translation

Tudfwlch son of Llywyd and son-in-law of Tudri arose to claim the land of Telych, which was in the hand of Elgu son of Gelli and the tribe of Idwared. They disputed long about it; in the end they disjudge Tudri's son-in-law by law. The goodmen said to each other 'Let us make peace'. Elgu gave afterwards a horse, three cows, three cows newly calved, in order that there might not be hatred between them from the ruling afterwards till the Day of Judgement. Tudfwlch and his kin will not want it for ever and ever.

Features

• The text shows many of the early spelling conventions of Welsh, when the basic Latin alphabet was used to represent the phonology of Old Welsh. At this stage, the use of ll to represent the lateral fricative /ɬ/ (liuit > Llywyd) and dd to represent /ð/ (did > dydd) had not been developed. The Latin letter u was used to represent the diverse sounds /ʉ/, /ʊ/ and /v/, which became u, w and f, v respectively, by the medieval period.
• initial mutations, a major feature of all Insular Celtic languages, do not appear to have been represented orthographically at this point
• In some cases, the language used in the Memorandum has become obsolete, but other words are relatively unchanged in modern Welsh:

Old Welsh	Modern Welsh	English
tir	tir	land
lau	llaw	hand
diued	diwedd	end
ir	yr, y	the
nouid	newydd	new
guetig	gwedy	after
cas	cas	hatred
hit	hyd	until
did	dydd	day
braut	brawd	judgement
in ois oisou	yn oes oesoedd	for ever and ever

See also

• British Romance

References

• Price, Glanville (1985). The Languages of Britain. London: Edward Arnold. ISBN 0-7131-6452-2. 
• Koch, John T. (2006). Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. 

External links

• Old and Middle Welsh by David Willis, University of Cambridge