Common Brittonic

This article is about the ancestral Celtic language. For the group of languages descended from it, see Brittonic languages.

Common Brittonic
Region	Great Britain south of the Firth of Forth.
Extinct	Developed into Old Welsh, Cumbric, Cornish and Breton by AD 600
Language family	Indo-European Celtic Insular Celtic or P-Celtic Brittonic Common Brittonic
Language codes
ISO 639-3	None (mis)
Linguist List	1bd
Linguasphere	50-AB

Common Brittonic (also called Common Brythonic, British, Old Brythonic, or Old Brittonic) was an ancient Celtic language spoken in Britain. The language of the Celtic people known as the Britons, by the 6th century it split into the various Brittonic languages: Welsh, Cumbric, Cornish, and Breton. It is classified as a P-Celtic and Insular Celtic language.

Common Brittonic is a form of Insular Celtic, which is descended from Proto-Celtic, a hypothetical parent language that by the first half of the first millennium BC was already diverging into separate dialects or languages. There is some evidence that the Pictish language may have had close ties to Common Brittonic and might be a fifth branch.

Evidence from Welsh shows a great influence from Latin on Common Brittonic during the Roman period, and especially so in terms related to the Church and Christianity, which are nearly all Latin derivatives. Common Brittonic was later replaced in most of Scotland by Gaelic and south of the Firth of Forth also by Old English (which later developed into Scots). Common Brittonic survived into the Middle Ages in Southern Scotland and Cumbria—see Cumbric. Common Brittonic was gradually replaced by English throughout England; in the north, Cumbric disappeared as late as the 13th century and, in the south, Cornish was effectively a dead language by the 19th century, although attempts to revitalize it have met with some success. O'Rahilly's historical model suggests the possibility that there was a Brittonic language in Ireland before the arrival of Goidelic languages there, but this view has not found wide acceptance.

History

Sources

No documents written in Common Brittonic have been found, but a few inscriptions have been identified. Curse tablets found in the Roman reservoir at Bath in Somerset contain about 150 names, about half of which are undoubtedly Celtic (but not necessarily Brittonic). There is an inscription on a metal pendant discovered in 1979 in Bath, which seems to contain an ancient Brittonic curse:

Adixoui Deuina Deieda Andagin Uindiorix cuamenai or maybe Adixoui Deiana Deieda Andagin Uindiorix cuamiinai

The affixed – Deuina, Deieda, Andagin, (and) Uindiorix – I have bound

An alternative translation being:

May I, Windiorix for/at Cuamena defeat (alt. summon to justice) the worthless woman, oh divine Deieda.

There is also a tin/lead sheet with part of 9 lines of text. This is damaged, but seems to contain Brittonic names (see Tomlin 1987).

British place-names are another type of evidence, recorded in Latinised forms by Ptolemy's Geography. The place names of Roman Britain were discussed by Rivet and Smith in their book of that name published in 1979. They show that the majority of names used were derived from Common Brittonic. Some English place names still contain elements derived from Common Brittonic. Some Brittonic personal names are also recorded.

Tacitus (in his Agricola) noted that the language of Britain differed little from that of Gaul. Comparison with what is known of the Gaulish suggests a close relationship with Brittonic.

Pritenic

Pritenic (also Pretanic) is a modern term that has been coined to label the language of the inhabitants of northern Great Britain during Roman rule in southern Great Britain (1st to 5th centuries AD). Within the disputed P-Celtic vs. Q-Celtic division of the Celtic languages, "Pritenic" would thus be either a sister or daughter language of Common Brittonic, both deriving from a common P-Celtic language spoken around the 1st century BC.

The evidence for the language consists of place-names, tribal names and personal names recorded by Greek and Latin writers in accounts of northern Britain. These names have been discussed by Kenneth Jackson, in The Problem of the Picts, who considered some of them to be Pritenic but had reservations about most of them. Katherine Forsyth (1997) reviewed these names and considers more of them to be Celtic, still recognizing that some names of islands and rivers may be pre-Indo-European. The rarity of survival of Pritenic names is probably due to later Gaelic and Norse settlement in the area.

The dialect position of Pritenic has been discussed by Jackson and by Koch (1955). Their conclusions are that Pritenic and Common Brittonic had split by the 1st century AD. The Roman frontier between "Britannia" and "Pictland" is likely to have increased the split. By the 8th century AD, Bede considered Pictish and Common Brittonic to be separate languages.

Diversification

Common Brittonic was used with Latin following the Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43, at least in major settlements. A number of Latin words were borrowed by Brittonic speakers.

The Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain during the 500s marked the beginning of a decline in the language, as it was gradually replaced by Old English. Some Brittonic speakers migrated to Armorica and Galicia. By AD 700, Brittonic was mainly restricted to Northwest England, Southern Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Devon and Brittany. In these regions, it evolved into Cumbric, Welsh, Cornish and Breton.

Place names

Common Brittonic survives today in a few English place names and river names. However, some of these may be pre-Celtic. The best example is perhaps that of the River(s) Avon, which comes from the Brittonic abona which translates into "river" (compare Welsh afon, Cornish avon, Irish (and Scottish Gaelic) abhainn, Manx awin, Breton aven; the Latin cognate is amnis).

List of place names derived from the Brittonic languages

Main article: Celtic toponymy

Brittonic-derived place-names are scattered across Great Britain, with many occurring in the West Country; some examples are:

• Avon from abonā = "river" (cf. Welsh afon)
• Britain from Pritani = "People of the Forms" (cf. Welsh Prydain "Britain", pryd "appearance, form, image, resemblance")
• Dover from Dubrīs = "waters" (cf. Welsh dŵr, older dwfr)
• Kent from canto- = "border" (cf. Welsh cant "rim or periphery")
• Lothian (Lleuddiniawn in medieval Welsh) from *Lugudũn(iãnon) "Fort of Lugus"
• Severn from Sabrīna, perhaps the name of a goddess (in Welsh, Hafren)
• Thanet from tan-eto- = "(place of the) bonfire" (cf. Welsh tân "fire", Old Breton tanet "aflame") or more probably tann-eto = "oak grove" (tanno- "kind of oak", Breton tannen "oak")
• Thames from Tamesis = "dark" (akin to Welsh tywyll "darkness", from Brittonic *temeselo-)
• York from Ebur-ākon = "stand of yew trees" (cf. Welsh Efrog, from efwr "yew" + -og "abundant in") via Latin Eburacum > OE Eoforwic (re-analysed with OE roots as 'boar-village') > ON Jorvik

Some Brittonic place names are known but are no longer used. In a charter of 682 the name of Creech St. Michael, Somerset is given as "Cructan".

The words "Tor", "Combe", "Bere", "Hele" and "Worthy" of Brittonic origin are particularly common in Devon as elements of placenames, often combined with elements of English origin. Compound names sometimes occur across England, such as "Derwent Water" or "Chetwood", which contain the same element translated in both languages.

See also

• Proto-Celtic
• Gaulish

Bibliography

• Atkinson and Gray (2005) "Are Accurate Dates an Intractable Problem for Historical Linguistics?". In: Mapping Our Ancestors, Collard, Mark, et al., eds. Transaction Books
• Filppula, M., Klemola, J. and Pitkänen, H. (2001). The Celtic Roots of English, (Studies in languages, No. 37), University of Joensuu, Faculty of Humanities, ISBN 952-458-164-7.
• Forsyth, K. (1997) Language in Pictland.
• Jackson, K. (1953) Language and History in Early Britain.
• Jackson, K. (1955) "The Pictish Language" in F. T. Wainwright The Problem of the Picts. London: Nelson.
• Koch, J. (1986) «New Thought on Albion, Ieni and the "Pretanic Isles"» in: Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium; 6, 1–28 (1986).
• Lambert, P.-Y. (ed.), Recueil des inscriptions gauloises II.2. Textes gallo-latins sur instrumentum, Paris: CNRS Editions, 2002, p. 304-306.
• Lambert, Pierre-Yves (2003). La langue gauloise. 2nd edition. Paris, Editions Errance. p. 176
• Lockwood, W. B. (1975) Languages of the British Isles Past and Present, London: Deutsch ISBN 0-233-96666-8
• Ostler, Nicholas (2005) Empires of the Word. London: HarperCollins ISBN 0-00-711870-8.
• Price, G. (2000). Languages of Britain and Ireland, Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-21581-6
• Rivet, A. and Smith, C. (1979) The Place-Names of Roman Britain
• Sims-Williams, Patrick (2003) The Celtic Inscriptions of Britain: phonology and chronology, c.400–1200. Oxford, Blackwell. ISBN 1-4051-0903-3
• Trudgill, P. (ed.) (1984) Language in the British Isles, Cambridge University Press.

External links

• Celtic Personal Names of Roman Britain
• Roman road stations of the Cannock-Chase area
• Alex Mullen (2007), "Evidence for Written Celtic from Roman Britain: A Linguistic Analysis of Tabellae Sulis 14 and 18", Studia Celtica