The Welsh Language: A History

THE WELSH LANGUAGE

The Welsh Language

A History

Janet Davies

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

CARDIFF

2014

© Janet Davies, 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff, CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CiP Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78316-019-8

e-ISBN 978-1-78316-129-4

The right of Janet Davies to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

Acknowledgements

The Welsh Language: A Personal Perspective

1 The Origins of Welsh

2 Welsh in the Early British Kingdoms

3 Welsh in the Middle Ages

4 From the Act of ‘Union’ to the Industrial Revolution

5 The Welsh Language in the Era of Industrialization

6 Welsh in the Later Nineteenth Century

7 Welsh in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

8 The Second World War and After

9 The Welsh Language Today

10 Welsh and the Other Non-State Languages of Europe

11 The Characteristics of Welsh

Postscript

Further Reading

List of Illustrations

Inscribed stone at Tywyn, Merionnydd

A page from the Book of Aneirin

Title page of Yn y lhyvyr hwnn, the earliest printed book in Welsh

Title page of the New Testament, 1567

The National Eisteddfod, Chester, 1866

Y Cylchgrawn Cymraeg

Pupils and teacher at Chubut, Patagonia, 1908

Saunders Lewis reading his radio lecture Tynged yr Iaith in 1962

The Nant Gwrtheyrn language centre

Montage of some recent Welsh-language publications

List of Maps

The present extent of Indo-European languages in Europe and Asia

Map showing British and Saxon kingdoms during the period

AD

500–700

Map showing Pura Wallia and Marchia Wallie

Principal language zones c.1750

Percentage of population able to speak Welsh, 1971

Percentage of population able to speak Welsh, 1991

Percentage of population with a knowledge of Welsh, 2011

Number of Welsh speakers, 2011

Dialect variations for ‘young girl’

Dialect variations for ‘milk’

Acknowledgements

As always, I am greatly indebted to John Davies for his advice and assistance.

Illustrations and maps in this book are included by kind permission of the following. Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders:

Inscribed stone at Tywyn, Merionnydd: © Crown copyright: Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales

A page from the Book of Aneirin: Cardiff MS 2.81. Courtesy of Cardiff Libraries

Title page of Yn y lhyvyr hwnn, the earliest printed book in Welsh: by permission of the National Library of Wales

Title page of the New Testament, 1567: by permission of the National Library of Wales

Principal language zones c.1750 from Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), The Welsh Language before the Industrial Revolution (University of Wales Press, 1997): Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies

The National Eisteddfod, Chester, 1866: by permission of the National Library of Wales

Y Cylchgrawn Cymraeg: by permission of the National Library of Wales

Pupils and teacher at Chubut, Patagonia, 1908: by permission of the National Library of Wales

‘Percentage of population able to speak Welsh, 1971’ and ‘Percentage of population able to speak Welsh, 1991’ from

J. W. Aitchison and H. Carter, A Geography of the Welsh Language 1961–1991 (University of Wales Press, 1993)

Saunders Lewis reading his radio lecture Tynged yr Iaith in 1962: by permission of the National Library of Wales

The Nant Gwrtheyrn language centre: by permission of the National Library of Wales

Dialect variations for ‘young girl’ and for ‘milk’ from Alan R. Thomas, The Linguistic Geography of Wales (University of Wales Press, 1997)

Montage of some recent Welsh-language publications: Tebyg at ei Debyg, by permission of Gomer; Nefar in Ewrop, by permission of Y Lolfa; Llwyth, by permission of Sherman Cymru; Cryfder ar y Cyd, by permission of Gwasg Carreg Gwalch; Cymru: Y 100 Lle i’w Gweld cyn Marw, by permission of Y Lolfa

The Welsh Language: A Personal Perspective

For many people in Wales, the Welsh language is the essence of Welsh identity. Yet, for the majority of the people of Wales, the language has only a marginal impact upon their lives. That was my experience as a child. I was brought up on the borders of Breconshire and Monmouthshire, a district where a con­siderable number of the inhabitants had a knowledge of Welsh a hundred years ago. By the 1950s, however, none of the native inhabitants could put together a sentence in the language. A few incomers were Welsh speakers, a fact that sometimes impinged upon us. Our parish church was Llanelly, magnifi­cently sited above the Usk valley. Its vicar was Daniel Parry-Jones, a native of Carmarthenshire, and the first Welsh I ever heard came from his lips as he proffered the communion cup to the distinguished Irishwoman, Dr Noëlle French. Welsh, I came to the conclusion, was a liturgical language, rather like Latin among Roman Catholics. There were Welsh lessons at school, but it was difficult to imagine that anyone of my age could weave together the words we learned and turn them into intelligible and effortless speech. That some of my con­temporaries could do so was something I discovered when pupils from Brynmawr met pupils from Ystradgynlais, at that time in the same county. Thus I became dimly aware that somewhere over the hills, in the upper Swansea valley, in Carmarthenshire, and also, according to some, in Anglesey, there were people who not only spoke Welsh effortlessly, but did so all the time. It seemed very odd indeed.

Yet although Welsh was rarely heard in our community, it existed all around us. There was hardly an English place-name within miles. Indeed, Welsh names continued well over the border with England; on the train journey to Hereford, it was noticeable that the first station after passing the border was Pontrilas. Living in a land of llan and aber, dol and cwm, pant and maes – the building blocks of place-names throughout Wales – it was impossible to escape the fact that a language unspoken by my community was legible throughout that com­munity. And although purists might think that some of the place-names were pronounced in a rather cavalier fashion (we did dreadful things to Maesgwarthaf), on the whole we man­aged them well enough. We did so because an instinct for the correct pronunciation of Welsh was built into the way we spoke English. When I eventually came to learn Welsh, I found that the pronunciation presented no problems at all. Neither did many aspects of word-order, for the syntax of our ordinary speech – the much-derided Wenglish – preserved patterns it had inherited from Welsh.

In no sense did the lack of knowledge of the language make us feel less Welsh. The traditions of the community included Brychan and his saintly progeny, the hidden city under Llan­gors Lake, and De Breos, the wicked marcher lord. We played on the banks of the canal and around the foundries and the tramroads of the early industrial age; we visited Crawshay Bailey’s round houses and the caves of the Chartists; we knew of Lady Llanover; we learned of Brynmawr’s unhappy repu­tation as the blackest of the black spots of the depression years; we eagerly read the serialized versions of Cordell’s novels. All these things made us fully aware that we were in the main­stream of the traditions and the history of Wales. Many years later, when giving birth at Llandovery Cottage Hospital, I was totally baffled when I heard the woman in the next bed to me referring to me as ‘y Saesnes sy’n dysgu Cymraeg’ (the English­woman who’s learning Welsh). The Welsh-speaking Welsh, I came to the conclusion, use words in a different way. That seemed even odder.

The oddities of the Welsh situation intrigued me. Over the years, through meeting Basques and Catalans and Bretons and Frisians, I came to realize that these oddities are by no means unique. I should have been glad, when I first began to think about them, if there had been a brief guide to the origins and nature of Welsh, to the use that had been made of the language over the centuries, its present condition, and the parallels that can be drawn between its history and the history of others among the languages of Europe. Wanting to read a book is the best possible reason for writing one. This book was written primarily for those people in Wales whose child­hood experiences were similar to mine. I should also like to think that it will be of interest to those visitors to Wales who begin to ask questions when they first encounter llan and aber and dol and cwm.

1

The Origins of Welsh

The Indo-European family of languages

The Welsh language, like most of the languages of Europe, and many of those of Asia, has evolved from what linguists term Indo-European. Indo-European was spoken at least 6,000 years ago (4,000

BC

) by a semi-nomadic people who lived perhaps in the steppe region of southern Russia, or perhaps in Anatolia. (Anatolian personal names with Indo-European associations have been found in Assyrian texts of the twentieth century

BC

.)

COGNATE INDO-EUROPEAN WORDS

Speakers of the language migrated eastwards and west­wards; they had reached the Danube valley by 3,500

BC

and India by 2,000

BC

. The dialects of Indo-European became much differentiated, chiefly because of migration, and evolved into separate languages. So great was the variety among them that it was not until 1786 that the idea was put forward that a family of Indo-European languages actually exists. In the twenty-first century, Indo-European languages are spoken in a wide arc from Bengal to Portugal, as well as in countries as distant as New Zealand and Canada, to which they have been carried by more recent emigrants. The Indo-European family is generally considered to consist of nine different branches, which in turn gave rise to daughter languages. Welsh evolved from the Celtic branch, as did its sister languages – Breton, Cornish, Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx – although it was not until 1853 that the Celtic languages were fully accepted as members of the Indo-European family.

The present extent of Indo-European languages

in Europe and Asia

The Celts

The Celts were perhaps the first Indo-European people to spread across Europe. It is widely believed that a material culture specifically associated with the Celts originated in the eastern Alps in the eighth century

BC

, but that area was not necessarily the wellspring of the Celtic language. There are those who believe that Celtic had its origins along the Atlantic seaboard, and that it seeped into much of Europe in the wake of the vigor­ous economy of the late Bronze Age. The great variety of views held about the origin of Celtic makes it necessary for any statements on the subject to be hedged around with doubts and qualifications. As Barry Cunliffe put it: ‘Specialized works should only be approached by those of a resilient disposition.’

Genetic studies may offer further evidence, but the vicious theories that have been underpinned by simplistic accounts of prehistoric linguistic origins have made many scholars reluctant to rely upon biological archaeology.

However, it can be stated with confidence that by the later Iron Age, Celtic speakers were widely present in Spain, Britain, Ireland, Gaul, Germany, Italy, the Danube Basin and in parts of Anatolia. They left their mark upon the place-names of Europe. The names of the rivers Rhône, Rhine and Danube are Celtic, as are those of the cities of London, Paris and Vienna. Gallipoli on the shores of the Dardanelles is the city of the Gauls or the Celts, and there is a town called Bala (a Celtic word meaning the efflux of a river from a lake) in the heart of Anatolia in modern Turkey. Linguists identify at least four forms of Celtic spoken on the European mainland and in Asia Minor in the last centuries of the pre-Christian era – the Galatian of central Anatolia, the Gallo-Brittonic of Gaul and much of Britain, the Celtiberian of Spain (where other Celtic languages may also have been spoken) and the Lepontic and perhaps the Cisalpine Gaulish of northern Italy.

COGNATE CELTIC WORDS

The Brittonic language

The language introduced into Britain was similar to that spoken in Gaul; indeed, the Celtic speech of Gaul and Britain at the dawn of the historic era can be considered as one language, frequently referred to as Gallo-Brittonic. A different form of Celtic – Goidelic – became dominant in Ireland and, in later centuries, in Scotland and the Isle of Man. Goidelic, the ancestor of Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx, is known as Q-Celtic, because it retained the kw sound of Indo-European, writing it as q and later as c. In Gallo-Brittonic, the ancestor of Welsh, Breton and Cornish, the kw developed into p, and Gallo-Brittonic is there­fore known as P-Celtic. The distinction is apparent in the Irish ceann and Welsh pen (head). The distinguished Irish historian Myles Dillon argued that Celtic