Connections with other languages

And my new discoveries, borrowed from English:
cwndid = ‘a conduit’
and
hebog = ‘a hawk’ – according to the GPC, borrowed from Old English, when the form was hafoc (‘f’ and ‘c’ pronounced as in Modern Welsh spelling, conveniently enough).

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Not sure why I threw the arth for bear in - it popped up on a wiktionary etymology link in cornish, but not in Welsh. There is an old word in GPC “ardd” for highland, hill, top etc, which it links to Old Irish Ard, Gaullish Arduenna and Latin Arduus and compares it to hardd. This is the word that has been used for the suggested derivation of Penarth (which incidentally has an emblem showing two bears, because originally the arth was misassociated with the word for Bear). There are many other place
names associated with arth, as in the “high” - cenarth etc. As you have now quite rightly corrected me, I mistakenly then thought of Gwaelod y garth and mentally linked it to Garth, because the meaning and sound are so similar. GPC suggests Garth comes from the PIE route *gher - to grasp, enclose. and has been associated with a fort. Is it possible for the meaning of words to merge, because of their sound and other associations - i.e. garth and ardd coming from different roots, but the meanings and usage merging?.

A problem in Welsh would be that another Ardd from another root is associated with arable land and ploughing, which is a very different meaning, but I guess that isn’t that unusual and languages cope with that sort of thing.

I was also surprised that gogarth and gogerdd for clifftop are not associated with Garth, but is derived from (Go and Cerdd - land running towards the sea).

I like the possibility of those links to Ordios. Apart from the possible Basque links to Gascon, I also read that a stronghold of Gascon - the former Principality of Béarn stayed independent from France until 1620, which may have had an effect on the language. In that area, it seems there is the possibility of words derived from whatever Ligurian was as well?.

Yes, I noticed the word Garth popping up when I visited Newcastle recently - particularly in connection to new housing developments. I don’t recall its use when I lived there - but I could be mistaken.

I think @RichardBuck is the person with the knowledge here, but I suspect it’s probably from Middle English or Old Norse - especially if it refers to a four sided yard, an enclosure or something like that. Very common in English place names etc. If it was a hilltop or clifftop then maybe other origins might be possible, but unlikely I would imagine.

There are a few place name elements, where you could sometimes wonder is that from English or Welsh/Brythonic - you probably can’t rule out the Welsh Garth even coming from the English or both of them coming from Norse, I suppose - who knows.

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I’ve just been reading through this thread (well, skimming, at least) and I’m delighted to see that out of the Welsh words mentioned that are derived from Latin and/or other related languages, nearly all of them have exact or very close cognates in Kernewek (Cernyweg to you)! :grinning:

Of course, that stands to reason, as most of the Latin words would have been borrowed either when the Romans were in Britain or a few centuries later when Latin-speaking Christian missionaries came over, when what we now call Cornish and Welsh would have been the same language or very close dialects, so the same Latin borrowings remained in both languages as they diverged. I won’t go through the entire thread’s worth, but these are the ones from Gisella’s list early in the thread that I recognise:

Unig - Unnik
Sych - Sygh (or segh)
Llaeth - Leth
Gwin - Gwin
Pysgod - Pysk
Padell - Padell
Coginio - Keginieth
Cymysgu - Kemyska
Ffwrn - Forn
Melys - Melys
Profi - Previ
Llyfrau - Lyvrow
Ysgrifennu - Skrifa
Llinell - Linen
Caru - Kara
Cantor - Kaner
Duw - Duw
Uffernol - Ifarnek
Nadolig - Nadelik
Pasg - Pask
Capel - Chapel
Pont - Pons
Ystafell - Stevel
Ffenest - Fenester
Tafarn - Tavern
(Dydd) Llun, Mawrth, Mercher, Iau, Gwener, Sadwrn, Sul - (Dy’) Lun, Meurth, Mergher, Yow, Gwener, Sadorn, Sul

… OK, I won’t go on any further, but I’m just chuffed to see so many familiar words — I’m needing to concentrate on the Cornish for the time being, but now I can see I will definitely HAVE to learn Welsh as well!! :smiley: (I will be in the North for just a few days later this month — around Colwyn Bay and then up to Bala — so I will brush up on basic greetings and useful phrases before I go. I’m looking forward to that.)

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there’s definately a bit of Cornish surviving in South Wales. - so many cornish miners and links with fisherman etc, that a bit of it must have mixed in and still live on.

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Yes, the housing estate that I’m mainly thinking of is at the top of the bank :slight_smile: banc/incline coming west out of Newcastle. The more established name of the erea is Hill heads. However, I did originally think that its Garth name was more related to the Norse origin.

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There’s a few parts of a rather cool series still up on S4C Clic at the moment called Y Cosmos – it makes a bit of a change for me to be watching documentaries about cosmology in Welsh, rather than Celwydd Noeth or Rownd a Rownd, what with vocabulary like Y Glec Fawr (Big Bang), disgyrchiant (gravity) and mater and egni tywyll (dark matter and dark energy).

All great stuff, and one word popped out at me that belongs here: dwys ‘dense’, from Latin densus, with the -n- disappearing to leave a long -e- (*dēs-) which becomes Welsh -wy- like in swydd and hwyr and Lloegrwys and all the others we’ve had already.

And I came across another, somewhere else, that I don’t think we’ve mentioned elsewhere: cadwyn – now cádwyn but apparently formerly cadŵyn, from Latin catēna ‘chain’ (Italian catena, Catalan and Spanish cadena, English ‘catenary’ etc.).

Incidentally, the English is the same word, via French with its own weird and wonderful sound-changes – chaîne from Old French chaeine from something like *chaḍeine ( as a softening of d, pronounced like Welsh dd, lost from French around the 13th century, I think).

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Will be familiar to many learners through the phrase cwrs dwys - an intensive course.

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Ooh - not one I’d come across, but all grist to the mill - the more pegs to hang words on, the better :slight_smile:

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I loved this bit of news the other day: Smart meters across the UK are randomly switching to Welsh and no-one knows why :grin:

image

And even better, it turns out the Welsh here is exactly the same as the Cornish — we would say devnydh hedhyw (pronounced pretty much identically). If I had a smart meter (which I don’t at present), I wouldn’t mind it switching to Welsh at all. :grinning:

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Warning - this might be a very heavy read.

A few months back on ITV, Steven Mulhern was in Cardiff asking people what the welsh word for incredible was and they didn’t find a Welsh speaker or learner and so nobody knew, which he thought was quite hilarious. Anghredadwy is the word he was looking for, but I was thinking that this is actually quite similar to Incredible in the sense that an = in and cred = cred. I assumed that it could have been borrowed from English or maybe even a Latin link. Wherever the Welsh came from I was surprised how authentic the current Welsh word credu is to the reconstructed Indo-European word - and that’s had a long journey from several thousands of years BC. In fact credu/cariad/caru etc are related to the English words Heart (from Germanic Herto) and Cardiac (from Greek) and Latin credo, in the sense that one form of the Proto Indo European (PIE) root word for heart is ḱḗr

(just to confuse things a bit there are confusing variations or alternatives to this - *kred and also the Proto-Indo-European *keh₂- Old Norse hórr , Gothic (hōrs, “adulterer”) (from hōra- ), Sanskrit चारु (cā́ru, “pleasant, lovely”), Latin cārus (“dear, beloved”)) and to “believe” is a derivation of “to put or place the heart”.

The “put or place” comes from the ending which is from the PIE word dʰeh₁- “to do”

delwedd
The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World - By J. P. Mallory, D. Q. Adams

From GPC, we have this.

credaf: credu

[Crn. cresy , Llyd. C. cridiff , Diw. kridi, kredi , H. Wydd. cretim : < Clt. * k̂red-d - < IE. * kred-dhē -, cf. Llad. crēdī ]

Latin is very similar - credi or credo - as is Sanskrit, so all of these words are very close to the original Indo-European words - the Hittite word is a good example, since Hittite is clearly very old and often claimed to be the first actually attested Indo-European Language.

And there’s more if you can bear the pain:

Since to put or place in Welsh is Rhoi, I wondered where that came from, because in the old books and still in speach today etc, it is often written rhodd, with an ending"rhoddi" etc. I wondered if the dd(i) ending derived from the original PIE ending dʰeh₁ and it does.

Rhoi/Rhoddi

A conflation of two separate stems: (1) Middle Welsh roðy (“to give”), from Proto-Brythonic *roðọd (compare Cornish ry (“to give”), Breton reiñ (“to give”)), from Proto-Celtic *ɸro-dāti (“give”) (compare Old Irish do·rata (“he has given”)), from Proto-Indo-European *deh₃- and (2) Middle Welsh rodif (“I put”), from Proto-Brythonic *roðid , from Proto-Celtic *ɸro-dīti (“put”), from Proto-Indo-European *dʰeh₁- .

The celtic ɸro gives rise to the ro/rho of rhoddi. This comes from the PIE route words *pro/*pre, which in Latin would still be pro. So I wondered if latin had a word that started in pro and ended in -do (the latin modification of dʰeh). It turns out that Latin prodo is a word and is pretty much a cognate for Rhoddi/Rhoi. Literally both words mean to “put or place in front of”, where pro or rho means in front of.

prōdō ( present infinitive prōdere , perfect active prōdidī , supine prōditum );

  1. I give, put or bring forth; bear, produce, propagate.
  2. I put forth in writing; publish, exhibit, make known, relate, report, record.
  3. I proclaim, appoint, elect, create.
  4. I give up, surrender, abandon.
  5. I reveal, disclose; betray perfidiously, surrender treacherously.
  6. I permit to go farther, protract, project; put off, defer; prolong; hand down; bequeath.

I don’t know how well researched it is, but I came across this video not long ago. Perhaps it is of some interest!

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I really like this one - he speculates that there might have been language contact and we know that there definately was language contact - but that would have happened with all the other parts of Europe, with all the other Indo-European languages as well. If you look at English now, then trade is the main reason for other languages learning and adopting English words and structures etc.

If you look back in time at Iberia - principally celtic speaking in the bronze and Iron-age and much of their earlier scripts were written using Phoenician scripts and the Phoenicians had trading posts in Cadiz and some areas of southern spain - the Phoenicians spoke a semitic language. There is clear evidence of trade in silver etc at the time of King Solomon from celtic iberia to the levante - presumably via Phoenician trading links.

The Berbers are renowned for speaking multiple languages and their overland trading links in North Africa is yet another possible link for early language contact, with other African languages and semitic languages.

The early greeks viewed the atlantic as the area beyond the straits of hercules, which they viewed as the end of the earth (many believe that equates to the straits of Gibraltar) - so a different world and peoples lay along the atlantic coast that would be alien to them and the Phonicians dominated trade from that end of the mediteranean - carthage etc, but not beyond the straits. If the Celtic languages stretched from Northern Britain to the South of modern day spain/portugal, then I see no reason, with those sea faring skills why they wouldn’t venture further down the west coast of Africa and there could be other sources of contact with other Afro-asiatic languages. I have been trying to look for links, but apart from odd words here and there, which prove absolutely nothing at all, I haven’t got the knowledge or skills to see any links with current west african languages. The principle languages of senegal for example are serer and Fula - serer has extensive, sytematic consonant mutations, which is not a common thing, but not rare enough to show any linkage. The serer may have given the name to the country, which is not an old colonial word, but an old serer word, believed to mean old canoe or old boat and you could reconstruct those same words in celtic, if you wanted to. There are some nice coincidences, Dioli means to prey/praise etc, as it originally did in welsh - leading to diolch perhaps. In the main though, there aren’t that many realistic hooks to keep looking and all of the languages do seem to be generally very very different. And then of course there’s Basque!

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Just watched this video. Interesting, but I would be very wary of drawing any conclusions from it. As the narrator himself says, the similarities may be coincidental. And it’s possible to find similarities between any two groups of languages if you try. Is this just fishing for data that fits a pre-conceived theory? Not being a linguist I won’t attempt to answer, but maybe some people on this Forum know more about it?

By the way, there’s a crazy theory out there based on ONE WORD proving that the British are of the Lost Tribes of Israel (honestly). The Hebrew word for “covenant” is “brith”, and it’s used in the Bible to describe the agreement between God and the Israelites (the Jews). The term “brith” is a transliteration - i.e. how the Hebrew sounds when written - in English here. In modern Hebrew it’s pronounced “Brit”. “Brith” was possibly a closer transliteration in Biblical times. As described in the Book of Kings, 2,500 years ago Assyria exiled the northern Israelite tribes. According to the theory, some of these people made it to the island(s) off the north-west coast of Europe. People of the Covenant? The Brits. The only credible part of all this is that it’s actually been proposed - I have no idea by who.
I rest my case…

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I haven’t found time yet to watch the video – I am at work – but have somehow managed to lose my lunch-hour down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole of British Israelism. I was trying to check if they did, as I was once told, claim that Saxons = “Isaac’s Sons” (they do), but also found further evidence, via Wikipedia, of the Welsh being one of the Lost Tribes, in that Assyrian annals apparently refer to Israel as Beth Khumbree (no idea about what transliteration system they’ve used to come up with that one…)

So, yes, both the English and the Welsh have been recruited to the cause of British Israelism, which turns out (disappointingly but unsurprisingly) to include a number of anti-Semites along with the nutters and amateur philologists; a search online led me to the website of the Church of the Great God, Inc. (that’s a Wikipedia link, BTW, so it’s fairly safe – the church website is here if anyone wants it), which claims:

Seems reasonable…

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Well, this is all fine by me. I’d be rather proud if I could prove that I had Welsh ancestry!

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A couple of quickies to revive this thread:

One came up when @aran et al came on the Oxford Welsh Learners’ boat trip – @CatrinLliarJones pointed out some willows on the bank and supplied the Welsh word helyg (with the usual rule for trees that that’s actually a collective, and you need helygen if it’s only one). With the usual change of *s- to h-, this turns out to be the same as Latin salix – as in ‘salicylic acid’ (aspirin) from willow-bark: Italian salice, Catalan salze, Spanish sauce, Portuguese salgueiro.

And another came up with me reading T Llew Jones’ pirate novel, Barti Ddu: rhwyfo ‘to row’, from rhwyf ‘oar’: the Latin is rēmus (-wy- comes from Latin -ē-, and the -f- is softened from -m- as usual). Italian, Portuguese and Spanish remo, Occitan and Catalan rem, French rame. And in English – ‘trireme’! :slight_smile:

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Oh, of course — I knew what the word for willow is in Latin as well as Cornish (helyk / helygen, same as the Welsh), but never made that connection! Thanks, Richard. :slight_smile:

And another quickie in the form of an article from Ninnau, the North American Welsh newspaper (which now incorporates Y Drych)


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