Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/220

Rh This is only a slight sketch of a considerable range of investigation, but the subject would require a book to itself, so that it is impossible here to do more than indicate the direction in which students of Cornish nomenclature should work. But in the investigation of place-names in any language one must always allow for corruption and alteration in the course of centuries, and in a Celtic country for the Celticising of names of non-Celtic derivation. Thus the well-known Welsh name Bettws is probably the old English bede-house (prayer-house), Gattws, less common, is gatehouse. The terminations aig, sgor, bhal, dail, ort, so common in the Hebrides and West Highlands, are Gaelic forms of the Norse vik, skjær, val, dal, fjord, and many names in those parts are altogether Norse, spelt Gaelic fashion, and have no meaning whatever in Gaelic. Probably the Cornish place-name Bereppa, Barrepper, Brepper, Borripper, of which instances occur in Gunwalloe, Penponds, Mawnan, and elsewhere, is only the French Beau-Repaire, and there are probably many other names of French derivation. Dr. Bannister's Glossary of Cornish Names is of so eminently uncritical a character as to be of little use. Though he had a wide knowledge of separate Cornish words, he was no philologist, and did not seem to understand how to put his words together. Had he only given the situation of the places —the name of the parish would have been something towards it—he would have left a basis for future work. As it is, the whole work needs to be done over again. Of course one need hardly say that out of such a large collection of names a considerable number of the derivations are quite correctly stated, but those are mostly the easy and obvious ones, and even easy ones are often wrong, and it was quite useless to encumber the glossary with the hopeless derivations of