Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/311

Rh CELTIC LITERATURE 299 siderable ; Mr Edwin Norris thought it to be as great as that between French and Spanish. Besides the difference in their vocabularies, which is, of course, largely due to tho great number of words borrowed by the southern British dialects, especially by Cornish, we may mention the following points in which Cornish differs from Welsh, and these will serve to indicate the general character of the difference between the latter and the southern dialects as a whole : the retention in Cornish of an initial s combined with other consonants without prefixing y, e.g., scof, sco&amp;lt;l, spyryt, which in Welsh are weakened to ysgol, ysgwydd, and ysprydd ; the diphthongation of vowels in Welsh in cases where Cornish preserves the strong vowel, e.g., Cornish iron, torn, scouth, which are in Welsh trwyn, twym, and ysgwyd ; the better preservation of consonants in the middle of words in Cornish than in Welsh, e.g., Cornish hanter, steren, valtovat, canteuil, which have been reduced in Welsh to hanner, seren, gwallawiad, cant/11 ; and lastly the preservation in Cornish of a genitive case in complete con formity with the Irish. Age ot The question naturally suggests itself here, when did existing t ne original Celtic stem divide into the two branches branches described 1 and again, when did each of those branches dialects produce their dialects ] The late Mr Edwin Norris was of opinion that the separation took place after the arrival of the primitive stock in the British Islands. This opinion appears to be in entire conformity with all the facts of the case, ethnological, linguistic, and historical. We have already indicated that the Scottish Gaelic is an essentially modern dialect, which has an existence of only a few centuries. It is probable that pure Irish was spoken in the Isle of Man in the 6th and 7th centuries, that is, Irish exhibiting no greater dialectic variety than existed at the same period between any two provinces of Ireland itself, so that the Manx dialect must have grown up since then. Of the two branches the Irish is the most archaic, that is it has preserved more of the characteristics of the original stem. Among the British dialects the most archaic, that is, the one which best represents the British branch, is Cornish, which is the descendant of the speech of the un- Romanized Britons of England. This was also the opinion of Mr Norris, who held that the older the Welsh the more closely would it approximate to Cornish. It is indeed probable that the Welsh dialect originated in the 5th and 6th centuries, when the conquests of the Saxons began to isolate Wales from the other British-speaking people. The separation of Cornish and Armoric is still more recent, a fact which supports the story of the emigration of Britons to Armorica, and of long-continued intercourse during the early Middle Ages. Gaulish If the preceding view of the origin of the two branches language. O f Celtic and their respective dialects be correct, it disposes once for all of a very vexed question, namely, did old Gaulish belong to the Irish or to the British type, or, to put it more correctly, to which of those types would the dialects belong which would have grown up in France if Gaulish had not been suppressed by Latin ] The usual view has been that the Gaulish belonged to the same type as the British. Grimm s attempt to prove that the medical incantations contained in the book of Marcellns of Bor deaux, a physician of the 4th century, were Celtic of the Irish type led to a modification of this view. Ame dee Thierry assumed that the Gauls proper spoke a dialect of the Irish type, while the Belgse and the Gauls or Galatians of Asia Minor spoke Cymric or British. Such a view implies that Irish and British had already grown out of the original stem before the advent of the Celtic people in the British Islands and Gaul ; and further that two distinct waves of Celts had come into Western Europe, the first or oldest being the Goidelic or Irish, and the second the Cymric or British. Edward Lhuyd, the father of Celtic philology, long ago suggested an hypothesis of this kind as an explanation of the occurrence of geographical names in Britain which appeared to him to be Goidelic rather than Cymric. Zeuss threw the weight of his great authority into the scale in favour of the kinship of the old Gaulish and Cymric. The grounds on which he based his opinion have since, however, been altogether explained away, or their force much weakened, especially since the investiga tions of Gluck and Roget de Belloguet on the Gaulish voca bulary which has been collected from classic authors and in scriptions, and the increased knowledge of the Celtic dialects, the study of which Zeuss himself so powerfully promoted. Mediaeval Irish and Welsh manuscripts contain an Irish ethuic extensive body of legendary ethnology, which in the case of traditions. the Irish legends has been even fitted with a complete chronology. Setting aside the more fabulous parts of the Irish legends which refer to colonists who arrived a short time before and after the deluge, we find four successive colonies mentioned in the following order : Nemedians, Firbolgs, Tuatha De Danann, and Milesians. The Nemediam are said to have occupied the country during only two hundred years, when the greater part of them went away in three separate bodies, owing to the harassing attacks made upon them, and their final overthrow, by a people who appear in Irish legends as sea-rovers, called Fomorians. One body took refuge in Britain, another went to Thrace, and the third into the north of Europe. The Thracian party becaina the ancestors of the second colonizing race, the Firbolys. The Nemedians who went to the north of Europe appear afterwards as the Tuatha Be Danann; those who went i-nto Britain became the Britons. According to this legend three of the early tribes which peopled Ireland were of the same race with the Britons. The fourth and latest of the Irish races, the Milesians, or followers of Miled, are also connected with the others in the genealogies to be found in Irish manuscripts, but the rela tionship is much more distant than that which is represented to have existed between the other races. All Irish accounts of the early races inhabiting Ireland agree in bringing Miled from the north of Spain ; but in the early times when tho Irish ethnic stories received their present shape, the majority of people, not alone in Ireland, but everywhere, had very imperfect notions of geography, and often applied the few geographical names which had reached their ears by pure hazard, and generally without having more than the vaguest notions of the places they referred to. A perusal of Irish and, we may add, of Welsh poems and tales will bear out what is here stated. Spain in the Milesian story probably means no more than that the Milesians, whoever they were, came from a distance, and not from neighbouring countries with which the early Irish bad intercourse. Ethnic tradi tions as a rule do not add much to our knowledge, but it is always dangerous to ignore them altogether because they must necessarily contain some truth. Of all the Irish traditions of this class those only seem to possess real importance which relate to the mysterious people called the Tuatha De Danann. This name appears to mean the tribes of De and Ana; and as De is God, and Ana is called the mother of the Irish gods, these supposed invading tribes are only the deities in a system of mythology which has yet to be unravelled. All these deities descend from a common ancestor, the Irish Alldai, or All-God, and appear to form two lines the Acs mythology. Trebair and the Aes Side, probably analogous to the Teutonic Vanir and sEsir. The close resemblance between the Irish and Norse words Aes and jEsir can hardly be accidental. The former signifies a people ; the latter is connected with the Norse ans and the Anglo-Saxon 6s, God, which occurs in many men s names. The Sid was