Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/17

 A certain number of the names still found on the map of England occur, mostly in widely different forms, in documents written during the Roman dominion, from fifteen hundred to two thousand years ago. There is a Roman military road-book of the second century, commonly called the Antonine Itinerary, which gives the distances, along the great highways, from one town to another. There is a work on Geography by Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria, written in Greek about A.D. 150, which records the latitudes and longitudes of British river-mouths, capes, and sometimes of towns. There are also Roman military documents of somewhat later date that contain many of our names; and others are to be found in various Latin writers from Caesar downwards.

Now these earliest records were written before the English—the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—came to this island. The names found in them must therefore belong to the language of the ancient Britons, unless indeed they were given by the still older inhabitants, in which case it would be hopeless to think of finding out their meaning. About the ancient British tongue we do know something, and many of our oldest names have been satisfactorily explained by its means.

The explanation, however, is not such an easy business as many popular writers imagine. It is a common delusion that the Britons of the second century spoke modern Welsh, and that therefore a Welsh dictionary is the only instrument needed for the translation of the British names that were written down by Romans eighteen hundred years ago. Now it is perfectly true that modern Welsh is, except for the large number of words that it has borrowed from other tongues, the direct descendant of the ancient British language. But modern research has established the fact that the British of the second century was a fully inflected language, which has developed into Welsh much in the same way as Latin has developed into French; namely, by dropping nearly all its