Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/18

 final syllables, and changing most of its sounds (so that the identity of the words is no longer recognizable except by those who know what the sound-changes have been), by losing many of its words, and by adopting words from other languages. Not a few of the supposed Welsh words which amateur etymologists are fond of using to explain ancient British names are actually known to be borrowed from English. Moreover, the Welsh dictionaries are very untrustworthy, and contain many words that never existed at all; some of them having been invented for the express purpose of accounting for place-names. Among these spurious coinages are caint and gwent, which the dictionaries tell us mean 'open or champaign country'. These figments are intended to explain the proper names Caint, which is Welsh for Kent, and Gwent, which is the name of the district round Caerwent in Monmouthshire. In innumerable popular books we are informed that the Romans latinized the British name Caint into Cantium. Now it is true that the ending -um is Latin; but the original British form was not Caint, but Cantion. Ptolemy's spelling is by accident quite correct, because Greek and British happened to agree in the form of neuter nouns of the o declension. The British name has become Caint in Welsh by dropping the ending and transferring the i to the first syllable, these being the regular processes of sound-development, which have been gone through by all words of similar form that have survived. In the fifth century, when the south-east corner of Britain was conquered, the name had probably lost its ending and become Canti, and was adopted by the English in that form. According to the well-known phonetic laws of Old English, this name regularly became Cent (C pronounced K); that is to say, the i first modified the a into e, and then dropped off. The Old English name