Page:Morris-Jones Welsh Grammar 0007.png

§ 5 period we have only echoes, such as the names found in Bede, § 113 i (4).

(O. W.), from the beginning of the 9th to the end of the 11th century. The remains of this period are a number of glosses, and some fragments of prose and anonymous verse. But O. W. forms are preserved in later copies in the genealogies, the Book of Llandâf, the Laws, the Book of Aneirin, etc.

(Ml. W.), from the beginning of the 12th to the end of the 14th century and somewhat later. The orthography varied much during this period, and was at first in an unsettled state. It will be convenient to refer to the language of the 12th and early 13th century as Early Ml. W., and to that of the 14th and early 15th as Late Ml. W.

(Mn. W.), from Dafydd ap Gwilym to the present day. Though D. ap Gwilym wrote before the end of the 14th century, he inaugurated a new period in the history of the language, and is in fact the first of the moderns. The bards of the 15th and 16th centuries wrote the bulk of their poetry in the cywydd metre popularized by Dafydd; and the forms used by him, with some alterations of spelling (ai, au for ei, eu § 79), were preserved unchanged, having been stereotyped by the cynghanedd. The language of this body of poetry may be called

At the introduction of printing, Wm. Salesbury attempted in his works, including the New Test. (1567), to form a new literary dialect, in which the orthography should indicate the etymology rather than the sound. His practice was to write Latin loanwords as if no change had taken place in them except the loss of the ending, thus eccles for eglwys 'church', descend for disgyn ‘to descend’; any native word with a superficial resemblance to a Latin synonym was similarly treated, thus i ‘his, her’ was written ei because the Latin is eius (perhaps eu ‘their’ suggested this). But Dr. Morgan in his Bible (1588) adopted the standard literary language as it continued to be written by the bards, though he retained some of Salesbury’s innovations (e.g. ei for i ‘his’). Some dialectal forms used by Morgan (e.g. gwele for gwelai ‘saw’ § 6 iii) were replaced by the literary forms in the revised Bible (1620), which became the standard of later writers. Thus