Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 5.djvu/445

 io* S.V.MAY 12, 1906.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

365

Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief, Taffy came to my house And stole a leg of beef.

and goes on to tell how the predominant partner returns the visit, and hurls at the Cymro a handy vessel

quam Belus et omnes A Belo soliti : turn facta silentia tectis.

I have often heard "took" in the fourth line in place of "stole," and the readiest Welsh for that would be cymmerodd. If I had to express in Welsh " Mr. B., you will, of course, take the chair at the meeting?" "Certainly," it would probably assume this form : " Mr. B., fe gymrwch y gader wrth gwrs yn y cyfarfod ? " " Cymra, cymra."

One or two typical forms may here be added :

Eng.

Literary S.W. N.W.

Welsh. dialect. dialect.

cymmeryd cymryd. cymyd to take,

fegymmeraf mi gymra mi gyma I'll take,

fe gymmerais mi gymres mi gymis I took.

The reader will see that the accented middle syllable of the literary form is absent from the dialectal ones, which thus go with the Irish derivatives of commur ; and that the N,W. dialect also omits the r which persists in every form of the S.W. word. There is no need to remind him that Goidelic and Brythonic tribes contemporaneously in- habited Wales long after the departure of the Romans and the introduction of Christianity into this island. What many, however, do not know is that one N.W. pro- nominal form for "they" is nhivythe, that the corresponding form in the S.W. dialect is hivynt-hwy, and that this difference has given rise to the nickname Hivntivsa, term used throughout North Wales for the men of the South.

An example of the way in which a topo- graphical term used independently in more than one district may suddenly emerge into prominence under special circumstances is furnished by Plutarch in his life of Marius. He tells us that the Ambrones were the first part of the combined body of invaders to come to blows with Marius's army, and that the Ligurians in the latter force were the first to meet them. The Ligurians heard the war-cry "Ambrones!" instantly recog- nized it as a clan-name of their own, and took it up themselves. The Ambrones were defeated, and their name at once sank into its previous obscurity ; but we can easily see that it might have become a name of dread had the issue of the struggle been different. The Ambrones are said to have been a por-

tion or canton of the Celtic Helvetii, and the name is undoubtedly of the same origin as the Irish form of aber, which also appears as the name of a Teutonic folk, the Sicambri a term that appears in Welsh in Abersein (cf. Lochaber and Fochabers).

I may add that the Welsh phrase corre- sponding to "English and Welsh" is Cymry a Saeson, while that corresponding to "Eng- land and Wales " is Cymru a Lloegr. I have no idea what the word Lloegr really means ; but one of the most southerly trade-routes between Italy and the English Channel, across France, in ancient times, was along the valley of the Loire, the old name of which Liger or Ligeris, probably means the river of the Ligurians.

Now I venture to submit that the word Cymru is much more likely to have come into being in a special sense (if a special sense is insisted on), in a hill country full of glens, and peopled by tribes hostile to, or contemptuous of, each other, who used the same or closely related terms with a con- spicuous difference of pronunciation, in the way suggested by Hwntiv, than to have sprung from Gombrox, whose existence is purely theoretical.

Prof. Rhys says ('Celtic Britain,' p. 139) that it was during the effort of the Brython to expel the Angles from his country that he

" began to call himself a Kymro, that is t9 say, Cym-bro (Combrox), or compatriot, the native of the country, the rightful owner of the soil, which he thought it his duty to hold against the Ail-fro (Allobrox), as he called the invader who came from another land."

I do not know how much of that is history and how much of it is theory, but I know that it has been taken for history, and that an eminent Celtic scholar in France (M. Loth) has gone so far as actually to " emend " the Combro?iensis that he found in a Breton chartulary into Combro^ensis, on the strength of it.

My own humble opinion is that my Brythonic ancestor, the "man of Ardudwy"" of the dim times that witnessed the birth of Cymru, was much more likely to call his Goidelic neighbours to the south and north of him Cymry, because they mispronounced derivatives of their common cymmer^ than because he looked upon them as his " com- patriots."

In the Pembrokeshire dialect Cymry is sounded Cimry (there is no phonetic impor- tance to be attached to the final vowel, which might just as well be i as u or y). The Cymmeric of Dorsetshire (Carnaric in Domes-