- Language and Society among the Insular Celts AD 400-1000 -
When the examples of linguistic borrowing in Cormac's Glossary are assembled,
it soon becomes clear that the traffic, in general, is one way. It may be tabulated as
follows:
Latin> Welsh> Irish: no. 2I I, presbyter> premter > cruimther.
Welsh> Irish: no. I24, bracaut > broc6it.
Latin> Welsh: no. 327, consilium > cusyl.
Latin> Irish: no. 852, mater> mathair.
For Cormac, then, Latin was always the donor, Irish always the recipient; Welsh was
both. Put another way, Irish corrupts, Latin is corrupted, while Welsh both corrupts
and is corrupted. In these terms, we may say that, although Latin was evidently the
language which enjoyed the highest prestige, Welsh now shared to some extent in that
prestige in that it offered a staging-post for the journey from Latin to Irish, as well as
being an independent source of loans. That Latin was, as one would expect, of higher
status than Welsh, is suggested by a contrast between Cormac's treatment of two
words, dobar and mathair. Dobar, as he rightly says, is a word common to Irish and
Welsh.^94 Neither language is said to have borrowed the word, and therefore neither
has corrupted it. On the other hand, Irish mathair is said to be a corruption of Latin
mater rather than, as it is, a word common to the two languages.^95 Latin is inevitably
seen as the donor, whereas Welsh may be put upon the same level as Irish.
Two developments may lie behind the improved status of Combrec in Cormac's
eyes. The first is its association with Patrick, already regarded, even in Munster, as
the apostle of the Irish. Patrick the Briton may have been, along with thousands of
his compatriots, the slave of an Irishman, but in the eyes of Heaven the shepherd-
boy of Miliucc was of higher rank than any Irish king or druid. Second, whereas in
Patrick's day the Irish dominated the western sea-approaches to Britain, by the end
of the seventh century the Britons appear to have established a grip on the Irish Sea.^96
Britons were now able to invade the very areas in the province of Ulster where
Patrick was believed to have served Miliucc.
In spite of its acknowledged debt to Patrick, Ireland offered a sharp contrast with
Britain in the matter of language. What is more, it did so from the start. The ogam
alphabet was probably invented in the late Roman period by an Irishman who knew
Latin well but wished his own language to enjoy a status equal to that of the language
of Imperial Rome.^97 The peoples across the frontiers of the empire were both attracted
and repelled by Roman civilization. They might desire to take what they wanted94 Sanas Cormaic (YBL), no. 3 I I.
95 Sanas Cormaic (YBL), no. 852.
96 Annals of Ulster, ed. S. Mac Airt and G. Mac Niocaill (Dublin, 1983), s.a. 697.10; 702.2;
7°3. 1 ; 71 1.5; 71 7.5.
97 A recent discussion of the conditions in which the ogam alphabet must have been created
is A. Harvey, 'Early literacy in Ireland: the evidence from ogam', Cambridge Medieval
Celtic Studies 14 (Winter 1987): 1-15; his arguments about Latin literacy in Ireland only
hold if ogam was not invented by an Irishman in Britain, as suggested by Jackson,
Language and History in Early Britain, p. 156. There is still much of value in Harvey's
argument (notably p. 14, n. 51) even if one subscribes to Jackson's view.7 2I