- Language and Society among the Insular Celts AD 400-1000 -
of a recognized orthography for Welsh shows that it had a widely acknowledged
status as a written language.
The contrast, however, with Irish remains. While Irish was, from the fifth and
sixth centuries, admitted to a dignity second only to that of Latin, whether in inscrip-
tions or in grammars, Welsh scarcely appears in inscriptions at all and the earliest
grammar is late medieval. Irish soon became a language written for all purposes -law,
poetry, narrative, exegesis - while the range of surviving written Old Welsh is
much more limited. Poetry seems to have been the principal early medium in which
Welsh attained high status, to be followed only later by law and prose narrative. The
explanation of the contrast lies in the historical conditions of the fifth and sixth
centuries. While Irish entered Britain in the late Roman and post-Roman periods as
the language of a conquering people, British had long been greatly inferior in status
to Latin and was to remain so for centuries. There was perhaps a rise in the status
of British in the sixth and seventh centuries as the Britons gained some control of
the Irish Sea, but on their eastern frontier the great movement from British to
English speech, and therefore from British to English nationality continued apace
until the eighth century. Even in Brittany, the Gallo-Roman neighbours of the
Bretons preferred to throw in their lot with the long-haired Merovingians rather than
with their former fellow citizens of the empire, exemplary in their Romanitas though
the hair-cuts of Breton laymen may have been.17o
Because British had low status by comparison with Latin, Irish and English, it was
more subject to external influence. Much the most important such influence was that
of Latin. In vocabulary and even in grammar, British was strongly marked by the
centuries of political subjection to Rome and cultural subjection to Latin. The
existence of a pluperfect in Welsh, Cornish and Breton, but not in Irish, has been
attributed to the example of Latin.^171 While such a theory cannot be demonstrated,
it is a serious possibility. Similarly, the use of compound prepositions is widespread
in Late Latin and in the Brittonic languages, as in Welsh oddiwrth or Latin usque ad
in and desuper.^172 More generally, British lay within two linguistic zones. The first
was constituted by the Latin-speaking part of the empire; British, together with all
varieties of Late Latin, but unlike Irish and English, shared the loss of distinctive
vowel length and extensive loss of declension. The second linguistic area was a
northern European zone to which the Insular Celtic and Germanic languages
170As suggested by the Excerpta de Libris Romanorum et Francorum (Canonesa Wallici), c.
61 (ed. Bieler, The Irish Penitentials, p. 148).
171 P. Mac Cana, 'Latin influence on Brittonic: the pluperfect', Latin Script and Letters:
Festschrift presented to Ludwig Bieler on the occasion of his 70th Birthday (Leiden, 1976),
194-203. Paradigms are given by H. Lewis and H. Pedersen, A Concise Comparative
Celtic Grammar (Gottingen, 1961), § 460 = H. Pedersen, Vergleichende Grammatik der
keltischen Sprachen, 2 vols (Gottingen, 19°9-13), § 615.
172 D. Greene, 'Some linguistic evidence relating to the British church', 76, following A.
Sommerfelt, 'External versus internal factors in the development of language', Norsk
Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap 19 (1960): 304; M. Leumann, lB. Hofmann and A. Szantyr,
Lateinische Grammatik, II: Syntax und Stilistik (Munich, 1965), § 160; Vaananen,
Introduction au latin vulgaire, § 203 (on adverbs); D.S. Evans, A Grammar of Middle
Welsh (Dublin, 1964), e.g. § 223.735