- Chapter Thirty-Six -
IN NOMINE D(e)I SUMMI INCIPIT. CRUX. SALUATORIS. QUAE
PREPARAUIT SAMSONI :. APATI PRO ANIMA SUA: [ET] PRO ANIMA
IUTHAHELO REX :. ET ARTMALI :. ET TEC[AI]NThe grammar more or less survives as long as the inscription keeps to formulae - the
bookish incipit, crux saluatoris and pro anima - but as soon as it goes further it
betrays a complete ignorance of Latin morphology. Yet, however incompetent the
magistri of Llanilltud Fawr may have been in the ninth and tenth centuries, they used
Latin, not Welsh, for such weighty purposes as the commemoration of abbots and
kings.
The relationship between Latin and Welsh had, therefore, changed fundamentally
since the sixth century. As a spoken language Welsh cannot have had low status in
the ninth century for the good reason that it was spoken by all native inhabitants of
every British kingdom, whatever their rank. As a written language, however, it
reached only as far as the margins and the interlinear spaces of surviving manuscripts.
Evidence of any wider use of written Welsh is uncertain and confined to poetry.92
In Brittany and Cornwall the situation was even less favourable to the wide use of a
written vernacular. A high social status was attained by the Brittonic languages once
the aristocracy and even churchmen ceased to use Latin as their normal means of
communication; this did not, however, make much difference to the predominance
of Latin over Welsh as a language of written learning. Legenda, Welsh lien, 'things
which ought to be read', remained in Latin.
On the rise in the status of Welsh (or British, Combrec), Cormac again offers
valuable evidence. As we have already seen, he was interested in loanwords. This
interest led him to a concern with the phonological changes undergone by a word
when it was borrowed from one language into another. Following a Latin tradition,
he saw this process as one of deformation, corruptio - the result of the speaker
adapting a foreign word to fit the sound-system of his own language. In this per-
ception of linguistic borrowing, the source of loan-words and the source of corruptio
are necessarily opposed. Corruptio stems from the speech-habits of the recipient,
while the pronunciation of the donors is automatically correct. The word belongs to
the ultimate donor-language.
One of the clearest examples of Cormac's perception of the linguistic traffic
between Ireland and Britain is his account of Patrick's oath.^93 The head-word is
modebroth, but Cormac went on to explain that this was an incorrect pronunciation
on the part of the Irish: 'it ought to be pronounced thus: muin duiu braut'. Cormac's
rendering of an Old Welsh version of the oath gave him what he believed ought to
be the pronunciation, as opposed to the corrupt version of the Irish: linguistic
corruption is thus contrasted with how something should be said.
92 D.N. Dumville, 'Early Welsh poetry: problems of historicity, in B.F. Roberts (ed.) Early
Welsh Poetry: studies on the Book of Aneirin (Aberystwyth, 1988),4-7.
93 Sanas Cormaic (YBL), no. 850; how far Patrick could have said any such thing is not my
concern: for this see Ifor Williams, The Beginnings of Welsh Poetry, 14-15; Jackson,
Language and History in Early Britain, 633; J.T. Koch, 'The loss of final syllables and loss
of declension in Brittonic', 212-14.720