- Language and Society among the Insular Celts AD 400-1000 -
between the two - between the language of a Gildas and the spoken Latin, the lingua
Romana of Britain - implies the continuance of effective schools of grammar and
rhetoric; and that continuance, in its turn, implies the enduring high prestige of
standard Latin. In several parts of western Britain the Irish were established as rulers.
The anxiety of some of them to be commemorated in stone, both in Latin and in
Irish, shows an appreciation of the position of Latin: it remained the language of the
empire and of the church, and it may well also have been the language spoken, at least
in their grander moments, by the native aristocracy among whom they came to rule.
The insistence on the part of the settlers on using Irish as a language enjoying a status
equal to that of Latin is likely to have been a deliberate statement of the cultural
legitimacy as well as the distinctiveness of their rule in Britain.l08
The very name of Irish, Goidelc,I09 borrowed from Welsh Gwyddeleg, points to
western Britain.lIo A clear sense of linguistic nationality of the connection between
GoEdel and Goidelc, between the Irishman and the Irish language, would naturally
predominate in a multilingual community, and, therefore, as Goidelc suggests, in
Britain rather than in Ireland.!ll The name is unlikely to have been borrowed before
c.600;112 it thus attests the continuance into the seventh century of linguistic contact
and of a consciousness of distinct linguistic communities within western Britain.
Names for languages, Combrec, Goidelc, Laitin, were imported from multilingual
Britain into monolingual Ireland.l13
In Ireland also, however, we must allow for a considerable difference between the
language refined and elevated by the grammarian and the language of ordinary people.
This was true both of the imported Latin and of the native Irish. The
Welsh and Irish words for Lent, carawys and corgus, illustrate the less correct form of
Latin. Both derive from quadragesima via some such Late Latin spoken form
as ':·quaragess(a); neither can be explained as a direct borrowing from standard Latin.lI4
At the other extreme is an author such as Columbanus (ob. 615).1^15 His grammar and
style were evidently taken by him to Burgundy where he settled C.59I, since he was
already an educated man when he became a monk at Bangor (near the modern
108 This point is well made by A. Harvey, 'Early literacy in Ireland', p. 14, n. 51.
109 Auraicept na nEces, ed. Ahlqvist, The Early Irish Linguist, §§ 1. II, 12; 5.
110 David Greene, The Irish Language (Dublin, 1966), II; d. Welsh wy for Irish oi in a
borrowing going the other way, macwyf < mace coim).
III But see T.E O'Rahilly, 'The Goidels and their predecessors', Proceedings of the British
Academy 21 (1935): 323-7 (also publ. separately), for the view that a Brittonic language
was once spoken in Ireland; also his Early Irish History and Mythology (Dublin, 1946),
85-91.
112 It postdates w-> -gw in British, the date of which is uncertain and may have varied as
between Welsh, Cornish and Breton; see Language and History in Early Britain § 49
(especially pp. 389-91).
II 3 As Paul Russell has pointed out to me, an earlier Irish form of 'Latin' survives in the gen.
sg. in the title Dui! Laithne.
114 D. Greene, 'Some linguistic evidence relating to the British church', in M.W. Barley and
R.P.C. Hanson (eds) Christianity in Britain, 30D-700 (Leicester, 1968), 82.
115 C. Mohrmann, 'The earliest continental Irish Latin', Vigiliae Christianae 16 (1962):
216-33·