A toponomastic contribution to the linguistic prehistory of the British Isles
Some wider ramifications: Celtic lexis
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- Final considerations
- Recapitulation
Some wider ramifications: Celtic lexis It is time to take stock. As noted earlier, there is no evidence for any Palaeohispanic impact on island nomenclature, except to the extent that the “Southern” presence of Q-Celtic Gaelic may itself represent a strand of such evidence if it arrived in the islands from Iberia. We have also seen that the same island nomenclature offers no support at all for Vennemann’s Vasconic hypothesis, but Vennemann himself would not expect his Vasconic herdsmen to be involved in the naming of island habitats (personal correspondence, 18/08/2008).20 A Semitic contribution to toponymy has been suggested on purely philological grounds. There is some further tantalizing evidence beyond what I have presented here which suggests that a Semitic connection should not be dismissed out of hand, and which tends to make the suggestions above less incredible. Beyond the small fistful of singleton island-names just presented (Uist, Iona, Seil, Islay, Mull, Sark, and perhaps Scilly, Ebudae/Hebrides, Thanet, Éire and Britain), there are further hints of contact with Semitic, this time in the common topographical and habitative vocabulary of Celtic and other place-names of the Celtic-speaking lands.21 The Proto-Celtic *ros- is semantically problematic, having the meanings ‘promontory’ and ‘moor’ (Padel 1985: 199-203). Within Indo-European, a single possible Indic cognate has been suggested (Sanskrit prasthas ‘plateau’, = lit. ‘that which stands forth’). But the first of these senses, which seems to be the earlier (in each of Irish, Welsh and Cornish), invites comparison with PrSem *ra’š also meaning precisely ‘headland, promontory’, in the specifically NWSem form with a backed, rounded and raised vowel (Phoenician *rōš ‘head, headland’; cf. Jongeling 2008: 405); cf. the note on Seil above whose suggested etymology may call for the same rounding of */a:/ (but here from earlier */a’/).22 It is conceivable that such a borrowed word may have been influenced by, and merged formally with, a distinct Celtic word having an original short vowel, since the vowel in the ‘promontory’ word was originally short in Celtic.23 Another height-word in Semitic is *rām24 as in the modern place-names Ramat Gan, Israel, and Ramallah, Palestine (PrSem root *rwm). It has been cautiously suggested that this might be seen in the Cornish place-name Rame which may allude to the conspicuous conically-shaped hill on a headland in this parish guarding the entrance to Plymouth Sound, whose modern pronunciation can be explained in terms of local English dialect conditions (Coates 2006: 7-8). The same root might be seen in a vocalically different form in the name of the island of R(h)um (recorded in the Annals of Ulster ostensibly in 677 in the genitive form Ruimm), whose name is not satisfactorily explained. Mac an Tàilleir (2003) is willing to call it “pre-Gaelic” in defiance of a prima facie formal case for Gaelic rùim ‘space’ (whose relation to Old Norse [ON] rúm ‘room, space’ is unclear) and of an earlier Indo-European proposal by Stokes, quoted by Watson (1926: 95, n.3). Rum happens to have mountains among the highest anywhere in the Western Isles except the Cuillins group on Skye and Ben More on Mull, including therefore the highest non-Cuillin peak except the latter. (Rum’s is Askival, 2664', 812m.) Haswell-Smith (2004: 138-43) agrees that Rum is “probably” pre-Celtic, but notes that alternative suggestions have included Old Norse rúm-øy ‘wide island’ (with the generic vanished from the record; not compatible with its appearance in the Annals of Ulster) or Gaelic “ì-dhruim” ‘isle of the ridge’ (also falling foul of the spelling in the early record; dismissed already by MacBain 1922: 77). In any case, it is difficult to think of Rum as “wide” since it is mountainous from every angle and has no “width” distinct from its “length”: it is subcircular, or in Whitley Stokes’s view rhomboid.25 This configuration also rules out a single perceptually dominant ridge. I therefore follow Mac an Tàilleir. Perhaps whilst */a:/ may generally give Celtic */o:/ (see Seil above and *ros-), it is conceivable that it was raised to *[u:] in the borrowing process where an original [w] followed. Paul Tempan suggests in correspondence (26/06/2010) that the name of Ram Head near Ardmore, Co. Waterford, may be analysed in the same way. Its Irish name is Ceann or Carraig an Ráma, and the final element has no known early forms and no known Irish etymology (Power 1907: 68). The headland is a less dramatic formation than the others mentioned here, to judge by photographs I have seen, but by compensation it is the extreme south-eastern tip of Ireland and therefore a seamark of the greatest conspicuousness and importance. Neo-Brittonic *bod- ‘dwelling’ (Welsh bod, Cornish bos; British *bot-) can be compared directly with PrSem *but- ‘hut’ (Orel and Stolbova 1994, s.v.) and, as a feminine noun, it is consistent with a Proto-Celtic *butā. Padel (1985: 25) suggests that the Brittonic word denoted or connoted a dwelling-place of humbler status than *treβ-, the standard word for ‘farm’ or ‘village’ in the Neo-Brittonic languages. Botis, the name generally taken to be that of the island of Bute in the Ravenna Cosmography has been analysed by Rivet and Smith (1979: 273) as being root-identical with the ‘dwelling’-word. A case can be made on formal grounds, and ‘dwelling(s) island’ might imply an entire territory marked by a difference of status expressed in building technology, or simply naming from a, or the, prominent settlement. On the grounds of a formally strong phonological similarity here, Bute is allocated a place in the candidate list at 13. above. The much-discussed OW cair ‘fort; (later) village’, Cornish ker ‘univallate curvilinear hillslope enclosure; village’, Breton kêr ‘village’ (Padel 1985: 51), still has no generally accepted explanation. Schrijver (1995: 447-448) suggests a connection with Old Irish cathir (genitive singular cathrach) ‘fortress, fortified town’, which is semantically beyond reproach but phonologically difficult despite the similarity being “too striking to be accidental”: the loss of [θ], or its transmutation into [j], remains unexplained. Derivation from Latin quadra ‘square’ (Pokorny 1949-50: 135) suffers from essentially the same phonological difficulty, as well as a semantic shift that is not outrageous but requires some justification. James (2007-) derives cair from a British *cagrā, making it root-cognate with Welsh cae ‘field’, reviving an earlier suggestion by Loth (1903: 299), who had acknowledged its provisional status, remarking: “Je ne vois aucun moyen sûr de se tirer d’affaire avec caer.” The suggestions of Loth and Pokorny were characterized by Padel (1985: 50) as the best suggestions available at the time of writing for a “difficult” derivation. Whilst I am fully in sympathy with the drive to provide a Western etymology, given the lack of agreement and for the purposes of the present context the word can be compared with the PrSem root *kpr ‘village’ (not recorded in NWSem, but cf. Ancient Hebrew kāpār (bound form kəpar), Modern Hebrew and Syriac kfar, Arabic kafr, Huehnergard 2000: kpr2; Orel and Stolbova 1994 give a base *kap- ‘house’27), with regular pan-Celtic loss of /p/ from a form like */kapir/, */kaper/. That would, of course, continue to leave it isolated from Old Irish cathir. Final considerations The suggestions in the previous section of the paper, like the earlier toponymic ones, are advanced with all due caution. It is possible, of course, that resemblances between Insular toponymical and topolexical material on the one hand, and firmly-established PrSem lexical roots on the other, are coincidental, but for me, there are too many to dismiss those resemblances casually. In a small way, the suggestions also display phonological consistency, especially as regards the possible treatment of */a:/ and the treatment of non-plain (i.e. uvular and other emphatic-series) consonants (they are lost if they are back fricatives and de-emphasized, i.e. de-uvularized, if they are plosives). The range of voiceless fricatives and affricates is reduced. But I have touched only lightly on the question of how PrSem consonant phonemes might have been represented in Celtic. The mentioned possibilities should be treated with caution, of course, because they reflect back, in part, the constraints of phonological plausibility I imposed on myself when searching PrSem sources. There may be inconsistencies in the implied phonological development of some of the items discussed here (as implicitly in Rame and Rám vs. Rum), but need not be if one allows for alternative vocalizations of the root, for either lexical or grammatical reasons. There is hardly anything that can be said on the basis of this evidence about vowels, or about morphology, that of Semitic being of course typologically quite different from that of Indo-European. All that remains is the possibility of glimpsing through a glass darkly the lexis of a language used in the British Isles in periods of settlement more remote than we can see through the lens of the known languages of the area.28,29 In making all these suggestions, I have proposed or implied no particular cultural context except the general probability of the settlement of the British Isles from the south, and deduced from evidence the possibility that one linguistic strand in that settlement might be represented by North-West Semitic with no detailed regard for the reasons that might have taken it there.30 But we cannot leave this important issue up in the air. The main aim of this paper has been to allow a modest amount of obscure data to speak for itself, from a purely linguistic perspective and with only limited amplification. But it is difficult to leave an argument which carries unexplored implications for prehistoric population movements or trading relations hanging in the air. At very least, we must think about what sort of contacts might have left place-names for major territorial units – islands – for their successors of other linguistic stocks to use, yet no recognizable archaeological traces and, so far as is known, no record of other aspects of their language (e.g. a community writing or speaking it). If we accept that the suggested evidence for the use in the British Isles of a Semitic language is valid, it is logically possible that the islands were populated by speakers of a Semitic or Semitic-like language who were linguistically overwhelmed but some of whose toponyms were accepted by their conquerors or absorbers. This is the point at which the inconclusive wider arguments about a Hamito-Semitic substratum in Celtic could plug in, but whilst the argument for such influence has been widely touted it has not generally been thought convincing enough to become orthodoxy (pace Vennemann and his predecessors, and those who have believed that such an influence on Celtic may have been transmitted on to English). In any case, the possibility of PrSem influence on Celtic is logically distinct from that for the use of PrSem in the islands, because PrSem influence on Celtic could have taken place in Iberia, meaning that we would still lack an explanation of how PrSem place-names got into the British Isles except, perhaps too implausibly, by wholesale transfer (naming-after). An alternative scenario would allow PrSem adstratal influence on established Celtic populations, e.g. with Phoenician/Punic traders as the bearers. This possibility runs into the evident difficulty that a presumably transient population must have left its names for some of the major topographical features of the area and that these were taken up by the inhabitants and used in preference to their own names for them.31 Sims-Williams (2011: 280, note 16) downplays any such difficulty, emphasizing that even if Ériu were of PrSem origin, that need not imply a settled presence of speakers of this language in Ireland. We could perhaps argue that these exonyms were the ones transmitted to other cultures by the traders, and that they then filtered back into local native usage in waves from more prestigious later “Southern” cultures, a possibility which Broderick (2009: 167, points 5.-7.) suggests.32 But what would serve very well as an analogy would be the discovery of names genuinely left on conspicuous geographical entities, especially coastal ones, by more or less transient populations, in a context where long-settled populations were the norm.33 The existence of such a name-set can be demonstrated, though the circumstances of its genesis do not match precisely what is known of the situation in prehistoric times. I know of no detailed study – in fact I do not believe it has ever been remarked on before – of the Scandinavian place-nomenclature which survives in the inner Bristol Channel and the Severn estuary, but this is a situation where the settled local population is universally believed to have spoken English and Welsh in their historic settings, and where there is no evidence in the local dialects for Scandinavian loanwords beyond those found generally in varieties of the two languages in England and Wales (PN Gl, Smith 1965, 4: 44). Smith either does not record, or does not comment specially on, any of the names discussed below: a body of names formulated in Scandinavian, a language spoken in the region only by people documented as raiders and traders, a few of whom may have become settlers no little distance away. These names are coastal, and in some cases denote local features where actual Scandinavian settlement is unthinkable, such as rocks in the sea. Let us list and discuss these names. Firstly, we need to note the existence of three Scandinavian settlement names close to the inner Severn Sea (by which I mean further up-channel than Pembrokeshire where there is a cluster of such names indicating compact settlement). The first two are in historic Glamorgan and the third in historic Monmouthshire: Homri, in St Nicholas, in the Vale of Glamorgan north of Cardiff, Womanby in St John, Cardiff, and Lamby, at the mouth of the Rumney river and now in east Cardiff (Charles 1938: 158, 163 and 240-241).34 These, with their Scandinavian specifiers combined with the characteristic element *bȳ- ‘farm, village’, are genuinely in an extreme minority, and, not being adjacent to each other, it is doubtful whether they can be viewed as forming a cluster. But there is other very solid evidence of toponymic influence in the wider surrounding area, which needs some discussion. The island of Flatholm, in St Mary’s parish, Cardiff, Glamorgan, is sometimes said (e.g. Watts 2004: 232) to contain Scand. floti ‘fleet’ plus holm ‘small island’ (on the basis of the spellings Flotholm recorded in 1375, the Floteholmes 1387; Charles 1938: 163, though Charles took the view that it contains ON flatr ‘flat; but NB the lexical expression flota-hólmr ‘an isle’ in Cleasby-Vigfusson). Watts links the name with the incidents reported in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle in, when a Viking fleet was starved out of the island (917, A version; the other versions say Steepholm). Flatholm is actually flat, by marked contrast with its English neighbour Steepholm. Whichever story we prefer, its name is of Scandinavian origin. The name of Steepholm has an English first element and presumably dates from a period when holm was borrowed into English in a range of senses (Smith 1956: 258-9), therefore by itself offering no evidence for Scandinavian in the region. There is a collection of shoals, reefs and banks in the Severn estuary which, despite the lateness of their first records, appear to have unmistakably Scandinavian names, that is, they contain elements which I have not found reported in regional English or Welsh lexis, but only in names. These include, far up the Severn and up to fifteen miles from the Cardiff area: Gruggy (in mid-Severn in Redwick, not in PN Gl), cf. ON grugg ‘mud; dregs’, gruggóttr ‘muddy’: seemingly Scand. *Grugg-ey- ‘mud island’ Leary Rock (in mid-Severn in Aust, PN Gl 3: 129 (from 1830)), cf. ON leirr, another word for ‘mud’: seemingly Scand. *Leir-ey- ‘mud island’ The Scars, cf. ON sker ‘rock, skerry’ (in mid-Severn in Redwick, not in PN Gl)
A reviewer of this paper [WHOM I WOULD BE DELIGHTED TO ACKNOWLEDGE BY NAME IF S/HE CONSENTED TO BE REVEALED] has suggested that these Scandinavian names may have persisted into the Middle Ages and beyond through being reinforced by Bristol Channel traders based in originally-Scandinavian Dublin, and even into the age of rutters and coastal charts. I freely accept this possibility, but the evidence for the continuity of the relevant names and vocabulary into the usage of any such traders, in dialect or on early maps, is lacking. Most of the names in this group should be treated with caution because of their late attestation, but there seems to be a consistent pattern for which any other systematic explanation is at least equally difficult. Here we have evidence of a toponymic layer which has been taken up by a settled community from a visiting community involved in trade in the broadest sense, even if only piracy. The Scandinavians eventually must have put down roots which found toponymic expression in the three Glamorgan villages mentioned above, but the other names just listed do not form a natural hinterland or sphere of influence of those villages, and yet they seem to be names taken over as such from the visitors. The history of this process is one which remains to be written. In that sense, this name-set can be compared with the one which is central to this paper, although I acknowledge immediately that the sets are of a different order of prominence in the toponymic landscape of their respective periods. Nevertheless, the Scandinavian evidence shows that it is possible for economic visitors to give topographical place-names to a people speaking a different language, and for those place-names to stick without evidence of the visitors’ language becoming part of the local ecology. From that perspective, then, the possibility of adstratal PrSem influence on Celtic-speaking communities in the British Isles in the later first millennium B.C.E. is one to be reckoned with, and should not be dismissed out of hand or from an entrenched viewpoint. Recapitulation It is best to set out finally, once again, the limits of what is proposed. The textual and philological evidence is restricted, and not always straightforward to interpret or uncontroversial. But what there is is compatible with the position that: a small but not negligible number of the anciently recorded names of some of the larger islands of Ireland and Britain are of Proto-Northwest-Semitic origin, and that the suggestion that they are should not be dismissed out of hand; it is defensible to interpret the existence of such names in the light of known and reasonably supposed incidents in the prehistory of the islands and of known analogies to their patterning. References Adams, G. B[rendan] (1980) Place-names from pre-Celtic languages in Ireland and Britain. Nomina 4, 46-63. Bennett, K. D., J. A. Fossitt, M. J. Sharp, and V. R. Switsur (1990) Holocene vegetational and environmental history at Loch Lang, South Uist, Western Isles, Scotland. New Phytologist 114.2, 281-298. Broderick, George (2006) A dictionary of Manx place-names. Nottingham: English Place-Name Society. Broderick, George (2009) The names of Britain and Ireland revisited. Beiträge zur Namenforschung 44, 151-157. Broderick, George (2010) Indo-European and non-Indo-European aspects to the languages and place-names in Britain and Ireland – the state of the art. In P. Sture Ureland, ed., From the Russian rivers to the North Atlantic – migration, contact and linguistic areas. Berlin: Logos (Studies in Eurolinguistics, vol. 7), 29-63. Burd, F[iona] (1989) Saltmarsh survey of Great Britain: an inventory of British saltmarshes. Research and Survey in Nature Conservation 17. Peterborough: Nature Conservancy Council. Charles, B. G. (1938) Non-Celtic place-names in Wales. London: University College Mediæval Studies 1). Cleasby, Richard, ed. Gudbrand Vigfusson (1874) An Icelandic-English dictionary, 1st edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press, online at lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/html/oi_cleasbyvigfusson/a0001.html, accessed 2 August 2010. Coates, Richard (1988a) Periplus: a voyage round The Solent. In Toponymic topics. Brighton: Younsmere Press, 1-20. Coates, Richard (1988b) Uist = Ibiza. In Toponymic topics. Brighton: Younsmere Press, 21-23. Coates, Richard (1991) The ancient and modern names of the Channel Islands: a linguistic history. Stamford: Paul Watkins. Coates, Richard (2000) Thanet and its alternative name in the “Historia Britonum”. In Richard Coates and Andrew Breeze, with David Horovitz, Celtic voices, English places. Stamford: Shaun Tyas, 32-39. Coates, Richard (2006) Rame. [Last section in] An etymological miscellany. In Muscotter. Brighton: Younsmere Press, 3-9, at 7-8. Coates, Richard (2007a) South-western English dumball, dumble, dunball, ‘pasture subject to (occasional) tidal flooding’. Journal of the English Place-Name Society 39, 59-72. Coates, Richard (2007b) Yell. Journal of Scottish Name Studies 1, 1-12. Coates, Richard (2009) A glimpse through a dirty window into an unlit house: names of some north-west European islands. In Wolfgang Ahrens, Sheila Embleton and André Lapierre, eds, Names in multi-lingual, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic contact. Proceedings of the 23rd International Congress of Onomastic Sciences, 17-22 August 2008, York University, Toronto, Canada. Toronto: York University (published on CD-ROM, ISBN 978-1-55014-521-2), 228-242. Coates, Richard (2010) Review of Filppula et al. (2008). Language 86.2, 441-444. Coles, Bryony J. (1998) Doggerland: a speculative survey (Doggerland: une prospection spéculative). Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 64, 45-81. Download 302.73 Kb. 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