The Rhind lectures in Archaeology in connection with the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland : delivered in December, 1889, on the early ethnology of the British Isles / by John Rhys.

  • John Rhys
Date:
1890-91
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Rhind lectures in Archaeology in connection with the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland : delivered in December, 1889, on the early ethnology of the British Isles / by John Rhys. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    still more inconvenient and misleading to speak of the Welsh, the Cornish, and the Bretons as Britannic or British, seeing that those adjectives lead off with connotations of their own. So recourse has here also been had to the native vocabulary, according to which the Welsh word for a Briton, Latin Britto, is Brython ‘ a Briton or Welshman ; ’ and the language of the peoples of this group is termed in Welsh Brythoneg, one of the names also of the Welsh language, while in Cornish and Breton, it is Brethonec and Brezonec, meaning those dialects re- spectively: Brython in its various forms is to be regarded as the national name of all this group, as Goidel or Gael is of the other. Briefly, you have to classify the Celts of the present day into Goidels and Brythons: at the one pole you have your Gaels of the Highlands, and at the other my countrymen in Wales; and you will be proof against the fascination of much of the nonsense talked of the Celts, if you will always bear in mind that Gaels and Welshmen are no less unintelligible to one another, to say the least of it, than would be the in- habitants of Edinburgh and Berlin. This classification is dictated by the phonology of the Neoceltic languages, as illustrated by two or three very obvious differences. One of the most palpable of these differ- ences is presented to us in the fact that the Goidels have re- tained a guttural, where the Brythons have labialized it into another kind of consonant. Take for instance macc or mac, which is the word for boy and son in all the Goidelic dialects. The genitive of this word as found in the early Ogam inscrip- tions of Ireland, was maqui, which would have been in early Brythonic mapi, and the Old Welsh form for all cases was in fact map (now mdb) ‘ boy or son ; ’ and we can trace the in a derivative word v/hich carries us back to the time of the Roman occupation, namely, in mabon, ‘ a child or boy,’ a word applied in old Welsh poetry to the infant Jesus. This word mabon in its ancient form o'f Mapon, is applied to a Celtic god called in Latin, Apollo Maponus, on a fine monument of pagan piety at Hexham. He was so called, doubtless, in reference to the perennial youthfulness of the Celtic Apollo : this kind of hero of Celtic stories is, I may mention in passing, a great and
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