Breton, Cornish and Welsh are thought to have originated in a language similar to the Gaulish Language in Continental Europe, known as Common Brittonic or Ancient British. We have little direct evidence of this Brittonic Language in...
moreBreton, Cornish and Welsh are thought to have originated in a language similar to the Gaulish Language in Continental Europe, known as Common Brittonic or Ancient British. We have little direct evidence of this Brittonic Language in England, that gave rise to Welsh and Cornish and Breton. The Bath 'curse tablet' is the only written example of Ancient British. The language is also known in place-names and in some personal names.
Unusually, the place-names don't preserve much of the language's grammar, and seem to date to a time when quite ordinary nouns had more specific or even religious meanings. An example of an Ancient British word is abonā for a river, likely with the stress on the final syllable. This is the origin of the name Avon, the name of several rivers in England. This implies that the word had some more important meaning than just being any river, this may be reflected in the grammar of the word as the ending-nā is probably later, so 'a river of abounding water' or similar? Modern Brythonic languages are very different from the Gaulish and Ancient British languages, and it often isn't possible to trace a development in Brythonic back to Gaulish. Similarly, a lot of the vocabulary isn't the same, whereas Gaulish tends towards IE roots similar to the Latin forms, such as-cue/-pe 'and', Brythonic has
