SPEAKING of Welsh
St. David’s Day, the poor cousin of St. Patrick’s Day, is an opportunity to reflect on the lasting legacy of Welsh culture and language.
On St. Patrick’s Day, this month, everyone in Montreal can pretend to be Irish. In late November, on St. Andrew’s Day, balls and dinners remind us of the influence of the Scots. But St. David’s Day, the first of March, is remembered by almost nobody except the Welsh, whose national day this is. A small but integral part of the United Kingdom — or, to those of a nationalist mindset, England’s oldest colony — Wales enjoys a remarkable history and culture. Its language inspired much of the Elvish that J.R.R. Tolkien invented for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Whereas the other Celtic languages, such as Breton, Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic, are in serious trouble, Welsh continues to thrive.
The puzzle has always been why Welsh contributed so few words to the language of its powerful neighbour. After the fall of the Roman Empire, most of the people living in Britain probably spoke a form of Welsh (technically speaking, that ancient language is known as Brittonic, and it was the direct ancestor of both Welsh and Cornish). But when Anglo-Saxons muscled onto the island from Europe, Welsh fell silent except in the mountains and green valleys of the west. It had little effect on the rapidly emerging English language — or so it’s usually said.
A newer understanding of what happened centuries ago involves not just the silencing of Welsh at the invaders’ hands but its quiet, lasting influence. Think of how in English we say “I’m reading a newspaper” or “I’m looking at a screen.” That verb form doesn’t exist in French, German, or most continental languages — but it’s common in Welsh and other Celtic tongues. So is our heavy reliance on the verb “do” (why, after all, should Englishspeakers say “I don’t understand” rather than the more logical “I understand not”?) When English was taking shape, linguists now believe, its speakers continued to rely on patterns of grammar that made sense in their old language. The syntax of English is built on a partially Welsh base.
The same is true for the placenames of England — some of which eventually migrated across the Atlantic. The festival town of Stratford in Ontario, for instance, rises from the banks of the Avon River; so does its namesake in the heart of England where William Shakespeare was born. But “afon” (in Welsh, the f is pronounced like a v) is the Welsh term for a river — so “River Avon” makes about as much sense as “Mount Mountain” or “Sea Sea.”
The English Avon flows through the ancient Forest of Arden, where Shakespeare set his great comedy As You Like It — and Arden is another Celtic word, originally meaning “highland.”
Some devoted fans of Shakespeare refer to him as the Bard, a Welsh word for a distinguished poet.
The most surprising Welsh expression in the English language has to be “penguin,” a bird that has never swum or waddled anywhere near British waters. “Pen” is the Welsh word for head or end, “gwyn” the Welsh for white. Originally the name was applied to the great auk, a flightless bird of the North Atlantic with a prominent white patch near its beak.
Great auks became extinct in the mid-19th century, the victims of relentless hunting.
By then, sailors venturing into the inhospitable waters of the Antarctic had come across other species of flightless bird that reminded them of what they knew from the north — and so “penguin” acquired its name. “Gull,” too, is a Welsh bird name that crossed over into English. As for “corgi” — the royal family’s favourite pet — it’s Welsh for dwarf dog.
If you’re not excited about this column, you may think it’s “balderdash.” In which case, you’d be using another term that has its origins in Welsh. Happy St. David’s Day — I mean, Dydd Gwyl Dewi hapus! A caption appeared in The Gazette in late February that, as David J. Cohen pointed out to me, should never have seen the light of print: “TerriJean Bedford, who challenged Canada’s prostitution laws, speaks to reporters after they were struck down by the Supreme Court on Dec. 20.” Our highest judges may not always be enamoured of the press, but they don’t parade around Ottawa clubbing journalists to the ground.