Note 2080 — THE ETHNOLOGY OF ANCIENT BRITAIN (continued 2)

It may be worth mentioning that Professor Rhys has affirmed (The Welsh People, p. 13) that the language of the British Goidels shows more traces of having been influenced by contact with the language of the non-Aryan aborigines than that of the Brythons. This fact, if it were a fact, would obviously be a further argument, if such were needed, against the view that the Goidels were the latest Celtic invaders of Britain. One expects, of course, to find that the professor changed this view, which was published in 1900; and accordingly we read in the address which he delivered in the same year to the British Association (Report, &c., p. 896) that ‘the syntax of insular Brythonic is no less non-Aryan than that of Goidelic’. Naturally in 1902 (The Welsh People, 3rd ed., p. 13) he repeated the former statement.