Note 57 — Chapter IX · Place-name Stories

Among the reasons which have been suggested for the latter overlooking and effacing the play on the place-names, I have hinted that he did not always understand them, as they sometimes involved a language which may not have been his. This raises the question of translation: if the story was originally in Goidelic, what was the process by which it passed into Brythonic? Two answers suggest themselves, and the first comes to this: if the story was in writing, we may suppose a literary man to have sat down to translate it word for word from Goidelic to Brythonic, or else to adapt it in a looser fashion. In either case, one should suppose him a master of both languages, and capable of doing justice to the play on the place-names. But it is readily conceivable that the fact of his understanding both languages might lead him to miscalculate what was exactly necessary to enable a monoglot Brython to grasp his meaning clearly. Moreover, if the translator had ideas of his own as to style, he might object on principle to anything like an explanation of words being interpolated in the narrative. In short, one could see several loopholes through which a little confusion might force itself in, and prevent the monoglot reader or hearer of the translation from correctly grasping the story at all points as it was in the original. The other view, and the more natural one, as I think, is that we should postulate the interference of no special translator, but suppose the story, or rather a congeries of stories, to have been current among the natives of a certain part of South Wales, say the Loughor Valley, at a time when their language was still Goidelic, and that, as they gradually gave up Goidelic and adopted Brythonic, they retained their stories and translated the narrative, while they did not always translate the place-names occurring in that narrative. Thus, for instance, would arise the discrepancy between banw and Amanw, the latter of which to be Welsh should have been rendered y Banw, ‘the Boar.’ If this is approximately what took place, it is easy to conceive the possibility of many points of nicety being completely effaced in the course of such a rough process of transformation. In one or two small matters it happens that we can contrast the community as translator with the literary individual at work: I allude to the word Trwyth. That vocable was not translated, not metaphoned, if I may so term it, at all at the time: it passed, when it was still Trēth-i, from Goidelic into Brythonic, and continued in use without a break; for the changes whereby Trēth-i has become Trwyth have been such as other words have undergone in the course of ages, as already stated. On the other hand, the literary man who knew something of the two languages seems to have reasoned, that where a Goidelic th occurred between vowels, the correct etymological equivalent in Brythonic was t, subject to be mutated to d. So when he took the name over he metaphoned Trēth-i into Trēt-i, whence we have the Porcus Troit of Nennius, and Twrch Trwyd57 in Welsh poetry: these Troit and Trwyd were the literary forms as contrasted with the popular Trwyth. Now, if my surmises as to Echel and Egel are near the truth, their history must be similar; that is to say, Echel would be the literary form and Ecel, Egel the popular one respectively of the Goidelic Ecell. A third parallel offers itself in the case of the personal name Arwyli, borne by one of Echel’s companions: the Arwyl of that name has its etymological equivalent in the Arwystl- of Arwystli, the name of a district comprising the eastern slopes of Plinlimmon, and represented now by the Deanery of Arwystli. So Arwystli challenges comparison with the Irish Airgialla or Airgéill, anglicized Oriel, which denotes, roughly speaking, the modern counties of Armagh, Louth, and Monaghan. For here we have the same prefix ar placed in front of one and the same vocable, which in Welsh is gwystl, ‘a hostage,’ and in Irish giall, of the same meaning and origin. The reader will at once think of the same word in German as geisel, ‘a hostage,’ Old High German gīsal. But the divergence of sound between Arwystl-i and Arwyl-i arises out of the difference of treatment of sl in Welsh and Irish. In the Brythonic district of Mid-Wales we have Arwystli with sl treated in the Brythonic way, while in Arwyli we have the combination treated in the Goidelic way, the result being left standing when the speakers of Goidelic in South Wales learnt Brythonic58.