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.

Date:
[1891?]
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 Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    formidable warrior when he is only seven years old. But what I wish^ you clearly to understand is, that the word which was maqui iu Early Guidelic must have been mapi in Early Brythonic, that the same diflference extends to other words, and that it dates before the dawu of Celtic history. So far I have only instanced a consonant, and this will probably call to your minds Voltaire's defiuition of etymology as the science in which the vowels did not matter at all, and the consonants very little. There used to be some truth in that, but of late the vowels of the Aryan languages have been so minutely studied that the whole subject of Aryan philology has withiu the last few years been completely revolutionized, aud that we have all had to practice, so to say, a liew scale, a subtle chromatic scale as com- pared with the very easy one in which the older philologists eternally harped on the same three notes, a, i, u. This difficult exercise has recently proved the means of spoihng several good tempers, for nothing could be more trying for men wont to discourse genially and elegantly on the simplicity of early Aryan institutions, language included, than to find this simplicity to be mainly of their own cerebration. In deference then to the recently established importance of Aryan vowels, I must give you a vocalic instance to place alongside of the consonantal one to which I have just alluded, but I will only mention the tendency which the Brythous had in certain periods of their history to narrow a long u into a long i, or to a sound somewhat resembling the French u of wie, and other words of the same class. The Groidelic word for a dog or hound will do for our purpose. It is, as many of you doubtless know, cu (genitive co?i) which is the same word as the English hound, aud its u is represented by the ou of the English worJ, but in Welsh the vowel has been unrounded into i, the Welsh word being ci. I may men- tion in passing that you have a form of cii iu the name of the neighbouring town of Liuhthgow, which means the lake of Liatkchu or Grey Dog; the word appears to occur also with the correct Goidelic genitive as Linliathchon; and on the other side of the island we have the name of the great city of Glasgow, which is probably but a modified pronunciation of Glaschu,
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