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I. WELSH STUDIES LANGUAGE
By DA vm THORNE, Senior Lecturer in Welsh Language and Literature, St David's University College, Lampeter
I 0 GENERAL Brynley F. Roberts, 'Y Tywysog Louis-Lucien Bonaparte (I8I3- I 8g I)', Y Traethodydd, I 46: I 46-6 I, is an account of the linguistic interests of Bonaparte and an assessment ofhis contribution to Celtic studies. David Thorne, 'Cymreigyddion y Fenni a dechreuadau ieitheg gymharol yng Nghymru', NLWJ, 27:97-107, describes an attempt to introduce comparative linguistic scholarship to Wales at the Cymreigyddion eisteddfod of I842. 'Celtic Languages', Camp• bell, Compendium, 274-77, presents a general introduction to the origin of Celtic expansion and gives some account of the P-Celtic, Q-Celtic split. 'Welsh', ib., I444-5 I, consists of a brief historical introduction to Welsh language literature followed by a potted commentary on phonology and syntax. ·
2. GRAMMAR Peter Wynn Thomas, 'The Brythonic consonant shift and the development of consonant mutation', BBCS, 3 7, I ggo: I-42, proposes an alternative theory of the development of word- and phrase• internal Brythonic plosives as presented by Kenneth Jackson in Language and History in Early Britain; T. argues that the developments in question should be regarded as part and parcel of a single consonant shift common to the three neo-Brythonic languages, but generating similar results only word-internally. Bob Morris Jones, 'Linguistic causes of change in pronominalization in children's Welsh', ib., 43-70, is the latest in a series of significant papers analysing children's speech patterns; the current discussion argues that internal grammatical influences, together with sociolinguistic material, must be considered when examining the pattern oflinguis• tic change. Rhian M. Andrews, 'Ys.rym,yssit', ib., 7 I-88, demonstrates that, although these verbal forms have a copula as an initial element, s6o Welsh Studies they are used to express being; it is also suggested that they were accentuated on the ultima. Toby D. Griffen, 'Old Welsh ll and rh', ib., 8g-103, continues his discussion, based on dynamic analysis, of the process of eclipsis in the Welsh consonant system. Joseph F. Eska, 'Syntactic notes on the great inscription ofPeiialba de Villaster', ib., 104-07, seeks to interpret points of syntax in the text of the Hispano-Celtic inscription. Jenny Rowland, ib., I Ig-20, has a note on the orthography of Awdl XLV in the 6th-c. poem Y Gododdin. Britain 40o-6oo: Language and History, ed. Alfred Bammesburger and Alfred Wollmann, Heidelberg, Carl Winter, Universitatsverlag, 485 pp., has a series of contributions on the prehistory of the Celtic languages in Britain: Karl Horst Schmidt, 'Late British' (I 2 I -48), reviews the sources available for the study of the neo-Brittonic languages and discusses the date of the emergence of the languages as well as the causes of structural change and the relative speed of change in Early Brittonic; D. Ellis Evans, 'Insular Celtic and the emergence of the Welsh language' (I 49-77), notes the problems involved in the study of the transition from Old Celtic to Neo-Celtic and concludes that, despite the healthy state of scholarship in this area, it is not possible to demonstrate, as yet, how and when theW elsh language emerged from an earlier Insular form of Celtic; John T. Koch, '*Cothairche, Esposito's theory and Neo-Celtic lenition' (179-202), discusses the evidence which shows that Patrick belongs to a period between the mid 4th and early 5th c. during which period archaic Christian borrowings entered Irish: K. argues that the phonetic reality of these loanwords realizing Old Celtic lention is still reflected in the living Neo-Celtic languages; P. Y. Lambert, 'Welsh Caswallawn: the fate of British *au' (203-I5), examines the phonetic history of the u-diphthongs in the Brittonic languages and argues the case in favour of (E. au developing as a long open {>in Brittonic; Patrick Sims• Williams, 'Dating the transition to Neo-Brittonic: phonology and history, 40o-6oo' (2 I 7-6I ), surveys the evidence and argues that the transition from British to Neo-Brittonic could have been completed early in the 6th c.; Stefan Zimmer, 'Dating the loanwords: Latin suffixes in Welsh (and their Celtic congeners)' ( 263-8 I), uses Welsh suffixes borrowed from Latin as a means of dating some words and word groups. Paul Russell, Celtic Word-Formation: The Velar Suffixes, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 242 pp., traces the develop• ment and productivity of a group of adjectival suffixes having a velar consonant from the earliest Celtic evidence through to the Insular languages. Robert A. Fowkes, 'Verbal noun as "equivalent" of finite verb in Welsh', Word, 42: I g-2g, describes a construction in which a verb-noun adopts the role of a finite verb. Joseph F. Eska, 'The deictic pronominal *KEY in Celtic', Celtica, 2 I : I 53-55, is a discussion of the