Theodora Bynon, not Theodore Byron.
Keith
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From: The English Place-Name List [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Stephen Dougherty [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 11 January 2019 19:47
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: London/Londinium
Sorry Richard, I haven’t yet been able to access Jackson P.595 for an explanation so I will probably make a number of errors.
Alan James and GPC do have donjo as the Brittonic ancestor of dyn or din, but I’m intrigued to know how this is known and how certain we can be about the consistency of and the relationship between pronunciation and spelling. It is interesting that Cornish and Breton for a person/man is den, which is close to dyn so there seems to have been a fairly consistent evolution. If the London theory was correct, though, the don spelling would appear to be preserved in the current spelling of London, but not the pronunciation, which would appear to be closer to dyn/din or den.
It is not unusual for letters to be elided, particularly in the pronunciations of local place names. Leominster and Leicester are good examples. I grew up near Chichester in West Susssex, which was pronounced (more or less) Chduhsduhr by the locals or shortened to Chi (with the i pronounced somewhere between aye and an oi). So it is not impossible that the second o in Longodoniones would disappear along with the g (the ng sound is quite faint in modern Welsh and could be mistaken for n). I also wonder whether the es was genuinely a British plural or borrowed from Latin? Might not a Roman writer add a Latin plural for clarity, as we do with agendas and buses? If so, we would be left with Londonion. Depending on the local accent, ta Roman might well hear Londinion, which again would be Latinised to Londinium.
Theodore Byron suggests londonion as the British original , but says "the lexical base lond‐ remains rather elusive”. Speculating that it might be llong, rather than lond potentially solves the problem. She also says that “in addition to what we can reconstruct of it from a comparison of the surviving present -day languages, our knowledge of early British depends on what has come down to us in Roman and Greek written records and what emerges from an analysis of those British place-names which have survived in an Anglicised form”. This seems to leave ample wriggle room for speculation derived from modern Welsh.
Alan James says about L(l)ong: ‘A ship’. Originally probably any boat, its association with larger sailing vessels being influenced
by Latin navis longa. The Latin adjective is, nevertheless, unrelated to the Celtic noun.’ If true, does this throw the Latin origin into question?
Stephen
On 11 Jan 2019, at 11:06, Richard Coates <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
The Welsh word for ‘man’ is reconstructed as having had the form *don- in the early first millennium. (Jackson, LHEB p. 595, and GPC under dyn).
British Celtic didn’t form words or names simply by sticking roots together. There would have been a so-called thematic vowel on the first element. So any name meaning the hypothetical ‘ship men’ in the first century would have been something like *Longodoniones, with the British plural suffix -es or an equivalent. The Welsh plural suffix is a left-over from a more complex Celtic inflectional system. All that doesn’t help the suggestion on the table.
Your solution for Londinium would still be odd by being a Latin form of a British name which incorporated a Latin borrowing.
Richard
From: The English Place-Name List <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> On Behalf Of Stephen Dougherty
Sent: 11 January 2019 10:55
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [EPNL] London/Londinium
Thanks Guto
I’ll check your recommendations. Keith Briggs made a similar point about Llong to which I’ve replied. I don’t see why, if llong is derived from Latin, a hybrid can be ruled out.
I appreciate languages change, but some change less than others as do some words, especially the most elementary ones. The word man has existed for millennia in Germanic languages and it would not be surprising if the the same were not true of dyn and perhaps its plural. Llong appears to have survived in Welsh for around two millennia, so why shouldn’t dyn have survived a little longer?
I don’t see why finding similarities between ancient and modern languages should not form a part of or at least a starting point for a theory, especially an ancient language like Welsh which is likely to have been better preserved than most.
Stephen
On 11 Jan 2019, at 09:37, Guto Rhys <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
We know that the Celtic spoken in such areas was ancestral to Welsh/Brythonic.
The forms you note are modern Welsh not the Celtic of AD 40. Languages change. Placename proposals are not about finding vague similarities between modern languages and ancient ones. The first place to start is by examining the previous discussions which are readily available in works such as the Placenames of Roman Britain. Also, what of Bynon’s discussion in TPS 2016?
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-968X.12064
Welsh ‘llong’ is very probably from Latin ‘(navis) longa’ so it can be ruled out. A look at the online Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru would have been sensible. ‘Dynion’ is not an ancient plural, but I will stop here.
Sent from my iPhone
On 11 Jan 2019, at 10:05, Stephen Dougherty <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Hello
I have a theory concerning the etymology of London or, at least, of Londinium.
It’s based on the assumption that when the Romans arrived in Britain, the Brythonic language (at least north of the Thames) had some similarities to modern Welsh.
The theory goes like this:
Llong is Welsh for ‘ship'. Dynion is Welsh for ‘men'. Merge the two together and you get Llongdynion, which sounds quite like Londinium.
The Latin speaking Romans, usually turned -ion endings into -ium endings, which gives us Llongdynium and since Latin, like modern English, lacked the ll sound, the Romans would probably have preferred to use the basic L .
The y would be written as an i , the g would be elided, and that leaves us with Londinium.
Llongdynion/Londinium was a place where people involved in the shipping industry lived and has obvious similarities to the more recent ‘Sailor Town’ - a name once given to the Dockland area of London and found in many other towns all over the world.
That’s it. Any thoughts?
Stephen Dougherty
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