Welsh Journals

Dr. Chadwick and Dr. Dillon for their services to Celtic scholarship in the past; our indebtedness to them has been considerably increased by the appearance of this volume. J. E. CAERWYN WILLIAMS Aberystwyth GAULISH PERSONAL NAMES. A STUDY OF SOME CONTINENTAL FORMATIONS. By D. Ellis Evans. Oxford University Press, 1967. Pp. xxiii, 492 147s. The scope and plan of this magnificent volume is aptly described in the author's own words: it is 'to list the Celtic personal names which occur in the Celtic inscriptions of Ancient Gaul, in the Commentaries on the Gallic War, and in the graffiti of La Graufesenque and to make a contribu- tion towards the elucidation of some of the etymological, phonological, and morphological problems raised by those names'. Chapter I presents 'A Survey of Previous Work on Gaulish Anthroponomy' and describes 'The Nature of the Sources' ('The Celtic Inscriptions of Gaul', 'The Commentaries on the Gallic War' and the 'La Graufesenque Graffiti'). Chapter II presents 'The Material' in 'An Etymological Survey': names are classified as 'Compounded' and 'Uncompounded', and the elements of compounded names are examined in the light of etymology. Chapter III is devoted to the 'Phonology and Morphology' of the forms studied. There is an appendix of 'Doubtful Names' and five valuable indexes. As the author points out, the modern study of Gaulish names commenced with the publication of Christian Wilhelm Gliick's Die bei Caius Julius Caesar vorkommenden keltischen Namen (Miinchen, 1857), exactly 110 years before the publication of this volume. In the inter- vening period they have received the attention of a succession of prominent Celtic and Indo-European scholars and have been the subject of innumerable articles and a considerable number of important books, among which perhaps the most outstanding are Holder's Alt-celtischer Sprachschatz (Leipzig, 1891-1931) in three volumes, Dottin's La Langue gauloise. Grammaire, textes et glossaire (Paris, 1920), Weisgerber's 'Die Sprache der Festlandkelten' in 20. Bericht der romisch- germanischen Kommission, 1930 (1931), pp. 147-226, Whatmough's Dialects of Ancient Gaul (published in five parts on microfilm by University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1949-51, but also available in paper enlargements), and the first part of his Grammar of DAG (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1963). Since the war there has been a steady flow of articles and monographs devoted -directly or indirectly to Gaulish or Celtic names in all the major European languages, and especially in German and Spanish, and among these K. H. Schmidt's 'Die Komposition in gallischen Personennamen', Zeitschrift fur Celtische Philologie, 26 (1957), 33-301, and Manuel Palomar Lapesa's La Onomdstica personal pre-