Welsh Journals

be a foreigner who, hearing his Welsh partner read the text before the two collaborators (these scribes often worked in pairs), wrote down what he heard in a variation of the language that seems to have been the lingua franca of the age, the orthographia gallica anglicana, a notation evolved over the border in Anglo-Saxon England and not as is generally thought in a spelling peculiar to Welsh literature itself. In this question of nationality, is there anything else that can help us to throw more light on the subject? Assuming that the scribe was a Welshman, as I have done, with a Franco-Norman education, is it not surprising to find him again and again writing with an a rather than with an e or y, the symbols in vogue at the time, the sound [oe or d] before m, n, v, and f as in kamry (Cymry), camaraef (Cymraes), kamrit (cymryt), kantaf (cyntaf), kafreth (cyfreith) and kaftal (cystal), etc.? The sound in such a combination was never an [a] in literary Welsh or in any dialect that we know. Why then an a to stand for the vowel [oe or a]? I know of no reason which would induce an educated thorough- bred Welshman to have recourse to a in such cases. On the contrary, there is something not dissimilar to it in Old French. In the XIth and XIIth centuries the a before a nasal never rhymed with an ordinary a + any consonant and is homophonous only with a + nasal. There is also something not very unlike it in Worcestershire Anglo-Saxon where a + nasal is written as an open o. Thus we have mon, con, onswere, nome, home, lone for man, can, answere, name, etc. Another consideration which seems to militate against the scribe's Welshness is the h that he employs in the diphthongs as well as the doubling of the vowels. To Welshmen the characteristic mark of a Welsh diphthong is the gradual passage from the initial element to the final element without the organs of speech ever remaining in a fixed position. In the diphthong [ai], for instance, there exists scientifically a series of sounds between the various shades of [a], the shades of [e], before we come to that of [i]. But these different sounds do not produce a distinct impression on our ears. We only perceive the direction of the movement and the sense of variation. On the contrary, our Chirk codex scribe seems to hear a succession of two independent expiratory acts such as we sometimes in South Wales perceive in the North Welsh [eu] or as we hear in caiman or Hanoi in Modern French, a fragmentation between the two elements where our scribe puts in an h to mark the hiatus which he perceives. There are many such h's in the Black Book of Chirk: ahuft, 'August' (Awst), nahud (nawdd), 'protection', mahurth (Mawrth), 'March', nehuat (neuadd), 'hall', clehuo (clywo), 'he bears', entehu (ynteu), 'he', trohelleu (troelleu), 'wheels', myhu (myw), 'cow', dyhu (Duw), 'God', kefrehit (kyfreith), 'law', etc. Another trait which appears to mark the non-Welsh nationality of the scribe is the manner he often notes the spirant [6] with an f as in