Dear Tom, Dear All,



Shouldn't we try to discriminate a bit more in this category of Celtic/ pre-English place-names?  Some survivals are names of major topographical features - rivers, hills and forests - and all of these must always have had names, so you can legitimately contrast rivers-called-something-in-British with rivers-called-something-in-English as two mutually exclusive divisions of a defined total set. It's a pity that Kenneth Jackson's map doesn't include non-Celtic river names in this way.



But then there are the regio or district-names and because these are social constructions we can't speak of a total set because we don't know how many of them there were at any given time, or when they began to be given. Lots of the Celtic survivals are actually topographical names which were used by metonymic transfer to designate districts, and were only then taken over in their regional sense by English-speakers, who might not have had any idea that they had ever referred to specific landmarks. Then, considering that folk-names came to be used as settlement names - Hæstingas becoming Hastings etc. - it's probable that this also happened with topographical district-names (both Celtic and English), in which case the original name would have applied to three successive referents: first a landmark, then a district, and then a settlement. Often the settlement is, by luck or judgement, near the original landmark, as with Leatherhead, which is next to what must have been the original eponymous grey ford. But presumably there's no guarantee that it would always work out like that.



Actual Celtic settlement names, coined as such and not transferred from some previous landmark, are the rarest of the lot. There's no hope of comparing them proportionally with English ones because we don't know how many named settlements there were, or even, in the earliest period, whether settlements qua settlements had names.



Most of the national distribution maps used to illustrate 'Celtic survival' mix up surviving Celtic names for original referents, Celtic names transferred to new referents, secondary names incorporating (for whatever reason) an underlying Celtic name, English names using loanwords from a Celtic language, and (just to add to the fun) English names with English elements referring to Celtic people. You can see what they're getting at, but it isn't easy to compare like with like in such a collection.



Jeremy Harte



-----Original Message-----

From: The English Place-Name List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Tom Ikins

Sent: 13 March 2009 20:45

To: [log in to unmask]

Subject: Re: Britons in Anglo-Saxon England



---- John Briggs <[log in to unmask]> wrote: 

> There are maps of the individual counties ...in:

>Celtic Voices English Places:

> Sorry to add to your reading list!



My copy is well-worn for its age. I re-read the introduction last night.



I'm still a bit unsure of the basis of for any controversy over the survival of names. Survival presumes that an earlier name of a specific place was known. If the Brittonic name of a place is not known, how do we know it did not survive?



--

Tom Ikins



The Roman Map of Britain

http://www.romanmap.com



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