WELSH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. The Celtic languages are divided into two groups, Gaelic and Cymric. To the latter of these the Welsh belongs, and has even given name, as forming the most important member of the group, which comprises besides, Armorican (spoken in Bretagne) and Cornish (now extinct). A controversy has been waged concerning the nature and closeness of the intimacy existing between the Gaelic and Cymric tongues, but the question may now be considered settled by the researches of the rev. ,llichard Garnett (Gentleman's Magazine, May, 1839), who found, on examining the monosyllabic words in the introductory part of Neilson's Irish Gram mar, that out of 270, no fewer than 140 were identical in sense and origin with corre sponding Welsh terms, that 40 were cognate, an equal number borrowed from Latin, Saxon, etc., and that only 50 were peculiar to the Gaelic. Nevertheless, it is not to be supposed that the affinity is as close as that which exists between English and so called Scotch. It is rather (according to Mr. Garnett) such as exists between Icelandic and German. A Welshman cannot understand a Highlander or an Irishman; lie cannot even understand a Breton (as used to be believed), though the language of the latter is undoubtedly Cymric. Most extraordinary hallucinations were formerly current in regard to the antiquity of the Cymric tongues. Pezron, the Breton investigator, gravely affirmed that Welsh and Armoric (which he considered the same) had been "the lan gage of the Titans, that is, the language of Saturn, Jupiter, and the other principal gods of heathen antiquity." The rev. Joseph Harris, editor of the Seren Gonter, remarked in 1814 that " it is supposed hy some, and no one can disprove it, that Welsh was the language spoken by Adam and Eve in Paradise." The fact, on the other hand, is, that of the two branches of Celtic, the Cymric is less ancient than the Gaelic, and that among the Cymric tongues the Cornish is probably older than the Welsh. (See Norris, Ancient Cornish Drama, Oxford, 1859.) But preposterous as the views of most patriotic Welshmen are on this subject, it is undoubtedly true that the Welsh is one of the oldest living languages in Europe, and that it possesses a literature reaching back to remoter times than that of any modern tongue except Irish. The most striking p
laritios of the language are the abundance of its grammatical permutations, and its facility in forming derivatives and compounds. Of the former, two examples may be given by way of illustration. The Welsh word for "father" is tad; for "my" fy. But you cannot say for "my father," fy tad. After fy, every word beginning with t must change the t to nh; and therefore the correct phrase is fy nhad. So after ei, tad becomes either dad or thad, according as ei means "his" or "her." The rules of per mutation are almost endless, and, in the opinion of such Welsh scholars as are not Welshmen, useless, nothing being gained in point of euphony br expressiveness. The Welsh affirm that their language is exceedingly harmonious, and it would serve no good purpose to dispute the assertion; but foreigners ignorant of the tongue, and associating no definite ideas with the words that issue from a Welshman's lips, generally fail to realize the fact, and consider it in this respect—though not in others—distinctly inferior to Gaelic. The language, or rather the structure of sentences and the phraseology, exhibits a certain stateliness, or even grandiloquence, characteristic, indeed, of uncivil ized nations. One thing specially deserves notice. The Welsh people are profoundly attached to, and familiar with it. It is not dying out, like Irish or Scotch Gaelic. It has a genuine literary, as well as oral existence oven now, and though the changes it has undergone since the days of Taliesin are numerous and great—so great, indeed, that no modern unlettered Cambrian can understand a word of the early poetry of his country— yet it is essentially the same tongue that Caesar and Agricola heard, and is consequently to.be regarded with veneration as the solitary living link that unites those distant ages with our own.