WELSH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE.—Lasasuaos. The Welsh language is that which is now spoken, and has been so far back as historical records extend, in the principality of Wales. The name of " Welsh " was first given to the people who speak it by the Anglo Saxons, and the same term or a similar one seems to have been used in many of the Germanic and even of the Slavonic languages to denote the Italians, or other nations whose languages resembled the Latin. " Welschland " was the name for Italy in German of the middle ages, and is not yet entirely superseded in the language of the common people ; the name of that country in Polish is " Wlochy," and the appellations of the Walloons and the Wallachians appear to be derived from the same root. Singularly enough, the word has a strong cor respondence with the appellation given by the Romans themselves to the kindred nation of Gaul, who, as Cwsar tells us, called themselves Celts (" qui ipsorum lingua Celtm, nostra Galli appellantur "). Wallia and Gallia differ only by a letter, and Gallic and Gaelic have as close a resemblance.
The name which the Welsh give to themselves is "Cymry," and to their language "Cymreig," the obvious resemblance of the sound of which to " Cirnbri " has led many to suppose them identical with the Cimhri of Roman history. The meaning now assigned to the word " Cymry " is " primitive," but this meaning does not seem to have occurred to any Welsh scholar before the Rev. John Walters, who first published it about the middle of the 18th century. The Welsh is one of a family of languages generally denominated the Celtic languages, and described as six in number, which wore all spoken in the 18th century, and five of which are still spoken in the 19th, four of them within the British islands. These are 1, the Irish, which prevails in different parts of Ireland : 2, the Gaelic of the Highlands of Scotland : 3, the flanks, which is decaying and appears to be dying in the Isle of Man : 4, the Welsh, or language of Wales : 5, the Coruieh, formerly spoken in Cornwall, but now extinct, and 6, the Armoric or " Bas Breton," prevalent in some departments in the ancient province of Lower Brittany in France. All of these languages which still survive have occupied for centuries a subordinate position to some other lan guage, the first five to English and the sixth to French. They have thus been precluded from the advantage of being spoken by the higher classes of society, and have iu many cases for want of a standard of phraseology and pronunciation separated into dialects, some of which in process of time have been considered as distinct languages.
The degree of affinity between the different Celtic languages is a point of considerable interest. A. controversy was carried on in 1839 on the question whether the Gaelic and Welsh, two languages in com mon use in different parts of our own island, are, or are not connected. The prevalent opinion for a long time bad been that they were dialects bearing a close resemblance to each other : Schlfizer and Adelung hinted suspicions of the correctness of this view; and Sir William Betham, in his' Gael and Cytnri,' published in 1834, asserted that they were wholly dissimilar. Professor Forbes, the learned Orientalist, whose native tongue is Gaelic, maintained the same views as Sir William, in an animated correspondence on the subject, which appeared in the ' Gentleman's Magazine' for 1836 and 1838. The main fact which he announced, that the most intimate knowledge of the Gaelic language would not enable a person to master a single verse of the Bible in Welsh, was certainly new to the world in general, and would never have been suspected from the tone in which most Celtic scholars were accustomed to speak of the affinity of the languages ; but the inference which he drew from it, of a total want of connection between the two, was satisfactorily refuted by other facts. The Rev. Richard Garnett, of the British Museum, who was induced to search into the question by the statements of Professor Forbes, reported in the ' Gentleman's Magazine' for May, 1839, that on examining the mono syllabic words in the introductory portion of Neilson's Irish Grammar, about 270 in all, he found of "In the Grammar," he added, "prefixed to Armstrong's Gaelic Dictionary there is a list of about two hundred verbs in common use. Seventy, or more than one-third of the whole, are unequivocally cognate with Welsh and Armoric, and twenty more probably so." In Stewart's Gaelic Grammar' we have a list of twenty-four simple prepositions (omitting mere varieties of form), and about forty improper, or compound. Of the former,. fourteen are Welsh, and three Cornish ; and of the latter, eighteen, or nearly one-half, radically Welsh." Mr. Garnett remarked with justice, that "the amount of resemblance is hardly so great between Icelandic and German," and these are unquestionably kindred languages.