Over the last few
months, our blog posts have focused on loan words in Anglo-Norman - from
Greek, from Italian, from Mongolian ... This month and the next, we are going
to have a look at some Anglo-Norman words borrowed from Celtic languages.
Medieval Britain
was a multilingual environment, and it is clear that there was a high level of
contact between Anglo-Norman, Middle English and Medieval Latin, resulting in a
high level of loan words between the languages. But these were not the only languages
used at this period in the Anglo-Norman regnum, which also included Ireland,
Wales and Scotland. It is perhaps surprising then that relatively few words in
the AND are tagged as deriving from either Welsh or Irish and no borrowings
seem to have come from Scots Gaelic. This is a phenomenon that bears a closer
look, suggestive of a very different contact situation in the Celtic countries
than in England. Can the pattern and frequency of borrowings offer insights
into the use of Anglo-Norman in Ireland, Wales and Scotland as well as offer
clues about the level of contact between speakers of Anglo-Norman and the local
languages? There appears to have been little work done on this perspective, to
our knowledge, though we would be very happy to hear of work done on this
topic![1]
There are a number
of Anglo-Norman texts which were composed in Ireland - these are sometimes
referred to as Hiberno-Norman works. These include La Geste des Engleis en Yrlande (Dermot2), composed around 1225, as well as numerous administrative
texts extant from the period of Anglo-Norman rule, which can be found in our
List of Texts under the following sigla: Affairs
of Ireland, Chart St Mary's, Ireland, Irish Docs, Stats and Ords Ireland
and Windsor. Despite the relatively
large number of works produced in the area, there are currently only six words
in the AND tagged as Irish: betagh, cro, jacoine, kerne, kernemen and grawe.
 |
| BL Arundel 14 f. 27v.; 'partially damaged map of islands including Ireland (labelled 'Hybernia') and 'Britannia' in Giraldus Cambrensis's Topographia Hiberniae' from the BL Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts |
Betagh, may be from the
Irish bétach, an adjective meaning 'doughty, valorous' but also 'violent, wanton',
used substantively in the AND. It occurs once in a document from Waterford,
written around 1300:
si un baron ou un chevaler ou autre gentishomme eit
neifs, sicome maniere de betagh, e aventure aveigne q'il sont nees de sur la
terre le avant dist baron ou chevaler ou autre frankhomme, e il ne puet pas
estre demené a droiture, si com son pere estoit avant lui Bor Cust ii 89
['if
a baron or knight or other gentleman has villeins, after the fashion of the
betagh, and it happens that they are born on the land of the said baron or
knight or other freeman, and he may not be held to right as his father was
before him']
The
editor of Bor Cust glosses the term
as 'Irish villein' though it doesn't seem that the term had much currency in
Irish.
Jascoine
refers to the mythological fish encountered by Saint Brendan on his journey.
The name of this fish, iasconius, may
derive from the Irish íasc . The DMBLS suggests this
possible etymology for the term as it appears in the Navigatio S. Brendani. The Anglo-Norman term no doubt derives from
the Latin and not directly from the Irish term.
Grawe seems to refer to a type of cup or goblet,
though the etymon remains unclear. It has been cautiously identified as Irish,
due to the context, but may in fact be something else:
iii. coups e
iii. grauntz hanaps qe hom appele ‘grawes’ d’argent Affairs of Ireland 134
['3
cups and 3 big goblets of silver which one calls 'grawes']
Kerne and
kernemen, from the Irish ceithern, refer to a type
of lightly-armed Irish foot soldier. These terms seem to have been more widely used
than the previous ones, and we find them used in a number of Irish
administrative documents as well as in a letter written by Richard II from
Waterford.
ou
estoient de eux tuéz .clxij hommes armés et les kernes armez Lett & Pet 347.11
['there where .clxij. of their armed men and
armed Irish foot-soldiers were killed']
Kerne is
known in Middle English as well (MED kerne n. and OED kern n.1) so it is
possible that the word entered Anglo-Norman though English rather than Irish.
The earliest citation of the word is in a Latin text of 1297, which the use of
it in Anglo-Norman is attested from 1316. The earliest use in an English
document dates from 1423. The compound kernemen
certainly suggests an English influence, though this compound does not seem to
have been recorded in English.
Cro
is a legal term, defined as 'fine for homicide' and appears in Irish as cro.
It appears in a single, perplexing citation:
Item le cro et le galnys et le enach uniuscuiusque
hominis sunt pares APS 664.
The
citation, using Latin as the matrix language, but with the Anglo-Norman
definite article to introduce the three terms from the other vernaculars,
provides three synonyms for the same concept of 'wergild'. Firstly, cro from Irish; secondly, galnys,
the Welsh galanas, an equivalent
concept; and, thirdly, enach.
The last term could be from the Irish enech (found in the expression lóg n-enech
'honour-price') but also possibly a Scots Gaelic term, as it is found in a
document from the Acts of the Parliament
of Scotland and most likely a synonym for the other two terms. This is the only term identified as Scots Gaelic in the AND.
Ultimately, there
are few identified borrowings from Irish into Anglo-Norman. This may suggest a
must have been lower level of contact between the two languages than between Middle
English and Anglo-Norman. However, it may also be the case that documents from
these areas are must less studied, and that further investigations into the
archival holdings in contacts zones in Ireland, may yield further evidence of
language contact. We'll compare these results with Welsh in the next post.
[hap]
[1] We'd
like to thank the eDIL for their assistance, and for bringing the article H. Risk, 'French Loan-words in Irish', Études
Celtiques 12 (1970/71) 585-655 & 14 (1974) 67-69 to our attention. Any
mistakes in this blog are our own!
Fascinating! Thanks!
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