This is an important and wide-ranging study which takes the story of Kenneth Jackson’s masterpiece Language and History in Early Britain on from the twelfth century to the end of the twentieth century, mainly through the investigation of written and oral forms of place-names. The main emphasis is on the place-names of Cardiganshire (now Ceredigion) but place-names in other parts of Wales are also considered and they are all discussed in the context of historical dialectology.
The author analyses the phonology of Cardiganshire place-names, in their spoken and written forms from earliest times, with particular prominence given to changes in the period from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. As Cardiganshire lies at the crossroads of the most important Welsh dialectal boundaries, the toponymical analysis provides a basis for a detailed temporal and spatial discussion/reconstruction of the phonological development of Welsh dialects in the modern period.
By establishing the age of some points of phonological difference between the vernacular and literary Welsh, this volume is an original and valuable contribution to orthographic and dialect studies particularly in the development of methodology for place-name and dialect research, with fascinating use being made of traditional oral forms collected locally through an intensive campaign of fieldwork.
A native of Cardiganshire, Iwan Wmffre is a historian and a linguist whose research is focused on the north-western periphery of Europe. He has held research posts in the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth, and in the Musée de Bretagne, Rennes, Brittany, and has taught Breton at the University of Galway. His publications include articles on Celtic history, sociolinguistics and linguistics as well as translations of texts from Welsh, Breton and Irish. He has published two books, Late Cornish (1998) and Central Breton (1998), in the Lincom Europa series ‘Languages of the World’.