VN y dechreuad yr oedd y BRITISH & F. BIBLE SOCIETY, London, 16mo., 1859. YN y dechreuad yr oedd y Gair, a'r Gair oedd gyd â Duw, a Duw oedd y Gair. 2 Hwn oedd yn y dechreuad gyd â Duw. 3 Trwyddo ef y gwnaethpwyd pob peth; ac hebddo ef ni wnaeth wrth Dduw, a'i enw Ioan. 7 Hwn a ddaeth yn dystiolaeth, fel y tystiolaethai am y Goleuni, fel y credai pawb trwyddo ef. 8 Nid efe oedd y Goleuni, eithr efe a anfonasid fel y tys VA y dechrae ydd oedd y VN y dechreuad yr oedd y don a'r y sydd yn dyfod i'r goleuo pob dyn a'r y sydd i I. GEOGRAPHICAL EXTENT AND STATISTICS. 12 Ond THE Celts, or KeλToi or Keλrai, were a people of the origin of which nothing positive is known. They occupied a great part of Western Europe, perhaps in times antecedent to the invasion of Indo Germanic nations. The very name Celt is of uncertain etymology. Ammian derives it from the king, Kelta or Celta; Leibnitz from the German gelt or geld, money; Mezerai, from the British gall or gault, a forest; Pelloutier from the Tudesk wallen, to wander; Latour-d'Auvergne, from goel or gall, yellow, alluding to the light hair of the Galli, whom Bochart identifies with Dodanim (for Rhodanim) of Gen. x. But the name Celt may possibly come, as Camden says, from gwalth, a head of hair, coma, and gwalthog, comatus: from whence Keλraí, Taλáτai, or Táλλo, Galli or Gauls; the Godil, Cœdil or Keill, and in pl. Keilt or Keiltiet, or Gaels, Gædels or Guidhelod, as the Irish call themselves and their tongue. The language called Celtic is divided into two principal branches, viz.: 1. the Irish or Hibernian, from which the present Irish or Erse, and the Gaelic of Scotland, are derived: 2. the British, to which the primitive Gaelic or Gallic was allied, and from which are derived the Welsh, the Cornish, and the Armoric or language of Brittany. The Manks dialect is peculiar to the Isle of Man, and is a corruption of the Irish branch of the Celtic tongue. The Welsh, sometimes called the British language, on account of its former predominance in Britain, is then a dialect of the Celtic, as we have said, once diffused throughout the greater part of Europe, although now confined to certain sections of the British Isles and to a portion of Brittany. According to the census of 1851, the population of Wales and of Monmouthshire amounted to 1,163,251; but a large proportion of this population, particularly in Monmouthshire and Glamorganshire, consists of English and Irish immigrants. It is believed that, throughout the whole of Wales, the natives of the principality to whom the Welsh language is vernacular do not number above 700,000 individuals; an amount of population which is less by one half than that of either Yorkshire or Lancashire. In estimating, however, the number of individuals by whom Welsh is spoken, it must be taken into account, that from fifty to seventy thousand Welshmen are settled in various towns of England, particularly in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Chester, Birmingham, and Bristol: there are, besides, a considerable number in the United States. II. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE LANGUAGE. One grand distinctive feature which runs through the Welsh, and all the other dialects of the Celtic language, is the incompleteness of the grammatical system of inflections, and the general roughness of articulation, as compared with the complex and elaborate systems of the Sanscrit, Teutonic, and other families of languages. This circumstance, viewed in connection with the generally received opinion, that Europe was first colonised by tribes of Celtic origin, leads to the inference that the separation of the Celtic family from the parent stock in Asia took place at a period anterior to that in which the language then common to the Asian race had attained its full development. The study of the Celtic dialects has, therefore, a bearing more or less direct upon all questions connected with the early history and origin of nations; for the remarkable analogies still preserved by those dialects with other families and classes of languages, lead us back to the most remote epochs that can possibly be investigated by the aid of comparative philology. In Celtic may still be traced some faint indications of the ancient relationship, if not of the original identity, of the Indo-European and Shemitic classes. The Celtic, like Hebrew and other Shemitic languages, has two sets of personal pronouns; namely, the full or unmutilated forms used chiefly in the nominative case, and the abbreviated forms employed in construction; the latter often found in conjunction with a preposition, so as to make but one word. The Celtic pronouns also point to the solution of a problem that has long occupied the attention of philologists, for it has been satisfactorily ascertained that the personal terminations of Welsh verbs are neither more nor less than a series of pronominal suffixes; so that, as Dr. Pritchard has justly observed. the long-debated question respecting the origin of these terminations may now be considered as set at rest, so far, at least, as the Celtic is concerned. In the number of its tenses in the active voice, and especially in the possession of a passive voice, the Celtic dialects are richer than any of the Teutonic languages except the Maso-Gothic, which alone retains a remnant of its ancient passive form, and that only in the present tense of the indicative and subjunctive moods. In the laws of euphony regulating the permutation of consonants when brought together in composition, the Celtic offers many points of resemblance to other languages of its class; but with this distinctive peculiarity, that while in Greek and in most of the Indo-European languages one consonant has no power in modifying another, except when joined thereto in one and the same word, the Celtic alone resembles the Sanscrit in the modifying influence possessed by the final and initial consonants of words in sequence. The principles upon which these changes in the consonants of distinct words depend are, in Sanscrit, comprised in what is technically called the law of Sandhi, and are purely euphonic in their nature. In Welsh and its cognate dialects, on the contrary, these characteristic changes of initial consonants seem to have a more especial reference to the meaning of the preceding word, or to some rule of grammatical construction; yet there are many cases in which the alteration of the initial letter seems in Welsh to depend mainly, if not solely, upon euphonic principles. The Welsh differs in several respects from the other Celtic dialects: it is derived immediately from the Cymric branch of the Celtic language, anciently spoken throughout Germany to the ocean, whereas Gaelic, Erse, and Manks, probably owe their origin to the ancient language of Celtic Gaul. The Welsh is remarkable, like the Eolic Greek, for its habitual substitution of hard palatal and guttural consonants for the soft palatal and sibilant letters of the Sanscrit in such radicals or elementary words as are common to both languages. In this peculiarity it is followed in some degree by the Teutonic languages, although they often incline more strongly to the introduction of an aspirate. The great number of Latin words which enter into the Welsh vocabulary may in part be accounted for by the long supremacy of the Romans in Britain: to which cause may also be traced the adoption, by the Welsh, of the Roman characters, which took place at an early period, as is evident from ancient inscriptions and legends on coins. To account, however, for the numerous Celtic words which are to be detected in the Latin and Greek languages, we must resort to the hypothesis that the Umbri, the Osci, and perhaps some of the other primitive colonists of Italy and Southern Europe, were of Celtic descent. In many words, of which Lhuyd gives a detailed list (Arch. Brit. p. 269), the Celtic and Greek approximate so closely as to leave no room for doubt respecting the identity of their origin, while the corresponding terms in Latin evidently proceed from an entirely distinct source. Such words as in Latin commence with sc, sp, or st, have the letter y prefixed in Welsh (e. g. Lat. scelere, Wel. ysceler; Lat. spiritus, Wel. yspryd; Lat. status, Wel. ystâd); a similar peculiarity is exhibited by the French, and severa Eastern languages, such as the Arabic, Hindustani, Bengalee, which also insert a vowel before Latin or foreign words. commencing with these letters, as in espèce, from Lat. species; espérer, from Lat. sperare, etc. The form of conjugation in the Welsh verbs bears affinity to that of the Latin, as will appear by exhibiting some of the forms of a verb common to both languages: e. g. Wel. canu, to sing, Lat. cano, or canto; Wel. canaf, or canav, Lat. cantavi; Wel. canaist, Lat. cantavisti, contracted cantasti; Wel. canodd, Lat. canit; Wel. imperative, caned, Lat. future; canet; Wel. canasom, Lat. contr. cantassemus, for cantavissemus. The form of the second person plural is peculiar to the Welsh: canasoch, you sang; the ch is derived from chwi, you; a personal pronoun used in Welsh as a distinct word; Wel. canasent, Lat. cantassent. It appears from these examples that the Welsh has some analogy with the Latin (though not derived from it like the Italian), as far, at least, as the conjugations are concerned: for the Italian terminations deviate from the Latin as much as the Welsh, and nearly in the same manner, with the exception of the second person plural already noticed: as -amus in Latin is -amo in Italian, and in Welsh -om, as in the above examples. III.-VERSIONS OF THE SCRIPTURES IN THIS LANGUAGE. The earliest mention of a Welsh version of any part of the Scriptures occurs in an epistle prefixed by Dr. Richard Davis, bishop of St. David's, to the first printed edition of the Welsh New Testament (that of 1567), in which he states that there was a version of the Pentateuch extant about the year 1527, and that he himself saw a copy of the work in the possession of a learned gentleman, a relative of his own: he does not, however, give any information respecting the translator, or the period at which the version was executed.' Several short detached portions of Scripture were translated into Welsh, and printed during the reign of Edward VI., probably for the use of the Liturgy or Service Book compiled during that period. In 1562, a law was enacted by parliament enforcing the translation of the entire Scriptures into the Welsh language, under the superintendence of the Bishops of St. Asaph, Bangor, St. David, Llandaff, and Hereford. In consequence of this enactment, William Salesbury, a Welshman of liberal education, and a good linguist of the age, was appointed by the bishops to take the oversight of the projected edition; and by him the entire New Testament was translated, except the Book of Revelation, which is ascribed to Huet, a chantor or præcentor of St. David's, and five of the Epistles (2 Timothy, Hebrews, St. James, and the two Epistles of St. Peter), which were translated by the above-named Dr. Richard Davis, bishop of the same place. The whole version was made from the Greek, collated with the Latin: its general fidelity has never been disputed, but it is faulty in style and orthography. It is divided, like our present Testaments, into chapters, but has no distinction of verses except in some books toward the end. It was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, and was printed in 1567 in London, at the expense of Humphrey Toy. The edition, which consisted of 500 copies, was in quarto, and printed in black letter. More than twenty years elapsed after the publication of the New Testament, before a version of the Old Testament was bestowed upon the people of Wales. This boon was at length conferred by Dr. William Morgan, originally vicar of Llanrhaiadr-mochnant, in Denbighshire, and raised in 1595 to the see of Llandaff, and in 1601 to that of St. Asaph. With the aid of several eminent scholars, he prepared a version of the Old Testament from the Hebrew, and revised Salesbury's version of the New Testament. He was not nominated to this important undertaking, but engaged in it spontaneously. In 1588 he printed both Testaments, with the Apocrypha, in one volume folio. The work was divided into verses throughout, and, like the former edition of the New Testament, was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth. This edition also consisted of 500 copies, and was printed in black letter: a copy, presented by the translator himself, may be seen at Westminster in the library of the dean and chapter, and another in the library of the British and Foreign Bible Society. Dr. Morgan afterwards subjected the New Testament to a second revisal, and the corrected version was ready for the press in 1604, when he died: it does not appear to have been ever printed. The important work which had occupied so many years of this prelate's life, was not discontinued after his decease. His successor in the see of St. Asaph, Dr. Richard Parry, manifested equal zeal in the preparation of a faithful version of the Welsh Scriptures. Of his own accord, and in concert with his chaplain, the celebrated Dr. John Davies, Dr. Parry undertook a complete revision of the Old and New Testaments, in the course of which he introduced so many corrections and alterations, that the work is deservedly regarded as a new and independent version, rather than as an amended translation. It has always been held in such high estimation that it has been used as the text of all succeeding editions; and the few variations that from time to time may have been made from it, are chiefly of an orthographical nature: it is, in fact, the standard version of the Welsh Scriptures. It was first published in 1620, by Norton and Hill, his Majesty's printers in London, and contained a dedication to King James. The copy which was presented to the king is now in the British Museum. The edition, however, only consisted of 500 copies: like the two previous editions, it was printed in black letter and in folio, and the total want of copies of the Scriptures printed in a more accessible form was at this period severely felt in Wales. In consequence of this lamentable deficiency, some noble-minded citizens of London combined together to furnish a portable edition of the Welsh Bible at their own expense. Their edition, which was published in 1630 in London, was in small octavo, and contained, besides the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha, 1 A Welsh version of the Bible was preserved in MS. at Celydd Ifan, near Bridgend in Glamorgan: it appears to have been executed from the Latin Vulgate, by an ancestor of the family residing in that place, about the year 1470. A considerable portion of the MS. was still extant a few years ago, though no trace of it can be found at present. It may have been a MS. of the Pentateuch of this version to which Dr. R. Davis referred. We may, how ever, also mention that it has been stated that the translation of the Pentateuch into English, by William Tyndale, was the basis of a Welsh version. the Book of Common Prayer, and a metrical version of the Psalms. Prŷs, archdeacon of Merioneth, was the translator of this Psalter, which is now used in the Welsh churches. Another metrical version of the Psalms, by Captain Middleton, had been printed by Salesbury in London as early as 1603. The other principal editions of the Scriptures, issued during the 17th and 18th centuries, may be briefly enumerated as follows: 1647. The New Testament in 12mo., without headings to the chapters; 1000 copies. 1648. Second edition of the Metrical Psalms, by Archdeacon Prŷs, in 12mo. 1654. The whole Bible in 8vo.; 6000 copies. This is sometimes called Cromwell's Bible. 1654. A separate edition of the New Testament, also in 8vo., 1000 copies; printed in larger type than the Bible of the same date. 1672. The New Testament with the Psalms, both in prose and metre. This edition was published by means of subscriptions collected in Wales and England: it was printed in 8vo., and consisted of 2000 copies. 1678. The whole Bible with the Book of Common Prayer, in 8vo., printed in London. Of this edition, which consisted of 8000 copies, 1000 copies were distributed gratis among the poor, and the rest were sold at a price below the cost of printing. Mr. Thomas Gouge, a man of noted benevolence, was the principal promoter of this edition: it passed through the press under the care of his friend, the Rev. Stephen Hughes, who formerly held the living of Mydrim, in Caermarthenshire, but was ejected at the passing of the Act of Uniformity. The corrections in orthography and punctuation, introduced by Mr. Hughes, were numerous and important; and this edition, though not without its defects, has in consequence been held in high estimation. 1690. Bible in 8vo., 10,000 copies. This edition was published by the Rev. David Jones, the ejected minister of Llandisilio near Narberth, under the patronage of Lord Wharton, and with the assistance of some ministers and citizens of London. 1690. Bible in folio, 1000 copies, printed at Oxford, for the use of churches. This is sometimes called Bishop Lloyd's Bible, because he is believed to have had some hand in the publication, and to have supplied the chronology and references. It was printed under the superintendence of Mr. Pierce Lewis, a gentleman of Anglesea. This was the first edition printed in Roman characters; it varies from preceding editions in the orthography of many words. 1718. Bible in 8vo., 10,000 copies, printed in London. This is often called "Moses Williams' Bible," because that gentleman, then vicar of Dyfynog, in Brecknockshire, superintended the publication. This edition was the first published under the patronage of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge: it has the Apocrypha, the Psalms in metre, some hymns and forms of prayer; also marginal references and the contents of chapters. 1727. Bible in 8vo., 5000 copies, London. This edition was published under the same patronage as the last, but without the references or the headings of the chapters: on account of this omission it was never so highly valued or sought after by the people. 1746. Bible in 8vo., 15,000 copies, Cambridge. This was the third edition brought out under the superintendence of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. It contains nearly all that was printed in the edition of 1718, and passed through the press under the care of Mr. R. Morris, of the Navy Office, a distinguished Welsh scholar. In this and the following edition the orthography of Bishop Lloyd's Bible was adopted. 1752. Bible in 8vo., 15,000 copies, London. This, like the edition of 1746, was printed under the superintendence of Mr. Morris, at the expense of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge: these two editions cost the sum of £6000. 1752. New Testament and Psalms in 8vo., 2000 copies, London: printed from the edition of |
