Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

The index, like the book, is full of fascinating material, but layout as between the two may lead readers to miss things they seek. The references, by township, are in principle unambiguous, yet sections on individual townships are so long that it would have been a help if at the proof stage some willing drudge could have been found to substitute page references throughout the index. Perhaps this aspiration is unrealistic; at least some way might be found to warn when there are two widely separated references to one element under one township, e.g. to pingel under E[wloe] W[ood] at both p. 176 and p. 187. Lexicographic discussions are usually but not always in the body of the book rather than the glossary. Sometimes they are signalled in the glossary (e.g. copp, cob, pp. 123-24), sometimes not (e.g. pingel, p. 187).Some inconsistencies, and occasional actual errors. in the treatment of Old English forms come mainly from standard reference-books the author has, not unreasonably, trusted. 'Pinfold' is correctly pyndfald, but then for consistency 'pound' should be pynd, of which pund, the head-form used, is a partly dialectal phonetic variant. There is no OE word pull; that is the west midland form of pyll, whose meaning is 'creek' not 'pool'. The underlying form of 'fold' is falod, not syncopated fald. BraJc and brec are the same word, in respectively West Saxon and Anglian phonetic forms; not surprisingly there are more and firmer references for the latter. (A similar distinction in late Old English between oblique cases Anglian mcedwe. 'meadow', and West Saxon malde, 'mead', bears on the discussion on p. 187.) 'OE reinn "a boundary strip" a water-course as a boundary' is a complex of errors derived at some remove from misreading OED entries themselves partly erro- neous. Rein, phonetically impossible for Old English, is an Old Norse form, etymon of OED rain,2 'strip of land'. 'Watercourse' (not necessarily on a boundary) is cognate OE rain, etymon of OED rean, which, pace the OED's editors, is the same word as OED reen and rhine.2 Ran is actually attested in a Shropshire charter boundary, missed both by the OED and by Jan de Vries whose Altnordisches etymologisches Worterbuch has. among available reference-books, the best discussion of this group of words. It is a pity that faults take longer to describe than virtues. There is a lot of fun and solid scholarship in this book; I am glad to have it, and look forward to more in content like it. But if this is to be the start of a Welsh series comparably successful to that of the English Place-Name Society, the publishers need to improve their performance very drastically. P. R. KITSON Birmingham Only one n-it is a feminine noun. 2 The phonetic form of rhine is, as the OED says, hard to account for by normal processes, and the spellings given under that head might in principle belong partly to ran and partly to some other etymon, perhaps ryne as it suggests. However, the south-western dialectal distribution which would then be common to both tells strongly against that. The citations for the phonetic form rhine seem to make it proper to Somerset specifically. Explanation is probably to be sought in a combination of two irregular but attested late Old English develop- ments, ce>ea (back-formation for regular monophthongization of diphthongs) and fronting ea>iel*ia, which happened sporadically anywhere, but only in Devon and Somerset commonly enough to give rise to river-names Yeo as local reflex of ea 'river'.