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Van Hal, Toon, “When quotation marks matter: Rhellicanus and Boxhornius on the diﬀerences between the lingua Gallica and lingua Germanica [Notes — documents]”, Historiographia Linguistica 38:1 (2011): 241–252.

Roberts, Brynley F., “The discovery of Old Welsh”, Historiographia Linguistica 26:1–2 (Jan., 1999): 1–21.

abstract:

Edward Lhuyd's (1660-1709) Archaeologia Britannica (Oxford 1707), was intended to be a study of early British history together with copies of some of the original source material. The only volume to appear, entitled Glossography, printed glossaries and grammars of the Celtic languages and lists of Irish and Welsh manuscripts, and it set out the principles of phonetic changes and correspondences so that linguistic and written evidence for the relationships of the first (Celtic) inhabitants of the British Isles could be evaluated. The antiquity of the evidence was of prime importance. Lhuyd sought the 'very ancient' written sources which would bridge the gap between the post-Roman inscriptions and the medieval Welsh manuscripts which he had seen. Humphrey Wanley (1672-1726), the Old English scholar, drew his attention to the Lichfield gospel book and two Latin manuscripts at the Bodleian Library which contained Welsh glosses and Lhuyd himself discovered the Cambridge Juvencus manuscript. These were the oldest forms of Welsh which he had seen. He analysed the palaeography, the orthography and vocabulary of these witnesses, and although he was not able fully to comprehend these records, he was able to begin to describe the characteristics of the British insular hand and to define some of the features which distinguished Old Welsh from Middle Welsh.

Poppe, Erich, “Latin grammatical categories in the vernacular: the case of declension in Welsh”, Historiographia Linguistica 18:2–3 (1991): 269–280.

abstract:

The grammatical category 'declension' cannot be applied to Welsh substantive nouns since they have one form only for the singular and the plural respectively. But some Welsh grammarians of the 16th and 17th centuries tried to use this category to classify substantive nouns by proposing new definitions, based on the system of plural formation (Robert 1567) or on the system of initial mutations (Rhys 1592; Salesbury 1593). The latter approach formed a short-lived 'paradigm' in Welsh grammaticography with a dynamism of its own. It became divorced from the classification of nouns only and was applied to all words which undergo initial mutations (Davies 1621). The history of the definitions of declension in Welsh grammaticography is thus an instructive example of the changes grammatical categories can undergo when applied to a specific vernacular and of the creativity of the vernacular grammarians.

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