Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies

Augustine’s fifteenth epistle is a short missive written to Romanianus, his patron and friend from childhood. The letter is essentially bipartite. The first half concerns realia, especially the material upon which the letter itself is written. The second half of the letter is an exhortation to contemplation, including direct quotation from the Aeneid. Romanianus must have shared some good news with his friend, as Augustine encourages him to consider the value and dangers of his earthly success in a paragraph containing Christian, philosophical, and pagan reminiscences. The threat of death looms over this section of the letter, which ends with a curious line about the risk of bees drowning in their own honey. This article offers a philological interpretation of the letter’s first paragraph and examines previous scholarship that has used Ep. 15 as fodder for arguments about late antique letter-writing materials. Augustine’s literary quotations and allusions in the second half of the letter will be analyzed in the context of Romanianus’ personal career, with some speculation as to the content of the trigger letter that prompted Augustine to write Ep. 15. Finally, a source will be suggested for the aphoristic bee story that serves as the letter’s closing image.

Jackson (1967: 489 f.) already noted that the Breton dialect of the island of Ushant seemed to have retained Late PBr. *dl, *dr as dl, dr, and not (e)l, (e)r like in the other MoB dialects, e.g. Ushant dialect (U) [ˈgɥẹdrẹn] ‘glass’ vs. MoB gwerenn, U [maˈdrunɛs] ‘godmother’ vs. MoB maeron(ez), and U [ˈkodlɛ] ‘young bull’ vs. MoB kole. Jackson (1967: 496 f.) suggested that the development Late PBr. *dl, *dr to U dl, dr only seems to have taken place in polysyllabic words and persuasively argued for the intermediate stage of *ðdl, *ðdr. His theories regarding this development are not all-encompassing, however, and fail to convincingly explain exceptions like U [ˈkɛlu] ‘news’ (MoB keloù) and U [ˈlɛrɛnː] ‘thong’ (MoB lêrenn). Using the evidence from the Atlas Linguistique de la Basse-Bretagne (Rennes 1924) (ALBB) and two tables consisting of all Ushant dialect words from Malgorn’s article Le dialecte d’Ouessant (1909) and the Nouvel Atlas Linguistique de la Basse-Bretagne (NALBB), I have been able to provide a new and accurate chronology for the development of Late Pr. *dl, *dr to U dl, dr. All Ushant dialect words that are central in this discussion can be found in the appendix at the back of the article. In this appendix one can find the position of the word in the appendices of my MA thesis and/or the ALBB, as well as the MoB form, the Middle Breton form (if attested), and an English translation.

This paper explores the history of the Middle Welsh preterite impersonal -pwyt in which -p- has been unexplained until now. By looking at the expected development of the preterite impersonal I argue that -pwyt was actually borrowed from the perfect paradigm and subsequently remodelled to fit in with the preterite paradigm.
This paper was presented at the 7th Colloquium of the Societas Celto-Slavica in Bangor, and the 34th Harvard Celtic Colloquium.

A peculiarity of the Ushant dialect of Breton is that it seems to have undergone i-affection much more often than most dialects, e.g. Ushant [ˈigin] ‘seed, bud’ instead of MoB egin; [kriˈʋinat] ‘to scratch, graze’ instead of krevignat; and [ˈxwizi] ‘to sweat’ instead of c’hweziñ. Many Ushant dialect words also have an i where other dialects have e that apparently cannot be explained with our current knowledge of the historical phonology of Breton, e.g. [gwẹˈdrinu] ‘(drinking) glasses’ instead of gwerennoù; [ˈsilaw] ‘to listen’ instead of selaou; and [ˈbrɛʃin] ‘knitting needle’ instead of brechenn.
In order to solve this problem a database of more than 2,400 Ushant dialect words was collected and subsequently searched for all examples of these obscure i’s. These examples were compared to each other and to existing theories that were then critically evaluated. In the end it was discovered that these words could be divided into different problem groups of which the largest could only be solved by the adoption of a new sound-law whereby e became i before u.

Early 2013 I found a letter by the Cornish bard Hal Wyn to Van Hamel, the founder of Celtic Studies at Utrecht University. This short article explores this letter and the person who wrote it, who turns out to be an interesting, but relatively unknown character from the early Cornish revival. This pdf is an updated version of the original article that appeared in Kelten 58 (mei 2013). It can also be found under: http://vanhamel.nl/wiki/Van_Hamel_en_Hal_Wyn .

Begin 2013 vond ik een brief van Hal Wyn aan Van Hamel, de stichter van Keltische Talen en Cultuur aan de Universiteit Utrecht. In dit artikel worden de brief en zijn auteur, een interessant maar relatief onbekend figuur uit de vroege Cornische heropleving, onder de loep genomen. Deze pdf is een geüpdatete versie van het origineel dat in Kelten 58 (mei 2013) verscheen. Het kan ook onder de volgende link gevonden worden: http://vanhamel.nl/wiki/Van_Hamel_en_Hal_Wyn .