AFON YSTWYTH AND ONOMASTIC SOUND-CHANGE

Abstract

Larry Trask, in his Dictionary of historical and comparative linguistics (2000: 238), brings into the canon of ideas a notion first set out cogently by Clark ([1991]/1995: 150-52) and Colman (1989; 1991: 59-67), namely «onomastic sound-change», i.e. one only applying in proper names, or applying in proper names before other lexical material. Such a type of sound change would violate the Mechanical Principle underlying sound-change as conceived by the Neogrammarians (Labov 1994: 603; Trask 2000: 208, 226-27) in that it recognizes that there may be non-phonetic constraints on sound-change, and that there are some such constraints which are not fundamentally sociolinguistic. Onomastic sound-changes need not themselves be regular, i.e. Neogrammarian, in character. Professor Trask has done a service in bringing knowledge of this notion out of the sometimes treacherously marshy field of onomastics, where some historical linguists fear or neglect to tread; it is absent, for instance, from the standard works by Croft (2000), Crowley (1992) and McMahon (1994), and there is nothing resembling it in the earlier books by Hock (1986), Anttila (1989) and Samuels (1972). Trask also interestingly —but without special comment— utilizes the complementary concept of the unexpected retention in some proper names of sounds otherwise lost: [n] is irregularly and puzzlingly retained intervocalically in the Basque derivational suffix *-(g)une ‘interval, space’ in some place-names (Trask 1997: 337). In doing this, his work points to the need for further investigation of the relation between historical onomastics and general historical linguistics. This remains to be done. In this paper, in memory of my sadly-missed colleague and friend, “deserving the fore-end of the bench” in the words of the tribute interpolated into the Gododdin poem, I have the modest goal of showing how the use of the idea «onomastic soundchange» may help clear up a problem with the origin of a Welsh river-name. The name of the Ystwyth in west Wales is first recorded in Ptolemy’s Geography (II, 3, 2; cf. Rivet and Smith 1979: 462) in the following forms in differing