[Spellyans] 'gwlas'

[Nicholas Williams]

gwl- and gwr- are not exactly comparable.
Rug is common from the earliest MC period onwards. Rug occurs in PA
but wrug is not attested there.
On the other hand wlase is attested as Late as CW.

The unlenited gruk is common in MC, but gwlas, gwlascor almost always have gwl- in the Middle and Late texts.

The tendency of wr- to become r- may have misled Nance.
At RD 2584-86 Christ says:

hag a wel the lyes plu
yn golon dre'n tenewen 
the restye syngys ow gu

Nance and those who followed him understood restye to be 'to rest' and thus translated the lines:

'and in the sight of many parishes
in the heart through the side
I couched my spear in rest'.

It would seem rather that restye is for wrestye 'to twist'; cf. 
ha fatell vynsans y wrestia aga screffa, heno aga oberow warlerth aga mynd aga
honyn heb auctorite na gothfas 'and that they would twist their writings and their works according to their own understanding without authority or knowledge' TH 33.

I should understand the passage in RD as follows:

'and in the sight of many parishes
in the heart through the side
I felt my spear twisted'.

This perhaps makes better sense.

If this interpretation is correct, it means that Tregear's wrestia is a more conservative spelling than restye in RD.

Nicholas



On 10 Apr 2012, at 21:36, Michael Everson wrote:

> In that case it's a question of residual rounding on [ʷɹ] and [ɹ] and [ʷl] and [l] 

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