[Spellyans] Wardbridge

Craig Weatherhill craig at agantavas.org
Fri Feb 10 15:25:41 GMT 2017


I don't believe it will ever happen, Harry.  <waed>, attested internally to Cornwall for seven centuries, has a completely different meaning to <ward> which is attested only by a mere handful of external sources over a very short period of time.  <Ponswad> remains safe.

Craig



On 2017 Whe 10, at 14:29, Harry Hawkey wrote:

> How long do you think it will take them to replace the official form of 
> 'Ponswad' with this new word? A couple of days at the most, right?
> 
> :-\
> 
> 
> On 10/02/17 10:34, Nicholas Williams wrote:
>> Wardbridge and Ponzwarda are clearly not mistakes.
>> Presumably the local people didn’t understand the element Wade and 
>> replaced
>> it with the more familiar shape Ward.
>> It is likely also that the substitution of Ward for Wade
>> occurred early, i.e. before the Great Vowel Shift of the late medieval 
>> period.
>> Wa:d to Ward was hardly likely after Wa:d had become Weid,
>> assuming that the change occurred in English rather than Cornish.
>> 
>> Lhuyd’s other place-names in the MS seem accurate, e.g.
>> 
>> Byzvena ~ Bodmin
>> Lys Stephan ~ Lanston
>> Marha Dzhow ~ Market Jew
>> Por îa ~ St Ives
>> Por Enis ~ Mowsol.
>> 
>> When citing contemporary Cornish words in the MS Lhuyd glosses them in
>> Welsh, but his Welsh is in his own idiosyncratic orthography which makes
>> looking them up in Welsh dictionaries rather difficult sometimes.
>> 
>> Nicholas
> 
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