Page:Cornwall (Salmon).djvu/65

LANGUAGE AND DIALECT peopled to any extent by Romans. Besides springing from the same Aryan stock, the Celtic speech had naturally borrowed many words from Latin during four centuries of Roman occupa- tion ; and many of the Britons who fled to western parts of England before the Teutonic invaders had received a considei-able veneer of Roman civilisation. The chief utility of a study of ancient Cornish_-is in the interpretation of surviving names.,.. Every one knows the old rhyme — " By Tie, Pol and Pen, You shall know the Cornishmen ". There is also a longer rhyme — " By Tre, Ros, Pol, Lan, Caer and Pen, You may know the most Cornishmen ". These syllables are of most common occur- rence, both in surnames and in the names of places from which the surnames have often sprung. Tre, the Welsh tref, means town-place or settlement; roV, often corrupted into "rose," means moor or heath; pol is pool, inlet, creek, often surviving as "pill "; Ian, the Welsh Llan, is enclosure, coming in time to mean sacred enclosure, and thus church — the word is the same as our lawn. In similar manner our word park is pure Celtic (Cornish pare), meaning field. Caer or Car is kin to the Latin castrum, a word similarly surviving in the Saxon ceastre, and our modern "casters" and "chesters" (Lan- caster, Manchester, etc.). Pen is head, peak or 47.