SOME LINGUISTIC SYNONYMES IN THE PRE-ROMAN LANGUAGES OF BRITAIN AND OF ITALY.

BY J. S. PHENÉ, LL.D., F.S.A., F.R.G.S.

Member of Council (now Vice-President), R.S.L.

[Read June 24, 1891.]

IN introducing a subject which has not hitherto been directly approached, I have to acknowledge the light thrown upon it indirectly by various investigators whose learning and ability have produced some of the most valuable works in our language. And although my researches had been made quite on their own footing, as at that time I was not even aware of such investigations by others, the subsequent study of those works has enabled me to avoid crude conclusions, has aided me in many matters of difficulty, and has given me the satisfaction of seeing that my own investigations have led me to several points of the subject not apparently treated of by any preceding author.

Of course I was not altogether without authority in my investigations, but had taken foreign authors to assist me, and these I now find so ably commented on by English writers that I have been enabled to avoid as misleading, writings which otherwise I should have looked on as the highest authorities.

At a glance it becomes apparent that Italian and British authors must necessarily be better examiners

of matters pertaining to their own respective languages than foreigners, and although the subject will not permit that the great amount of Teutonic thought which has been given to it should be dispensed with, yet it is a singular corroboration of the argument, that this Teutonic feature is about equivalent to the intermediate influences exerted on the people hereafter mentioned, their pursuits and their languages, at the remote period under consideration, in their transit through the various Teutonic and Sclavonic nationalities then and still existing between Britain and the Mediterranean.

To show, in the first instance, that a defined line of people, and, as a consequence, of communication, existed between Britain and the shores of Italy, and its neighbouring islands in very remote times, I may quote two widely different authorities. Dr. John William Donaldson, Lecturer on Classical Literature in Trinity College, Cambridge, and Examiner in the University of London, who, in his work upon Varro, after quoting a national term which exists from North Britain to the shores of Italy, adds, “thus we trace this distinctive appellation from Scandinavia (he might have said Britain) to the north of Italy, in a line nearly corresponding to the parallel of longitude."

He then says, "The ethnographic importance of the name can scarcely be overrated; for it not only tells us that the tribes to the east of the line upon which it is found were generally pure Sclavonian, but it tells us as plainly that the tribes to the west were equally pure branches of the Gothic, Saxon, or Low German race."

On the Anthropological aspect of the subject Professor Huxley remarks, that the blond, longheaded, tall races which have inhabited Scandinavia for the last 2,000 years, and which are largely prominent in the British Islands, were clearly the races who, between the fifth and second centuries B.C., made the incursions into Italy and Greece, thus again showing a direct line of race occupation, which we know extended ultimately as far south as Africa.

I may mention incidentally, as I have quoted from Professor Huxley's Paper of November, 1890,' that in the same Paper he states points relating to Etruria which are very similar to those in my Paper read before the British Association at Leeds in September, 1890, and which was fully reported at that time. Professor Huxley's Paper must at the same time have been in the press. I mention this simply to retain the credit of the originality of my own observations, and to make it clear that they were not derived from Professor Huxley.

I may now be permitted to draw your attention to some physical illustrations of objects, the pursuit for which led me to my own investigations, of which this Paper is a partial exponent.

Although, strictly, these should not be introduced into a philological discourse, yet as they led me to my conclusions, and also tend very much to illustrate some of the linguistic points I propose to bring forward, they may not be considered out of place. They give examples of art works, including roads, tumuli, cromlechs, circles, hill scarpings, serpentine

1 Nineteenth Century, for November, 1890, p. 750.

as

earthworks, stela, masonry, metallurgy, and fictile objects, which exist along the geographical courses which have just been described, and which appear as characteristic of those courses as the linguistic examples which accompany them, and the exhumated relics found in their several vicinities. I shall content myself at present with one reference to them. In 1881 I opened a mound in the park of Scott of Gala, near Galashiels, and found a remarkable reliquary in the head of the animal form of the mound [exhibited on a diagram-J. S. P.]. From long researches in North-Western Scotland I felt justified in stating at once that the mound was the work of the builders of the brochs.

No broch was then known to be in the county, but in 1882 one was discovered on Gala Water, and a second, said to be the largest but one in Scotland, has just been discovered near it on the Catrail, from which it is clear my inference was well founded.

As these illustrations are not the subject of this Paper but only accompaniments, the references to them will be slight; the more so as they have formed illustrations to Papers before special learned societies in which they illustrated directly the subjects of such Papers to audiences devoted to the investigation of the particular matters they referred

to.

I may launch the subject by a familiar example, running at once to and from the two extremes of the geographical position.

The first word in Virgil's Bucolics, "Tityrus," generally pronounced Tit-yrus, which is more easy

and probably was the original pronunciation, means inequality of appearance; also a reed, from the varying lengths of the pandean pipes; also a shepherd, from the fact of the shepherd, or rather goatherd, wearing the shaggy undressed skin of the goat in the rural districts in central Italy, a picturesque attire which railroad intercourse is fast removing. It also means a rustic, or as we say a rough, though that term is now otherwise applied. In the case in point it probably refers to the inequalities arising from the sun's rays piercing through the foliage of the wide-spreading beech tree.

In architecture, "rustic" means a surface with indents and projections. Tityre, rural Italian; perhaps from the local Italian " Titan," sun," the Latin titillo, to move, titulans, wavering; Icelandic titra, to shake or quiver; British, tityr, to whirl ; Old English, Totyr, and the modern Titter, used in the children's game of "Titter cum Totter," or "See Saw," in Suffolk.

This does not appear in German at all, the only approaching word, Triller, being the Italian trillo, to quiver, quaver, or shake, and clearly a musical introduction.

In East Anglia the play at "See Saw" is still accompanied by a rustic rhyme. The motion of ducks going into water is that of heads all up and down, or to use another rustic expression, all "hobbledy bobbledy," which is an equivalent to the motion of shaking or wavering. Ducks have nothing to do with "See Saw," but appear introduced into the following childish rhyme, uttered