Day: July 17, 2021

Welcome to Cornish Onomastics

Welcome to the Cornish National Onomastics Research Group. We are a project hosted by the Institute of Cornish Studies, University of Exeter. We are interested exploring unique aspects of Cornish identity and language as expressed through personal and place names, and particularly how names have been shaped by the...

What is anthroponymy?

Anthroponymy is the study of personal names, the study of names in the ancient, historical, and present era. It may use data collected from inscriptions and memoria, manuscripts, legal documents, directories, or the Internet, for example. The study of personal names can shed light on who people were, where...

What is a ‘Brittonic’ or ‘Gallo-Brittonic’ Language?

When linguists talk about ‘Brittonic’ they mean an insular p-Celtic language or group of p-Celtic languages closely related to the Gaulish group (Russell, 1995, pp.15-18). These are related to q-Celtic languages from the Goidelic and Hispano-Celtic groups, although not closely. There are two competing theories attempting to place these...

Languages and Material Culture

The distribution of material culture, even when represented by inscriptions in a given language does not guarantee the presence of a living spoken vernacular, the use of Latin for monumental purposes being an obvious example where the language of the vernacular differs from language in a specific literary context....