Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth

In Which One Midwest Man-in-Black Confers, Converses & Otherwise Hob-Nobs with his Fellow Hob-Men (& -Women) Concerning the Sundry Ways of the Famed but Ill-Starred Tribe of Witches.

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The Deep People

 

Reconstituting an Ancient Celtic Tribe

We're not reconstructing the past; we're reconstucting the future.”

(Volkhvy)

 

The original Celtic Tribe of Witches, a people known as the Dobunni, spoke a language known to linguists as Common Brittonic: a language which, in time, morphed (inter alia) into Welsh.

(The Dobunni themselves eventually morphed into an Anglo-Saxon-speaking people named, eponymously, the Hwicce. Peoples morph, languages morph: history is the story of change.)

So how do you say Dobunni in Welsh?

Some of my own family once hailed from the old Dobunni hunting-runs, but though Welsh is one of my ancestral languages, I'm not a Welsh-speaker, and I do not know whether or not memory of the tribe survived long enough to have undergone the sound changes that would have made a Brittonic word into a Welsh one.

(My guess would be, probably not. Being a people of the Cotswolds and the Severn valley—i.e. Southern Britain—the Dobunni were Romanized early, though their tribal self-awareness survived at least to the time of Boudicca's 62 CE “rebellion”, during which they sided with the Romans because their hereditary enemies, the Catuvellauni [“War-Cats”] fought with Boudicca's coalition.)

Nonetheless, we know enough about the processes by which the old language changed into the new that we can make an educated guess.

(As an amateur linguist myself, I find the process of updating old, disused words to what their contemporary forms would have become if they'd actually survived, to be a fascinating exercise in reconstitutive culture. If you think that there's an analogy here with the Pagan Revival, I think you're probably right.)

Boudicca's name, for example (if this actually was her name, rather than just an epithet meaning “victorious”) became Buddug (that's BIH-thig, with the TH of with), as the northern Celtic tribe known as the Votadini (who would have pronounced that V as W) became the Gododdin (gaw-DOE-th'n, with the TH of that).

So, mutatis mutandis, what name would the People Formerly Known As the Dobunni go by now?

Well, we can say for sure that the final -i would have dropped off. You can see the same process with Buddug (née Boudicca) and the Gododdin (formerly the Votadini).

The intervocalic B would have lenited (“softened”) into V, which in Welsh is written F. That leaves us with

 

DvFvN.

 

What the vowels would have become is more problematic. Welsh being a language that generally stresses the penultimate (next-to-the-last) syllable, we do know that the accent would be on the word's beginning, the which would naturally affect the shape that the vowels would take, lengthening the first, shortening the second.

So, at a guess, I'm going to say that, on the lips of their modern descendants, today the Dobunni would be calling themselves something like Y Dyfn (rhymes with "a coven") or Y Dwfyn (rhymes with "a proven").

That this can't hardly help but remind a Welsh-speaker of the adjective dwfn (fem. dofn), meaning “deep, profound”, is certainly not my fault.

No, not my fault at all.

 

Above:

A silver stater of the Dobunni, ca. 100 BCE

 

 

 

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Tagged in: Dobunni
Poet, scholar and storyteller Steven Posch was raised in the hardwood forests of western Pennsylvania by white-tailed deer. (That's the story, anyway.) He emigrated to Paganistan in 1979 and by sheer dint of personality has become one of Lake Country's foremost men-in-black. He is current keeper of the Minnesota Ooser.

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