W. Prydain 'Britain', and so came to be distinguished from the Southern Britons, who called themselves Brittones. Picti, which is not known to occur before a. d. 297, seems to be a Latin translation of *Pritenes explained as meaning 'figured' (: W. pryd 'form', Ir. cruth), just as W. Brithwyr 'Picts' is a translation of Picti. This explanation of *Pritenes is probably only a piece of popular etymology; but even if it had some old tradition behind it, the name is equally applicable to the other Britons, for they all painted or tattooed themselves, Caesar b.g. v 14, Herodian iii 14, 7. Indeed the objection to accepting it as the true explanation is that at the time when it was first applied it could not be distinctive.
The etymology of a proper name is always uncertain, except when, like Albion, it hardly admits of more than one meaning, and that meaning fits. Britain like Albion must have been a name given to the island by its Keltic invaders, and Albion suggests the feature most likely to impress them. There is an Italo-Keltic root of some such form as *qu̯rēi- which means 'chalk' or 'white earth', giving Lat. crēta, and W. pridd 'loam', Irish crē; the attempt to derive the Welsh and Irish words from the Latin is a failure—the root must be Keltic as well as Italic; and it may have yielded the name Pritannia meaning 'the island of the white cliffs'.
§ 4. i. Gaulish and British are known to us through names on coins, and words and names quoted by Greek and Latin authors. No inscriptions occur in British, but British names are found in Latin inscriptions. A number of inscriptions in Gaulish have been preserved. Goidelic is known from the ogam inscriptions, of which the oldest date from the 5th century.
ii. The scanty materials which we possess for the study of Gaulish and British are sufficient to show that these languages preserved the Aryan case-endings, and were at least as highly inflected as, say, Latin. The great change which transformed British and converted it into Welsh and its sister dialects was the loss of the endings of stems and words, by which, for example, the four syllables of the British Maglo-cŭnos were reduced to the two of the Welsh Mael-gwn. By this reduction distinctions of case were lost, and stem-forming suffixes became a new class of inflexional endings; see § 113, § 119 i.
§ 5. The history of Welsh may be divided into periods as follows:
(1) Early Welsh, from the time when British had definitely become Welsh to the end of the 8th century. Of the forms of this
