Ancient British Wenta is necessarily Gwent.[1] Besides Caerwent, which the Romans called for distinction Venta Silurum (i.e. Venta of the Silures), there were two other places of the same name, Venta Icenorum, the capital of the Iceni in Norfolk, and Venta Belgarum (of the Belgae); the name of this last Wenta was turned by the English into Wintanceaster,[2] now Winchester. The meaning of Wenta has not yet been discovered.
The Welsh word dwr, water, which makes a great figure in popular books treating of the etymology of place-names, is not exactly spurious, but it is a mere modern colloquial shortening of dwfr, the ancient British form of which was dubron. It is therefore evident that this modern word cannot be used to explain such ancient names as Durovernon (Canterbury), or Durnovaria (whence the Old English Dornwaraceaster, now Dorchester). An ingenious combination of two absurdities appears in the explanation of the name of the river Derwent as 'dwr gwent, the water of the gwent or champaign country', which has found its way into many school-books.
It would be just as reasonable to try to read Virgil by means of a French dictionary and with no grammar, as to try to translate ancient British names by means of a Welsh dictionary. To say this is to condemn nearly everything that has been written on the subject in popular books.
- ↑ It may be remarked that in the Central dialect of Old French a g was prefixed to an initial w in words adopted from the Germanic languages; thus guarde. (modern French garde, English guard) is from the Germanic word represented by the English ward. If this is due to the influence of Gaulish (which must have been nearly identical with Ancient British), it is not unlikely that the British initial w may even in Roman times have had a faint g sound before it. But this sound must at any rate have been much weaker than in modern Welsh, as otherwise it would have been preserved in the Latin and Old English forms of British place-names. In modern Welsh initial gw becomes w when the word is syntactically connected with a preceding word which in Ancient British ended in a vowel.
- ↑ The vowel-change is regular; in the earliest Old English there was no such combination of sounds as ent.
