( xli )
modern; not but here and there a word may have been accidentally caught up on either side: viz. borrowed by the Goths from the Celtic Language, and vice versâ; or perhaps adopted by each of them from some third Language radically different from them both. Thus, from the Welsh Tâd, our vulgar have got the common English word Dad and Daddy: And from the French Delivre, are derived both the English Deliver, and the Armoric Diluir, whence the Cornish Dilver.
In conformity to the opinion of the most knowing Antiquaries, I have given the Irish and Erse Tongues as descended from one common original with the Cambrian, or ancient British Languages, viz. the Welsh, Armoric, and Cornish. But, to confess my own opinion, I cannot think they are equally derived from one common Celtic Stock; at least not in the same uniform manner as any two branches of the Gothic; such, for instance, as the Anglo-Saxon and Francic, from the Old Teutonic. Upon comparing the two ancient Specimens given above in pag. xxvii. scarce any resemblance appears between them; so that if the learned will have them to be streams from one common fountain, it must be allowed, that one or both of them have been greatly polluted in their course, and received large inlets from some other channel.
But, notwithstanding this apparent dissimilitude, the celebrated Lluyd, and others who have investigated this subject, firmly maintain, that there is a real affinity between the Irish and Cambrian Tongues, and that a great part of both Languages is radically the same. He has further shown, that many names of places in South-Britain, and even in Wales itself, the meaning of which is lost in the Welsh Language, can only be explained from words now extant in the Irish and Erse Tongues: An incontestible proof either that the Irish or Erse Language originally prevailed all over the southern parts of this island, or that it is of congenial origin with the Cambrian or Welsh, and so
