|
The Britons were an ancient Celtic people who lived on Great Britain from the Iron Age through the Roman and Sub-Roman periods. They spoke a language that is now known as Common Brittonic. The earliest evidence of the existence of the Britons and their language in historical sources dates to the Iron Age.〔 After the Roman conquest of Britain in the 1st century, a Romano-British culture emerged, and Latin and British Vulgar Latin coexisted with Brittonic. During and after the Roman era, the Britons lived throughout Britain south of the Firth of Forth. Their relationship with the Picts, who lived north of the Firth of Forth, has been the subject of much discussion, though most scholars accept that the Pictish language was related to Common Brittonic.〔Forsyth, p. 9.〕 With the beginning of Anglo-Saxon settlement in the 5th century, the culture and language of the Britons fragmented and much of their territory was taken over by the Anglo-Saxons. The extent to which this cultural and linguistic change was accompanied by wholesale changes in the population is still a matter of discussion. During this period some Britons migrated to mainland Europe and established significant settlements in Brittany (now part of France) as well as Britonia in modern Galicia, Spain.〔Koch, pp. 291–292.〕 By the 11th century, remaining Celtic-speaking populations had split into distinct groups: the Welsh in Wales, the Cornish in Cornwall, the Bretons in Brittany, and the people of the ''Hen Ogledd'' ("Old North") in southern Scotland and northern England. Common Brittonic developed into the distinct Brittonic languages: Welsh, Cumbric, Cornish and Breton.〔 ==Name== (詳細はPytheas, a Greek geographer who made a voyage of exploration around the British Isles between 330 and 320 BC. Although none of his own writings remain, writers during the time of the Roman Empire made much reference to them. Pytheas called the islands collectively ἁι Βρεττανιαι (''hai Brettaniai''), which has been translated as the ''Brittanic Isles'', and the peoples of these islands of ''Prettanike'' were called the Πρεττανοί (''Prettanoi''), ''Priteni'', ''Pritani'' or ''Pretani''. The group included Ireland, which was referred to as ''Ierne'' (''Insula sacra'' "sacred island" as the Greeks interpreted it) "inhabited by the race of ''Hiberni''" (''gens hiernorum''), and Britain as ''insula Albionum'', "island of the Albions". The term ''Pritani'' may have reached Pytheas from the Gauls, who possibly used it as their term for the inhabitants of the islands.〔 The ''Anglo-Saxon Chronicle'', which was originally compiled on the orders of King Alfred the Great in approximately 890, and subsequently maintained and added to by generations of anonymous scribes until the middle of the 12th century, starts with this sentence: "The island Britain is 800 miles long, and 200 miles broad, and there are in the island five nations: English, Welsh (or British), Scottish, Pictish, and Latin. The first inhabitants were the Britons, who came from Armenia, and first peopled Britain southward." ("Armenia" is possibly a mistaken transcription of Armorica, an area in Northwestern Gaul.)〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://avalon.law.yale.edu/medieval/ang01.asp )〕 The Latin name in the early Roman Empire period was ''Britanni'' or ''Brittanni'', following the Roman conquest in AD 43.〔OED s.v. "Briton". See also (Online Etymology Dictionary: Briton )〕 The Welsh word ''Brython'' was introduced into English usage by John Rhys in 1884 as a term unambiguously referring to the P-Celtic speakers of Great Britain, to complement ''Goidel''; hence the adjective ''Brythonic'' referring to the group of languages.〔(Online Etymology Dictionary: Brythonic )〕 "Brittonic languages" is a more recent coinage (first attested 1923 according to the ''Oxford English Dictionary'') intended to refer to the ancient Britons specifically. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Celtic Britons」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|