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- "Copyn."
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"Incy Wincy Spider" yn Gymraeg:
Dringodd y pry copyn, fyny’r biben hir,
Glaw mawr a ddaeth a’i olchi nôl i’r tir,
Yna daeth yr haul i sychu’r glaw i gyd,
A dringodd y pry copyn y biben ar ei hyd.
Literal translation:
The spider climbed up the long pipe,
Heavy rain came a washed it to the ground,
Then the sun came and dried all the rain,
And the spider clibmed the pipe along it's length.
1387
I hope duo begin to distinguish between north and south, it is confusing for those of us who don't know the differences.
Yep, northern copyn and pry cop come from English "coppe" meaning spider. I've read it comes from Dutch "coppe". But I've also read there was the Old English word "āttercoppe" ("ātor" (poison) + "copp" (head)). (Incidentally, we also borrowed this last word into Welsh as copa, meaning "summit" or "head".)
The southern corryn on the other hand is Celtic, from cor meaning "dwarf" or "something small". It's related to English "curt, short, shirt, skirt" and Danish "skorte, skjorte, skørt".
Etymology is cool.
Can't reply to your comment directly, but yeah, if the Old English "āttercoppe" ("ātor" (poison) + "copp" (head)) derivation is right, then "copp" would be related to German "Kopf".
They were apparently borrowed from Late Latin "cuppa" (drinking vessel, cask), whence English "cup" and Welsh cwpan. Interesting how the idea of a vessel coming to mean "head" is found in Latin "testa" (pot, jug) becoming Italian "testa" and French "tête" (head) too.
As I say, etymology is cool. You could get lost in it.
Yes and J. R. R. Tolkien used the variants attercop, cop, cob, lop and lob in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The giant spider, Shelob in LOTR literally means "she-spider".
Indeed. York's Coppergate area is named after the cup-makers who worked there, nothing to do with copper, which is what most people assume.
Thanks shwmae! Again I can't reply directly but I'm sure this will get to you. Welsh seems to share a lot of cognates with Latin, I know a lot of this could be from the Roman period, but could the Celtic languages be a little closer to Latin than other language families like German or Slavic? With Welsh there seems to be something similar to Latin that I just can't quite put my finger on. Obviously I'm not an expert on either language but just from a glance.
Yes, there are noticable similarities between the Celtic and Italic branches, especially when you go back a few centuries and compare, say, Brythonic and Latin.
Wikipedia says:
"Within the Indo-European family, the Celtic languages have sometimes been placed with the Italic languages in a common Italo-Celtic subfamily, a hypothesis that is now largely discarded, in favour of the assumption of language contact between pre-Celtic and pre-Italic communities."
The article on Italo-Celtic goes into more depth.
Do you think 'coppe' could also be a cognate of the German word for head, 'kopf'?
The difference has to be written somewhere (when the words are different in the North and the South).. At least something like"(SW)" and "(NW)"
Wrong! Money is arian yn Gymraeg. Report it. Wait, maybe it's thinking of money spiders! Ha!
