A Big...Big...Big...Picture 3

Language is spoken before it is written.  The folks who were the first to speak the Welsh language is presented by Bede in his book "The Ecclesiastical History of The English Nation"written between 680 - 703 AD.  In chapter I, he writes "This island at present....contains five nations, the English [Anglo-Saxon], Britons [Brythonic], Scots [Gaelic], Picts [Pictish], and Latins [Latin], each in its own peculiar dialect..."  He continues to write "The Latin tongue is, by the study of the Scriptures, become common to all the rest."  So by 700 AD Latin was the chief language of the clerks, and writers of the time, but had also become a language between the nations. [Please note that the brackets are mine and not Bede's.]

Now for the Celts, the spoken language had become the only means to transmit their legends and stories.  To accomplish this generation after generation, a special position was established to manage this endeavor.  The Bard he was called.

Significant was his role in maintaining Celtic, to become Welsh culture, that the above drawing gives an impression of this activity by Edward Jones in 1784.  Oral tradition was the norm.  Words and their vocal expression, often to music [the harp shown above] , became the foundation to the written words that became Welsh.  Now, look back to the previous post that give words in the languages noted by Bede.

Bede's text is taken from:  Everyman's Library 479, History, J.M. Dent & Sons LTD, 1954, London, p. 5.

The drawing is taken from : Wales Her Origins Struggles And Later History Institutions and Manners, by Gilbert Stone, Frederick A. Stokes Co., NY, 1915. [Please note that the drawing is by Edward Jones, 1784...those Jones are everywhere.]

A Big...Big...Big Picture 2

Writing or speaking words become the threads that bind a cultural group together in this world of experiences.  Events of life like birth, death, and all the places in between, are packaged in words that get past down from one generation to the next.  The following table shows some of these words used among the language groups that played a role in the derivation of the surname JONES.  The words of life they are called.

The first column list these words in English, which is the language of my own tongue.  Next is Welsh which seems to be the cultural foundation for our surname JONES.  Latin [the language of the early Christian Church that wrote things down]...French [the language of those folks taking over the Island after 1066]...Greek [the language which clustered in the educated of the day such as priest, clerks, and the record keepers]...and finally Anglo-Saxon [the vernacular] which survived to bring us to the English.

Now what has this got to do with the surname JONES you may be asking.  Well, if you will, take each word in the first column and move its spelling across the other columns, you will see variations among the language groups.  Some spellings are close, but for the Welsh there are dramatic differences.  For example, the word for "Man" is "dyn" in the Welsh, but "homo" in Latin, "homme" in French, an "anthropose" in the Greek.  In the Anglo-Saxon it is "man".  Take some time and look through the words of life.

All this analysis shows how different the Welsh tongue is to our English tongue.  This difference is one main factor in the "phonetic" changes that took place during the course of the chronology of our surname JONES.  The language groups listed above all played a role in the formation and changes to our surname.  Welsh to English passing thorough a group of languages to become JONES.  What a "BIG" picture indeed it is.

Note: This table was put together after many years of trying to piece together why the various spellings of "John" appeared in the documents of the day.  Who would have known?