And I think to myself, what a wonderful world!

Today I'm going to talk about sheep-counting. Any shepherd will tell you that you must count your sheep regularly, to make sure none of them have got lost. All around the north of England, sheep were traditionally counted not using numbers but with a special rhyme of (apparently) nonsense words, matching the sheep against the words. There are lots of variations of these words: this one is from Swaledale, one of the Yorkshire Dales.

Yan, Tan, Tether, Mether, Pip,

Azer, Sezar, Acker, Conter, Dick,

Yanadick, Tanadick, Tetheradick, Metheradick, Bumfit,

Yanabum, Tanabum, Tetherabum, Metherabum, Jigget

Other parts of England use slightly different versions, but they are all basically the same.

So where does this rhyme come from, and what did the words originally mean?

The clue is the fifth word, 'Pip'. The Welsh for five is 'Pump' - not too different from 'Pip'. So could these actually be numbers in a language similar to Welsh? Let's look at the sheep-counting words and the Welsh numbers and see how they compare:

There are far too many matches here for coincidence, particularly when you note that b, m and p are closely related letters, as are t and d, and k and g. On this basis, the numbers for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19 are virtually the same in Welsh as in the sheep rhyme. So it does appear that the shepherds are speaking something close to Welsh.

There are differences— the sheep words rhyme better than the Welsh. It looks as if the n was added to Tan to make it rhyme with Yan, and the word for three was changed to Tether to make it rhyme with Mether, the word for four. So the sheep rhyme is modified Welsh.

So what are north of England shepherds doing speaking Welsh? In fact, at the time the Romans invaded Great Britain (the 1st Century AD), everybody on the island as far north as the Rift Valley in Scotland (the present location of Glasgow and Edinburgh) spoke the same language, which is now known as British. It was a type of Celtic and closely related to the Celtic language spoken in Ireland. The Romans recorded that the people in the north of Scotland (or Caledonia as they called it) spoke a different language which did not appear to be connected to British in any way. These people were called Picts by the Romans and their language is called Pictish but we know nothing about it. With the exception of the Picts, everybody spoke British.

The Romans themselves spoke Latin, but their language was not adopted by the ordinary people. Then in the 4th Century, the Romans withdrew from Britain, and about 100 years later, Germanic people invaded from northern Germany. The Angles gave their name to East Anglia and also to England (land of the Angles). The Saxons gave their name to Essex, Middlesex, Sussex and Wessex. All of these except Wessex are now counties. The Jutes don't seem to have left

their name anywhere. All three peoples spoke a Germanic language related to Dutch and German which gradually evolved to become English. British, the Celtic language, continued to be spoken in what is now Wales and Cornwall, evolving there into Welsh and Cornish. Cornish subsequently died out, but Welsh is still spoken, the last living remnant in the British Isles of the original British language.

The last, that is, except for the sheep-counting rhymes of the shepherds of the north.

One feature of both Welsh numbers and the sheep-counting rhyme is that they are based on five as well as ten. The numbers from 1 to 10 are each unique. The numbers 11 to 15 are given by "one-and-ten", "two-and-ten" and so, up as far as pymtheg/bumfit which clearly means five-ten. The unusual feature, though is that 16 - 19 are not given as six-and-ten, seven-and-ten etc, but as one-and-fifteen, two-and-fifteen, three-and-fifteen and four-and-fifteen. I'm not aware

of any other language in Europe which uses this base five style numbering.

Gnomon

25.06.09 Front Page

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