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Sidney Wood, in a comment on my last post, brought up the matter of the Cornish place-name element rose. He is quite right to point out that this has nothing to with flowers in the vast majority of Cornish place-names. The element ros is a bit of a problem, because it has two possible meanings: (1) rough land/heath (2) promontory. Unfortunately, names containing rose can also be corruptions of original names which contained res, which means “ford/watercourse”. Of the 50 names beginning Ros(e) in Weatherhill C.(2009) A Concise Dictionary of Cornish Place-Names, Cathair na Mart: Evertype 20% appear to derive from res originals, 30% are glossed as meaning promontory and the remaining 50% as meaning rough land.
Sidney also asks about the <d> in the name Culdrose. I have been unable so far to find any explanation of this. There certainly is no commonly occurring mutation that could explain this. The name is a puzzle anyway, because in Cornish, as in all Celtic languages, the vast majority of adjectives follow the noun, but in Culdrose the adjective kul (Kernewek Kemmyn spelling) it precedes. There is a short list of adjectives which regularly precede, but kul doesn’t figure in it.
Sidney’s other question concerns the surname Pengrowse. On the face of it this looks like a toponym meaning “headland with a cross” from Cornish pen + crows with a regular k → ɡ initial mutation of the second element. I know of no common phonological process which could derive this from the name Penrose, which is what Sidney asks about.
Photo credit: Atoma. Used under this licence.
Welsh (which also has ‘cul’ meaning narrow) does not allow, as far as I can see, placenames to begin with ‘cul’. However, there are several that start with ‘cil’: Cilfynydd for example. ‘Cil’ means source of a stream; might there be a reflex of that in Cornish? And, if so, could that be the initial element in Culdrose?
Martin,
Can’t find a Cornish reflex of cil anywhere. The only word for “source of stream” I can find in the dictionaries I have is pennfenten.
Thank you John. That’s a plausible explanation for Pengrowse. Google led me to a Cornwall genealogical document with, presumably, recorded instances: Pengrous 8, Pengrouse 13, Pengrows 9, Pengrowse 6, Penroase 8, Penroos 3, Penroose 2, Penros 22, Penrose 4386, Penross, 3, Penrosse 9. The parish register indexer Phillimore transcribed all as Penrose.
Though ‘cil’ in Welsh toponymy often means ‘source of a stream’ its basic meaning is ‘nook, corner, recess’ and its Cornish equivalent is kil, kyl which appears in one or two placenames, though not (apparently) with the source-of-stream sense. The Goidelic equivalent is cúil, not to be confused with cúl ‘back’. Culross in Scotland is probably not a parallel to Culdrose, as the Gaelic is normally Cuileann Ross ‘Holly-promontory’.
There is a problem in that the Anglicised cul- is a slightly unexpected outcome of an earlier Cornish kyl-; possibly just due to the way the name is stressed. Lr > ldr could just be a dissimilation which developed during the change of language, but it is also a little odd; perhaps we are even dealing with a second element tros ‘foot’? But I am unaware of the latter being used elsewhere in Cornish place-names. In all this the ultimate stress is a hint that the first element is in fact the adjective ‘cul’ after all.
As with place-name studies in general, this is all speculation in the absence of the earliest available written forms, though even having them in front of us might not help much. Might be worth looking at Padel’s Cornish Place-name Elements to see if it is covered.
Mark,
Thank you very much for that. I’ll consult Padel as you suggest. I don’t have a copy to hand but I know someone who does. Or better still it’s perhaps time I bought a copy.