Posted by Geraint_Lewis on August 19, 2013 at 23:33:31 user Geraint_Lewis.
In Reply to: Numbers posted by Ed Kiser on August 18, 2013 at 18:00:09:
Pretty much: it reflects the British Celtic population who occupied Cumbria (and indeed all of the British Isles) before the arrival of the Jutes, Angles and Saxons from what it now northern Germany.
As I understand it, up until ~940AD Cymru was an independent Celtic kingdom occupying the area now known as Cumbria (as the English came to pronounce this name). At that time a Saxon king attempted to invade and annex it (I think from Northumberland), but he was repulsed with help from the northern Celts, who were at that time developing a unified identity as Scots. Cymru then became a province of Scotland until 1092, when the English carried out a successful invasion. They subsequently settled the more prosperous valleys, whilst driving the surviving Celts either into the hills or into Scotland. There will, presumably, have been intermixing of the two populations over the intervening centuries (and, indeed, with other incomers, such as the Vikings described in Thorstein and the Elizabethan miners referred to by Slater Bob), but it makes sense that the original Celtic language has influenced local dialect in the hill country. The numbering system used by sheep farmers is an example of that.
It is perhaps worth noting that Cymru is also the Welsh word for themselves (it translates as "compatriot"). "Wales" is a derivation of the Saxon word "Whealas", which means "the land of the foreigners".