Talk:Cunobeline

Article title
The Oxford DNB calls the subject Cunobelinus as do modern works found on Google books. Cunobeline, on the other hand, seems to be found mainly in very old works. Seems doubtful that the article should have been moved. Angus McLellan (Talk) 13:39, 21 April 2010 (UTC)


 * A redirect was required and a move is an easy way of doing this. I checked the number of sources for each form in Google Books and they seemed similar - about a thousand.  I also noticed that some coins shown in the article carry the inscription Cunobeline while none have Cunobelinus. Colonel Warden (talk) 13:45, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

Interpretation of the name
'Cuno' as 'hound' is surely incorrect. It is really an old spelling of 'cyn' = Welsh 'before'. The Welsh version 'Cynfelyn' makes that pretty obvious really. The 'o' part of 'cuno' is a connective vowel equivalent to Welsh 'y'. Beli was the Celtic equivalent of Apollo. Hence, the name should be interpreted as 'before Apollo', ie 'second only to Apollo'. And, by the way, the British of the time spelled the name without the ending 'e'. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.197.181.177 (talk) 10:47, 15 November 2011 (UTC)


 * I have added a request for authority for the derivation given. It seems hard to deduce a derivation for a word when we do not know how the word was spelt or pronounced. Cunobelinus must be an approximation to what the Romans thought they heard, but I did not think that enough is known about the Celtic language in the form it took in Britain at this date to substantiate the derivation. -us is the normal masculine ending for a 2nd declension latin word and I would imagine that a Roman would end the word in this way without thinking much about it, but I do not pretend to be an expert on linguistics. The derivation suggested in the paragraph above is open to similar objections.

Waysider1925 (talk) 19:07, 20 March 2012 (UTC)


 * You're simply arguing from ignorance - quite a lot is known about the ancient Celtic languages and how they worked, from the science of historical linguistics. Like many Indo-European languages, it had inflectional endings similar to Latin - masculine nouns usually ended in -os, but there were some in -us as well. The form of his name is in any case derived not so much from Roman writers but from his own coins. I'll find a reference once I have a chance to consult a few books, but it shouldn't be hard to find. --Nicknack009 (talk) 20:03, 20 March 2012 (UTC)


 * I am quite willing to be instructed, but I do not appreciate discourtesy. I look forward to reading the authority in due course. I thought I understood from Peter Salter's Roman Britain that written British Celtic was almost unknown, but perhaps he is wrong or I have misrecollected what I read. As to the coins did they not have a latin inscription?

Waysider1925 (talk) 17:47, 21 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Discourtesy? You removed material from the article based solely on "I can't believe anybody knows anything about this". When I say you're arguing from ignorance, I'm not insulting you, I'm observing what you're doing. I have provided a reference. I was going to go to the library and find one from a more linguistic source, but I can't be bothered now. --Nicknack009 (talk) 18:28, 21 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Cuno as 'dog' or 'hound' is a mistake. I think the problem is that somebody has seen 'cuno = dog' in a glossary of proto-Celtic and then assumed that every instance of this form must therefore mean 'dog'. The correct interpretation in my opinion goes something like this: 'cun' is a precursor of 'cyn' = 'fore/before', 'o' is a connective particle similar to 'y' in present-day Welsh and 'belinos' is the god Beli with a genitive suffix 'in' and the male ending 'os' or 'us'. The present-day version of the name is the biggest clue: if 'cuno = dog' were to be true in this case, the name would have evolved as 'Cufelyn', but it hasn't. It's Cynfelyn.WallHeath (talk) 20:45, 22 April 2017 (UTC)


 * If you don't agree with what has been stated here in good faith, the answer is to state your own case. Removing a contributor's comments is against the rules: "...you should not edit or delete the comments of other editors without their permission." Please desist from what you have been doing. WallHeath (talk) 16:03, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

I was always told his name meant Hound of the Sun God: Belinus. However either way the main articles derivation is not evidenced. I dont think one can hope for consistent spelling of Brythonic words to guide us either. There was no agreement on english spelling till 400 years ago for instance so expecting welsh and eastern british spelling to accord is optimistic — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.169.188.23 (talk) 13:14, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

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Greek derivation
This appears to be self-contradictory on its face: "Cunobeline (or Cunobelin, from Latin Cunobelinus, derived from Greek Kynobellinus, Κυνοβελλίνος) ... His name is a compound made up of [ Common Brittonic, which we forgot to mention by name] cuno- ('hound') and Belenos (the god Belenus)."

Either it's Brittonic, or it's Greek. I the attempted implication here is that in Brythonic/Brittonic, he was Cunobelenos, and some Greeks turned this into Kynobellinus, and Romans turned that into Cunobelinus, and English got it from Latin. That a) isn't actually what we're saying, just really vaguely handwaving at, and b) it's a far-fetched chain for multiple reasons. There doesn't seem to be a clear (at least cited) reason why [early] English would have got this from Latin rather than by picking it up from Brittonic and later Welsh speakers directly, though it is possible (and more likely perhaps that certain variants like Cymbeline come to us ultimately via a Latin route). Next, Romans had more direct and frequent contact with the Britons than the Greeks did (and more familiarity with northwestern Celtic languages and names); Julius Caesar started establishing client-state relationships with tribes in southern Britain during Cunobeline's own lifetime. So why would Latin have got the name via Greece rather than directly, especially since we're talking about someone active right on the verge of the Roman invasion? Doesn't add up.

Since the exact route into English seems speculative, as does even what other language got it from what other language and when, it seems to me that we should give the two common English renderings for the historical person (as opposed to the literary Cybeline) first, as we're doing now, then give "from Common Brittonic cuno-, 'hound', and Belenos, the god Belenus", then proceed with "was a king in ...". In the second lead paragraph, give the Latin and Greek renditions as cognates along with the others, and perhaps without implying Greek→Latin flow unless multiple reliable sources agree that's what happened. Plus, it's much more encyclopedically relevant for the lead sentence to indicate the original cultural origin and meaning than to inject a bunch of semi-random exonyms.

I'm no expert on this stuff personally; just going by what's cited and stated in the article, and what seem like confused and dubious claims for which we'd need more specific sources. So, I'll ping someones who seem to know the material well:, , based on related cuno- discussions here and at Talk:Historicity of King Arthur. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:43, 6 July 2018 (UTC)


 * The name is Brittonic, not Greek; we get some really strange original research posted to Wikipedia on anything related to the ancient Celtic peoples! Cagwinn (talk) 04:05, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

I'm not very active on Wikipedia these days, but I got your ping. I think there are some misunderstandings here. The name "Cunobelinus" is known to modern English readers primarily from Roman era historians who wrote in Greek and Latin. Someone seems to have misunderstood that as meaning the name is derived from Greek and Latin, which is obviously not true. But the name "Cunobelinus" has not been passed down from Brittonic through early English speakers to the present day. Most early British history was forgotten by the middle ages and was only rediscovered with the revival of classical histories in the renaissance and later. If it had been passed down in an unbroken line from the early Britons to the early English to now it would have changed significantly in the process. In the early Welsh genealogies it has become Cynvelyn, which became Kimbelinus in Geoffrey of Monmouth, which became Cymbeline in Shakespeare - and that's with a name that was really only known in scholarly/literary circles, if it had been in common vernacular currency it would probably have changed even more. --Nicknack009 (talk) 10:10, 6 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Well, sounds like we know how to restructure the material then. I don't have any sources for stuff like Cynvelyn and Kimbelinus, though.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:18, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

strong as a dog
dog = hound = hunt

a "strong hunter" is more realistic