The
Celtic languages are descended from
Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic", a branch of the greater
Indo-European language family. The term "Celtic" was used to describe this language group by
Edward Lhuyd in 1707, having much earlier been used by Greek and Roman writers to describe tribes in central
Gaul. During the 1st millennium BC, they were spoken across Europe, from the
Bay of Biscay and the
North Sea, up the
Rhine and down the
Danube to the
Black Sea and the
Upper Balkan Peninsula, and into
Asia Minor (
Galatia). Today, Celtic languages are limited to a few areas on the western fringe of
Europe, notably
Ireland, the peninsula of
Brittany in
France, and areas of the
United Kingdom including
Wales,
Scotland and
Cornwall. Celtic languages are also spoken on the
Isle of Man,
Cape Breton Island and in
Patagonia. The spread to Cape Breton and Patagonia occurred in modern times. In all these areas the Celtic languages are now only spoken by minorities although there are continuing efforts at revival. Although Celtic languages were spoken in Australia before federation in 1901, these have died out.
Divisions
Proto-Celtic apparently divided into four sub-families:
- Brythonic (also called British or Brittonic), including Welsh, Breton, Cornish, Cumbric, and possibly also Pictish though this may be a sister language rather than a daughter of British (Common Brythonic). Before the arrival of Scotti on the Isle of Man in the 9th century there may have been a Brythonic language in the Isle of Man. Kenneth Jackson used the term "Brittonic" for the form of the British language after the changes in the 6th century.
Scholarly handling of the Celtic languages has been rather argumentative owing to lack of much primary source data. Some scholars distinguish
Continental Celtic and
Insular Celtic, arguing that the differences between the Goidelic and Brythonic languages arose after these split off from the Continental Celtic languages. Other scholars distinguish between
P-Celtic and Q-Celtic, putting most the Gaulish and Brythonic languages in the former group and the Goidelic and Celtiberian languages in the latter. The P-Celtic languages (also called
Gallo-Brittonic) are sometimes seen as a central innovating area as opposed to the more conservative peripheral Q-Celtic languages.
The Breton language is Brythonic, not Gaulish, though there may be some input from the latter. When the
Anglo-Saxons moved into
Great Britain, several waves of the native
Britons or "
Welsh" (from a Germanic word for "foreigners") crossed the
English Channel and landed in
Brittany. They brought their Brythonic language with them, which evolved into Breton – which is still partially intelligible with Modern Welsh and Cornish.
In the P/Q classification scheme the first language to split off from Proto-Celtic was Gaelic. It has characteristics that some scholars see as archaic but others see as also being in the Brythonic languages (see Schmidt). With the Insular/Continental classification scheme the split of the former into Gaelic and Brythonic is seen as being late.
The distinction of Celtic into these four sub-families most likely occurred about 900 BC according to Gray and Atkinson but, because of estimation uncertainty, it could be any time between 1200 and 800 BC. However, they only considered Gaelic and Brythonic. The controversial paper by Forster and Toth included Gaulish and put the break-up much earlier at 3200 BC ± 1500 years. They support the Insular Celtic hypothesis. The early Celts were commonly associated with the archaeological
Urnfield culture, the
Hallstatt culture, and the
La Tène culture, though the earlier assumption of association between language and culture is now considered to be less strong.
Pronunciation
The term
Celtic is pronounced either or , but is more common, as the word
Celtic is derived from the
Greek,
Keltoi. The term is sometimes spelled either
Keltic or
Celtick in old documents.
Classifications
There are two main competing schemata of categorization. The older scheme, argued for by Schmidt (1988) among others, links Gaulish with Brythonic in a
P-Celtic node, originally leaving just Goidelic as
Q-Celtic. The difference between P and Q languages is the treatment of
Proto-Celtic *
kʷ, which became *
p in the P-Celtic languages but *
k in Goidelic. An example is the Proto-Celtic verb root *
kʷrin- "to buy", which became
pryn- in Welsh but
cren- in
Old Irish. However, a classification based on a single feature is seen as risky by its critics, particularly as the sound change occurs in other language groups (
Oscan and
Greek).
The other scheme, defended for example by McCone (1996), links Goidelic and Brythonic together as an
Insular Celtic branch, while Gaulish and Celtiberian are referred to as
Continental Celtic. According to this theory, the "P-Celtic" sound change of to occurred independently or
areally. The proponents of the Insular Celtic hypothesis point to other shared innovations among Insular Celtic languages, including inflected prepositions, VSO word order, and the lenition of intervocalic to , a
nasalized voiced bilabial fricative (an extremely rare sound). There is, however, no assumption that the Continental Celtic languages descend from a common "Proto-Continental Celtic" ancestor. Rather, the Insular/Continental schemata usually considers Celtiberian the first branch to split from Proto-Celtic, and the remaining group would later have split into Gaulish and Insular Celtic.
There are legitimate scholarly arguments in favour of both the Insular Celtic hypothesis and the P-Celtic/Q-Celtic hypothesis. Proponents of each schema dispute the accuracy and usefulness of the other's categories. However, since the 1970s the division into Insular and Continental Celtic has become the more widely held view (Cowgill 1975; McCone 1991, 1992; Schrijver 1995).
When referring only to the modern Celtic languages, since no Continental Celtic language has living descendants, "Q-Celtic" is equivalent to "Goidelic" and "P-Celtic" is equivalent to "Brythonic".
Within the
Indo-European family, the Celtic languages have sometimes been placed with the
Italic languages in a common
Italo-Celtic subfamily, a hypothesis that is now largely discarded, in favour of the assumption of
language contact between pre-Celtic and pre-Italic communities.
How the family tree of the Celtic languages is ordered depends on which hypothesis is used -
Insular/Continental hypothesisP-Celtic/Q-Celtic hypothesisCharacteristics of Celtic languages
Although there are many differences between the individual Celtic languages, they do show many family resemblances. While none of these characteristics is necessarily unique to the Celtic languages, there are few if any other languages which possess them all. They include:
- two grammatical genders (modern Insular Celtic only; Old Irish and the Continental languages had three genders)
- a vigesimal number system (counting by twenties)
- verb-subject-object (VSO) word order (probably Insular Celtic only)
- an interplay between the subjunctive, future, imperfect, and habitual, to the point that some tenses and moods have ousted others
- an impersonal or autonomous verb form serving as a passive or intransitive
- *Welsh dysgaf "I teach" vs. dysgir "is taught, one teaches", Irish "déanaim" "I do/make" vs. "déantar" "is done"
- no infinitives, replaced by a quasi-nominal verb form called the verbal noun or verbnoun
- frequent use of vowel mutation as a morphological device, e.g. formation of plurals, verbal stems, etc.
- use of preverbal particles to signal either subordination or illocutionary force of the following clause
- *mutation-distinguished subordinators/relativizers
- *particles for negation, interrogation, and occasionally for affirmative declarations
- infixed pronouns positioned between particles and verbs
- lack of simple verb for the imperfective "have" process, with possession conveyed by a composite structure, usually BE + preposition
- use of periphrastic phrases to express verbal tense, voice, or aspectual distinctions
- distinction by function of the two versions of BE verbs traditionally labelled substantive (or existential) and copula
- bifurcated demonstrative structure
- suffixed pronominal supplements, called confirming or supplementary pronouns
- use of singulars and/or special forms of counted nouns, and use of a singulative suffix to make singular forms from plurals, where older singulars have disappeared
Examples:
(Irish)
Ná bac le mac an bhacaigh is ní bhacfaidh mac an bhacaigh leat.(Literal translation) Don't bother with son the beggar's and not will-bother son the beggar's with-you.
- bhacaigh is the genitive of bacach. The igh the result of affection; the bh is the lenited form of b.
- leat is the second person singular inflected form of the preposition le.
- The order is verb subject object (VSO) in the second half - compare this to English or French which are normally Subject Verb Object in word order.
(Welsh)
pedwar ar bymtheg a phedwar ugain(literally) four on fifteen and four twenties
- bymtheg is a mutated form of pymtheg, which is pump ("five") plus deg ("ten"). Likewise, phedwar is a mutated form of pedwar.
- The multiples of ten are deg, ugain, deg ar hugain, deugain, hanner cant, trigain, deg a thrigain, pedwar ugain, deg a phedwar ugain, cant.
Mixed languages
