Celtic languages
From Freepedia
The Celtic languages are the languages descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic," spoken by ancient and modern Celts alike. The Celtic languages are a family of the greater Indo-European language field. Anciently, 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 now limited to a few enclaves in the British Isles, eastern Canada, Patagonia, scattered groups in the United States and Australia, and on the peninsula of Brittany in France.
Proto-Celtic apparently divided into four sub-families:
- Gaulish and its close relatives, Lepontic and Galatian. These languages were once spoken in a wide arc from France to Turkey and from the Netherlands to northern Italy.
- Celtiberian, anciently spoken in the Iberian peninsula, namely in the areas of modern Portugal, Galicia, Asturias, Aragón and León.
- Goidelic (also Romanised Goidhelic, Gaidelic, and Gaidhelic -- in all cases, correctly pronounced "GIL-ik" or "GHEE-yul-ik"; the 'dh' or 'd' in this case being "slender" as opposed to "broad"), including Irish, Scots Gaelic, and Manx.
- Brythonic (also Romanised Brytonic, Brithonic, and Britonic - the 'h' is silent in any case), including Welsh, Breton, Cornish, Cumbric, the hypothetical Ivernic, and possibly Pictish (opinion is divided as to whether Pictish, which surves only in place names and inscriptions, is a form of P-Celtic or a pre-Celtic language).
Scholarly handling of the Celtic languages has been rather argumentative owing to lack of primary source data. Some scholars distinguish Continental and Insular Celtic, despite the existence of as many differences between the Goidelic and Brythonic languages as between either and the so-called Continental Celtic languages. Other scholars distinguish P-Celtic from Q-Celtic, putting most of the Continetnal Celtic languages in the latter group (except for the northern languages of the group, spoken in what are now northern France and Belgian, which are P-Celtic). Still others distinguish North Celtic (Brythonic and the northern Continental languages), West Celtic (Goidelic and some Celiberian languages), Central Celtic (most Gaulish and the rest of the Celtiberian languages), and East Celtic (Galatian and languages of the Celtic regions of the Balkan peninsula).
Two geographic overlaps are worth noting. First, although Brittany has always been a Celtic country, the Breton language (and the name 'Bretagne,' meaning "Britain" - which supplanted the earlier Roman name, "Armorica") is Brythonic (North Celtic), not Gaulish (Central Celtic). When the Angles, Saxons, and other Germanic tribes moved into Britain, some of the native Britons or "Welsh" (from the Anglo-Saxon word for "foreigners") were forced to flee across the English Channel and landed in Brittany. They brought their Old Welsh language with them, which evolved into Breton - which is still mutually intelligible with Modern Welsh and Cornish (which also developed from Old Welsh). All three countries also have the same national anthem (called "Land of my Fathers" in English), but with different words.
Second, there are four languages which call themselves "Gaelic" (meaning "Celtic") - but only three of them are Celtic languages:
- 1. An Gaeilge ("GWEHL-guh"), the Irish Language
- 2. An Gaelg ("GAYLG"), the Manx Language
- 3. An Gàidhlig ("GAHL-ik"), the Scots Gaelic language ('Gaelic' pronounced 'GAL-ik' in Scotland, never "GAYL-ik")
- 4. El Galego ("gah-LAY-go"), the Galician language but, literally, "The Gaelic." The ancient homeland of the Irish, the native Celtic language was supplanted long ago by the Latin which evolved into Modern Galician. But the people of Galicia are still very proudly Celtic, and for that reason continue to call their language "Gaelic" even though it's an Italic, not a Celtic language.
The distinction of Celtic into these four sub-families probably occurred about 1000 BC. The early Celts are commonly associated with the archaeological Urnfield culture, the La Tene culture, and the Halstatt culture.
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Classification
| Language classification |
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| Indo-European Celtic languages |
There are two competing schemata of categorization. The traditional scheme links Gaulish with Brythonic in a P-Celtic node, leaving 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.
With the discovery of the Botorrita tablets in the 1970s, it became clear that the Celtiberian language, about which virtually nothing was known previously, is also Q-Celtic. Meanwhile, an alternative schema based upon geography arose, linking Goidelic and Brythonic together as an Insular Celtic sub-family, and Gaulish and Celtiberian as a Continental Celtic sub-family.
According to this theory, the distinction of Q- and P-Celtic might have 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 [m] to [β̃], 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.
However, this ignores the fact, for example, that Spanish and several minor Romance languages spoken on the Iberian peninsula also frequently use VSO word order, particularly in forms recognised as highly literary or very old. Por ejemplo: Está él en casa – literally "Is he in house" (meaning "He is at home") is as frequently heard in Spanish as “Él está en casa.” Indeed, VSO word order cannot be avoided in the first person singular, because the pronoun (yo = I) is built into the verb: "Estoy en casa" = Est + yo (inverted to 'oy'), just as in Modern Irish "Táim anns’ a’ tí" = Tá + Mi (Modern Irish 'Mé' reverted to Old Irish ‘Mi’ and then inverted to 'im'). Likewise, there are both Irish and Galician legends which hold Galicia to be the ancient homeland of the Irish (thus, too, of the Manx and Gaelic Scots).
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. Since the realization that Celtiberian was Q-Celtic in the 1970s, the division into Insular and Continental Celtic is currently the more popular view, but because all of the Celtic languages have been fairly assaulted head-on by neighbouring Italic and Germanic languages for more than two millennia in some cases - with varying degrees of success on the part of the latter -- one should not be surprised that some Celtic languages lost certain once-common features while others retained, them.
It should be remembered, however, that this dispute is purely academic in that it concerns the relationship between modern-day groups of languages and groups that are now extinct. No serious authority disputes that the Celtic languages spoken at present divide into Goidelic and Brythonic clusters. When referring only to the modern Celtic languages, 'Q-Celtic' and 'P-Celtic' may be taken as synonymous with Goidelic and Brythonic, respectively (although this terminology usually implies acceptance of the overall Q-Celtic/P-Celtic hypothesis).
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 obsolete.
Assuming the Insular/Continental hypothesis, the family tree of the Celtic languages would be:
Assuming the P-Celtic/Q-Celtic hypothesis, the Celtic family would be organised this way:
And according to the third, purely geographic scheme (which presumes the 2000-year assault by Germanic and Italic languages upon the Celtic languages makes fine categorisation of the latter virtually impossible), the Celtic language family tree would be:
Characteristics 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:
- Initial consonant mutation (Insular Celtic only)
- Inflected prepositions (Insular Celtic only)
- VSO word order as standard (Insular Celtic only)
- Two grammatical genders (modern Insular Celtic only; Old Irish and the Continental languages had three genders)
- Definite but no indefinite article (Insular Celtic only; no evidence for a definite article in Continental languages)
- Counting by twenties.
Examples:
Ná bac le mac an bhacaigh is ní bhacfaidh mac an bhacaigh leat. (Irish example)
(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 i is the genitive inflection; the bh is a mutation.
- leat is the second person form of the preposition le.
- The order is VSO in the second half.
pedwar ar bymtheg a phedwar ugain (Welsh example)
four on fifteen and four twenties
- bymtheg is a mutated form of pymtheg, which is pump five plus deg ten. Likewise, phedwar is mutated from 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
- Bungee language, a Metis mix of Scottish Gaelic and Cree language
- Shelta, a mix of Romany language, the Irish language and English
- Some forms of Romany language in Wales, also combined Romany itself with Welsh language and English language forms.
See also
- Language families and languages
- Celt (for the ancient Celts)
- Modern Celts
- Pronunciation of Celtic (on the pronunciation of this word in English)
External links
References
Gray, R. and Atkinson, Q.D. 2003. Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin. Nature. 426:435-439.
