Celtic languages


The Celtic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, descended from the hypothetical Proto-Celtic language. The term "Celtic" was first used to describe this language group by Edward Lhuyd in 1707, following Paul-Yves Pezron, who made the explicit link between the Celts described by classical writers and the Welsh and Breton languages.
During the first millennium BC, Celtic languages were spoken across much of Europe and central Anatolia. Today, they are restricted to the northwestern fringe of Europe and a few diaspora communities. There are six living languages: the four continuously living languages Breton, Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh, and the two revived languages Cornish and Manx. All are minority languages in their respective countries, though there are continuing efforts at revitalisation. Welsh is an official language in Wales and Irish is an official language across the island of Ireland and of the European Union. Welsh is the only Celtic language not classified as endangered by UNESCO. The Cornish and Manx languages became extinct in modern times but have been revived. Each now has several hundred second-language speakers.
Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic form the Goidelic languages, while Welsh, Cornish and Breton are Brittonic. All of these are Insular Celtic languages, since Breton, the only living Celtic language spoken in continental Europe, is descended from the language of settlers from Britain. There are a number of extinct but attested Continental Celtic languages, such as Celtiberian, Galatian and Gaulish. Beyond that, there is no agreement on the subdivisions of the Celtic language family. Traditionally, they are considered to be divided into P-Celtic and Q-Celtic. However, Gaulish is widely considered more closely related to Insular Celtic than either of these two are to Celtiberian; together, Gaulish and Insular Celtic may form the Nuclear Celtic subfamily.
The Celtic languages have a rich literary tradition. The earliest specimens of written Celtic are Lepontic inscriptions from the 6th century BC in the Alps. Early Continental inscriptions used Italic and Paleohispanic scripts. Between the 4th and 8th centuries, Irish and Pictish were occasionally written in an original script, Ogham, but Latin script came to be used for all Celtic languages. Welsh has had a continuous literary tradition from the 6th century AD.

Living languages

SIL Ethnologue lists six living Celtic languages, of which four have retained a substantial number of native speakers. These are: the Goidelic languages and the Brittonic languages. The other two, Cornish and Manx, died out in modern times with their presumed last native speakers in 1777 and 1974 respectively. Revitalisation movements in the 2000s led to the re-emergence of native speakers of both languages following their adoption by adults and children.

Mixed languages

Classification

Celtic is divided into various branches:

Continental/Insular Celtic and P/Q-Celtic hypotheses

Scholarly handling of Celtic languages has been contentious owing to scarceness of primary source data. Some scholars posit that the primary distinction is between Continental Celtic and Insular Celtic, arguing that the differences between the Goidelic and Brittonic languages arose after these split off from the Continental Celtic languages. Other scholars make the primary distinction between P-Celtic and Q-Celtic languages based on the replacement of initial Q by initial P in some words. Most of the Gallic and Brittonic languages are P-Celtic, while the Goidelic and Hispano-Celtic languages are Q-Celtic. The P-Celtic languages are sometimes seen as a central innovating area as opposed to the more conservative peripheral Q-Celtic languages. According to Ranko Matasović in the introduction to his 2009 Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic: "Celtiberian ... is almost certainly an independent branch on the Celtic genealogical tree, one that became separated from the others very early."
The Breton language is Brittonic, not Gaulish; though there may be some input from the latter, having been introduced from Southwestern regions of Britain in the post-Roman era.
In the P/Q classification schema, 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 Brittonic languages. In the Insular/Continental classification schema, the split of the former into Gaelic and Brittonic is seen as being late.
The distinction of Celtic into these four sub-families most likely occurred about 900 BC according to Gray & Atkinson but, because of estimation uncertainty, it could be any time between 1200 and 800 BC. However, they only considered Gaelic and Brythonic. A controversial paper by Forster & 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.
There are legitimate scholarly arguments for both the Insular Celtic hypothesis and the P-/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, but in the middle of the 1980s, the P-/Q-Celtic theory found new supporters, because of the inscription on the Larzac piece of lead, the analysis of which reveals another common phonetical innovation -nm- > -nu, that is less accidental than only one. The discovery of a third common innovation would allow the specialists to come to the conclusion of a Gallo-Brittonic dialect.
The interpretation of this and further evidence is still quite contested, and the main argument for Insular Celtic is connected with the development of verbal morphology and the syntax in Irish and British Celtic, which Schumacher regards as convincing, while he considers the P-Celtic/Q-Celtic division unimportant and treats Gallo-Brittonic as an outdated theory. Stifter affirms that the Gallo-Brittonic view is "out of favour" in the scholarly community as of 2008 and the Insular Celtic hypothesis "widely accepted".
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 "Brittonic".
How the family tree of the Celtic languages is ordered depends on which hypothesis is used:
"Insular Celtic hypothesis"
"P/Q-Celtic hypothesis"

Eska (2010)

Eska evaluates the evidence as supporting the following tree, based on shared innovations, though it is not always clear that the innovations are not areal features. It seems likely that Celtiberian split off before Cisalpine Celtic, but the evidence for this is not robust. On the other hand, the unity of Gaulish, Goidelic, and Brittonic is reasonably secure. Schumacher had already cautiously considered this grouping to be likely genetic, based, among others, on the shared reformation of the sentence-initial, fully inflecting relative pronoun *i̯os, *i̯ā, *i̯od into an uninflected enclitic particle. Eska sees Cisalpine Gaulish as more akin to Lepontic than to Transalpine Gaulish.
Eska considers a division of Transalpine–Goidelic–Brittonic into Transalpine and Insular Celtic to be most probable because of the greater number of innovations in Insular Celtic than in P-Celtic, and because the Insular Celtic languages were probably not in great enough contact for those innovations to spread as part of a sprachbund. However, if they have another explanation, then it is possible that P-Celtic is a valid clade, and the top branching would be:

Italo-Celtic

Within the Indo-European family, the Celtic languages have sometimes been placed with the Italic languages in a common Italo-Celtic subfamily. This hypothesis fell somewhat out of favour after reexamination by American linguist Calvert Watkins in 1966. Irrespectively, some scholars such as Ringe, Warnow and Taylor and many others have argued in favour of an Italo-Celtic grouping in 21st century theses.

Characteristics

Although there are many differences between the individual Celtic languages, they do show many family resemblances.
  • consonant mutations
  • inflected prepositions
  • two grammatical genders
  • a vigesimal number system
  • * Cornish hwetek ha dew ugens "fifty-six"
  • verb–subject–object word order
  • 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 múinim "I teach" vs. múintear "is taught, one teaches"
  • 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/relativisers
  • * particles for negation, interrogation, and occasionally for affirmative declarations
  • 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
  • * Cornish Yma kath dhymm "I have a cat", literally "there is a cat to me"
  • * Welsh Mae cath gyda fi "I have a cat", literally "a cat is with me"
  • * Irish Tá cat agam "I have a cat", literally "there is a cat at me"
  • use of periphrastic constructions to express verbal tense, voice, or aspectual distinctions
  • distinction by function of the two versions of BE verbs traditionally labelled substantive and copula
  • bifurcated demonstrative structure
  • suffixed pronominal supplements, called confirming or supplementary pronouns
  • use of singulars or special forms of counted nouns, and use of a singulative suffix to make singular forms from plurals, where older singulars have disappeared
Examples:

Comparison table

The lexical similarity between the different Celtic languages is apparent in their core vocabulary, especially in terms of actual pronunciation. Moreover, the phonetic differences between languages are often the product of regular sound change.
The table below has words in the modern languages that were inherited direct from Proto-Celtic, as well as a few old borrowings from Latin that made their way into all the daughter languages. There is often a closer match between Welsh, Breton and Cornish on the one hand and Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx on the other. For a fuller list of comparisons, see the Swadesh list for Celtic.
† Borrowings from Latin

Examples

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
*

Possible members of the family

Several poorly-documented languages may have been Celtic.
  • Ancient BelgianCamunic is an extinct language spoken in the first millennium BC in the Val Camonica and Valtellina valleys of the Central Alps. It has recently been proposed that it was a Celtic language.Ivernic has been suggested to be Celtic by T. F. O'Rahilly, though this theory has been refuted and is not widely accepted by experts.Ligurian, on the Northern Mediterranean Coast straddling the southeast French and northwest Italian coasts, including parts of Tuscany, Elba and Corsica. Xavier Delamarre argues that Ligurian was a Celtic language similar to Gaulish. The Ligurian-Celtic question is also discussed by Barruol. Ancient Ligurian is listed as either Celtic, or Para-Celtic.Lusitanian, spoken in the area between the Douro and Tagus rivers of western Iberia. Known from only five inscriptions and various place names. It is an Indo-European language and some scholars have proposed that it may be a para-Celtic language that evolved alongside Celtic or formed a dialect continuum or sprachbund with Tartessian and Gallaecian. This is tied to a theory of an Iberian origin for the Celtic languages. It is also possible that the Q-Celtic languages alone, including Goidelic, originated in western Iberia or shared a common linguistic ancestor with Lusitanian. Other scholars see greater linguistic affinities between Lusitanian, Old Gallo-Italic and Old European. Prominent modern linguists such as Ellis Evans, believe Gallaecian-Lusitanian was in fact one same language of the "P" Celtic variant.Rhaetic, spoken in central Switzerland, Tyrol in Austria, and the Alpine regions of northeast Italy. Documented by a limited number of short inscriptions in two variants of the Etruscan alphabet. Its linguistic categorisation is not clearly established, and it presents a confusing mixture of what appear to be Etruscan, Indo-European, and uncertain other elements. Howard Hayes Scullard argues that Rhaetian was also a Celtic language. However, today most scholars believe that Rhaetic was a Tyrrhenian language closely related to Etruscan.Tartessian, spoken in the southwest of the Iberia Peninsula. Tartessian is known by 95 inscriptions, with the longest having 82 readable signs. John T. Koch argues that Tartessian was also a Celtic language.