CELTIC LANGUAGES

also spelled Keltic, branch of the Indo-European language family, spoken throughout much of Western Europe in Roman and pre-Roman times and currently known chiefly in the British Isles and in the Brittany peninsula of northwestern France. On both geographic and chronological grounds, the languages fall into two divisions, usually known as Continental Celtic and Insular Celtic. The discussion of the individual languages that follows divides them into the two main groups, beginning with Irish, which is the oldest attested. Irish The history of Irish may be divided into four periods: that of the ogham inscriptions, probably AD 300500; Old Irish, 600900; Middle Irish, 9001200; and Modern Irish, 1200 to the present. This division is necessarily arbitrary, and archaizing tendencies confuse the situation, especially during the period 12001600, when a highly standardized literary norm was dominant. After 1600, the modern dialects, among them Scottish Gaelic and Manx, begin to appear in writing. The Latin alphabet was introduced into Ireland by British missionaries in the 5th century and soon began to be used for writing Irish. By the middle of the 6th century, the process of putting into literary form the rich oral tradition of the native learned class was certainly well advanced. The problems of interpreting the early writings are complicated by the fact that the orthography was based on that of Latin, but with a British pronunciation; e.g., Latin pater was read as pader, the form of the loanword in Modern Welsh, and Old Irish Ptric was read as Pdraig (as it is spelled in Modern Irish). No new letters were evolved; the weak (less forceful) consonants were distinguished only in instances in which there were Latin spellings that could be utilized (e.g., strong ll: weak l, strong rr: weak r, nn:n, c:ch, t:th) or with the help of the punctum delens (s:s, f:f), a dot that shows that the sound is not pronounced. As a result, many ambiguities remain: n beir can mean either he does not carry or he does not carry it, according to whether the b- is read as a b sound or a v sound. Nor was the Latin alphabet capable of dealing with the new system of consonant quality that appears in Irish alone among the Celtic languages. Thus, from the Celtic nominative singular and plural forms bardos, bardi developed Welsh bardd, plural beirdd, with a vowel alternation like that of English mouse, mice. In Irish, the forms are bard, baird; the -i- of baird is purely graphic, serving to indicate that the following consonants are both palatalized. (Palatalized consonants are those in which the pronunciation is modified by raising the tongue toward the hard palate.) This palatalization had been purely phonetic as long as the -i that caused it survived, but in Old Irish the palatalization became independent, so that each consonant of Common Celtic evolved into four distinct consonants (i.e., phonemes); for example, from original Common Celtic b are derived a b sound and a palatalized b sound, and a v sound and a palatalized v sound. Apart from these phonetic developments, Old Irish is striking chiefly for the extraordinary proliferation of particles that appear before the verb and are used in forming compound verbs. For example, the Latin word suffio I fumigate is translated as fo-timmdiriut, composed of fo under, to to, imb- around, di from, and the stem reth- run, with vowel and consonant changes appropriate to the 1st person singular present tense. Such forms, combined with a system of infixed accusative and dative pronouns (i.e., pronouns inserted within a word) and syntactical accent shifts, produced a verbal system almost as complicated as that of Basque, though transparently Indo-European in origin. This system began to break down during the Old Irish period; the process was no doubt accelerated by the Viking raids that began at the end of the 8th century and that disrupted the monastic system, the guardian of the literary norm of Old Irish. Popular forms broke through in the Middle Irish period, though always mixed with archaizing forms; the backward-looking Irish scribes were never content to write down their own vernacular. During the 12th century, many ecclesiastical synods were held with the object of bringing the organization of the Irish Church more closely into line with that of western Europe, and the Anglo-Norman invasion took place in the latter part of the same century. It may have been these far-reaching changes that inspired the Irish literati to undertake a new standardization of their language. From the beginning of the 13th century, there is a rigidly fixed norm, often called Classical Modern Irish, which, for over four centuries, was used as the exclusive literary medium in Ireland and in Gaelic-speaking Scotland (there is no evidence for the Isle of Man). The Scandinavians were first contained and then absorbed; they contributed a small number of loanwords to Irish, mainly in the field of navigation but also in that of urban life, for they were the first to establish towns in Ireland, though only on the coast. The Anglo-Normans were a more serious problem. After almost complete success in the early period, however, they became largely Gaelicized in custom and language outside the towns they had founded. They contributed a large number of loanwords to Irish in the fields of warfare, architecture, and administration, though many of these were comparatively short-lived. When English took over from Anglo-Norman as the language of administration and English colonies began to be planted in Ireland, English loanwords began to come into Irish. Few of these, however, were recognized in the literary language, and only from the evidence of the modern dialects has it become clear that they were quite numerous. It was not until the beginning of the 17th century that the English power was finally consolidated in Ireland, first by military conquest and later by the planting of English-speaking colonists on a much larger scale than before. From this time onward, the decline of Irish began, with Irish becoming the language of an oppressed people. With no schools to teach the literary language nor any native nobility to support the literati who used it, the dialects appeared for the first time and began to be written in the paper manuscripts that constituted almost the only form of publishing available to those using Irish. By the beginning of the 19th century, it is probable that the population was almost equally divided between Irish speakers, mainly in the western half, and English speakers, mainly in the eastern half. The real imbalance lay in the fact that many of the Irish speakers were bilingual, whereas few of the English speakers were. The first census to record language use was taken in 1851, after the great famine that had struck the western areas with exceptional severity. By this time, the total number of Irish speakers was 1,524,286 (23 percent of the population), but only 319,602 spoke Irish exclusively. The decline of Irish has continued to the present day, in spite of a revival campaign initiated by the Gaelic League in 1893 and made part of official policy after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1921. Since then, Irish has been recognized as the first official language of the state; it is a compulsory subject in all of the schools and is a requirement for civil service and some other posts. There are probably more people able to read Irishperhaps 300,000than there ever were before. From 1945 onward, a standard written language has evolved, and there is a small but flourishing literary movement. Nearly all of the readers of Irish are English speakers by upbringing, however, and not many of them would claim that Irish had become their main language. In the western areas in which Irish was the traditional speech, there are now fewer than 50,000 people to whom it is a mother tongue, and all but a handful of these have a more or less adequate command of English. also spelled Keltic a branch of the Indo-European language family, spoken throughout much of western Europe in Roman and pre-Roman times and currently known chiefly in the British Isles and in the Brittany peninsula of northwestern France. The Celtic languages can be divided geographically and chronologically into the Continental Celtic language (or languages) and Insular Celtic. The former are generally divided into Lepontic, Celto-Iberian, and Gaulish and are known to varying degrees from inscriptions and classical references. The Insular Celtic group consists of the modern Celtic languages, which are generally further subdivided into Goidelic (Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic) and Brythonic (Welsh, Cornish, Breton) groups. All Celtic languages are tentatively traced back to Common Celtic, which was the parent language of both the Continental and Insular Celtic languages. Old Irish, the most archaic Celtic language of which substantial records exist and thus the closest in structure to Common Celtic, suggests that Common Celtic retained features of its ancestral language, Indo-European, both in its consonantal and vowel systems and in grammar, or structure. The speakers of Common Celtic probably lived in the eastern part of central Europe, some of them close to the Germanic peoples. The modern Celtic languages, all of which are descended from Insular Celtic, are the only Celtic languages known thoroughly. In these languages are found a number of linguistic features that seldom occur in other Indo-European languages, features which might possibly be explained by the influence of a non-Celtic people who continued to live in Britain and Ireland after the Celtic settlements of those areas (c. 500 BC). The Gaelic regions of Ireland, Man, and Scotland shared a common literary norm until the 17th century. The earliest writing is found in ogham inscriptions (AD 300500), a form of writing in which the letters are represented by groups of strokes and notches marked along the edge of stone monuments. Although the origins of manuscript writing in Irish are uncertain, the first extant text, a copy of the Psalms in the Latin script, probably dates from the 6th century. At that time, in any case, there began a great flourishing of literacy and learning in Celtic Ireland, and a substantial record has survived in Irish from the period. Lasting from approximately 600 to 900, it is known as the Old Irish period. The Viking raids of the 8th century disrupted the monastic order, which had guarded the literary norm, and about 900, with the beginning of the Middle Irish period, popular forms began to enter the language. The political turmoil that preceded the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169 may have led to a leveling in the forms of the spoken language. Whatever the case, by about 1200 what is known as the Early Modern Irish period had begun and a new literary norm (called Classical Modern Irish) had established itself. This standard was maintained throughout Ireland, Man, and Gaelic Scotland from the 13th to the 17th century. In the 17th century, with the centralization of political power in London, the old Gaelic world was fragmented and its shared institutions destroyed. One consequence was the emergence of separate literary forms of Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx, each reflecting local usage. In the case of Manx, continuity with the earlier literary conventions was completely lost. During the 17th century, a new English-speaking ruling class was settled in Ireland, and the mercantile and professional classes in towns became predominantly English-speaking. By the 18th century, the Irish language was confined to the poorer rural people. After 1745 this effect was also evident in Gaelic Scotland. These populous and impoverished communities were ravaged by economic failure in the 19th century, and survivors began a rapid shift to English. The last speakers of traditional Manx died during the middle of the 20th century. The number of Gaelic speakers in Scotland has declined to about 80,000. In Ireland, the traditional Irish-speaking community has declined to fewer than 60,000 speakers, but the total of those who use Irish habitually in the Republic of Ireland is perhaps more than 100,000, and more than 1,000,000 claim to know it. Welsh constitutes the oldest attested member of the Celtic language family, with literature (though fragmentary) dating to the 8th century. A continuous record of the language is available from the beginning of the 12th century. By the 15th century the English language had begun to flourish in Wales, but the decline of Welsh was stopped by the Methodist revival of the 18th century, which put Welsh Bibles and other Welsh-language religious books in every home. The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century brought English-speaking workers to the Welsh mines and factories, and the Welsh language again felt the impact of English. By 1901 less than half the population of Wales spoke Welsh and, by the late 20th century, less than a quarter, though much of rural Wales remains Welsh-speaking, and recent efforts have been made to increase its use in the schools. No literary texts are available for Breton until the 15th century, and from that time the dialects became more and more divergent. In the early decades of the 20th century, efforts were made to standardize four dialects of Breton, but, because of French official policy excluding Breton from the schools, few children learn Breton. Like those in Breton, Cornish literary texts began to appear only in the 15th century. Although it was still spoken sporadically at the beginning of the 18th century, Cornish had ceased to be spoken by the end of the century. Additional reading H. Lewis and H. Pedersen, A Concise Comparative Celtic Grammar (1937), is a survey of the entire field. The early history of the British group is discussed in detail by K.H. Jackson, Language and History in Early Britain (1953); for the later history of Welsh and Breton, J. Morris Jones, A Welsh Grammar (1913), and F. Gourvil, Langue et littrature bretonnes (1952), give useful information. P. Berresford Ellis, The Cornish Language and Its Literature (1974), deals with the early period, as well as with the recent Cornish language revival movement. R. Thurneysen, Grammar of Old Irish, rev. ed. (1946), is a classic among linguistic handbooks; for the later development of Irish, T.F. O'Rahilly, Irish Dialects Past and Present (1932), is full of information and contains chapters on Scottish Gaelic and Manx. B.O Cuiv (ed.), A View of the Irish Language (1969), containing 12 essays by various hands, maps, and illustrations; and D. Greene, The Irish Language (1966), are directed to the general reader rather than to the linguist. The relevant sections of Glanville Price, The Present Position of Minority Languages in Western Europe (1969), give full bibliographies of works dealing with the political and social status of the surviving Celtic languages. David Greene Irish Welsh is the earliest and best attested of the British languages. Although the material is fragmentary until the 12th century, the course of the language can be traced from the end of the 8th century. The earliest evidence may represent the spoken language fairly accurately, but a poetic tradition was soon established, and by the 12th century there was a clear divergence between the archaizing verse and a modernizing prose. The latter was characterized by a predominance of periphrastic verbal-noun constructions at the expense of forms of the finite verb. By this time, too, the forms corresponding to other Celtic and Indo-European present-tense forms had largely acquired future meaning; e.g., Welsh nid he will not go (future) contrasts with Irish n aig he does not drive (present). The gap thus left was filled, as in Scottish Gaelic and Manx, by a construction involving the substantive verb and the verbal noun; e.g., y mae'r wraig yn myned the woman goes or the woman is going is composed of the verb mae is and the verbal noun myned going. By the 14th century, prose and verse styles became more similar, the prose being less colloquial and the verse less archaic. This marks the beginning of modern literary Welsh, which was finally fixed by the Bible translation of 1588. Modern literary Welsh developed at a time when Welsh national identity was beginning to be seriously threatened by the close relations with England that followed on the accession of the Welshman Henry Tudor (Henry VII) to the English throne in 1485. Welsh was being written less and less, and the spoken language was being penetrated by English words. In 1536, the Act of Union deprived Welsh of its official status. By the beginning of the 18th century, the position of the Welsh language had fallen very low, though it was still the vernacular of the vast majority of the people. It was saved by the Methodist revival of the 18th century, which established schools everywhere to teach the people how to read the Welsh Bible and which brought the Bible itself, together with Welsh religious books, into almost every home. The literary language rejected most of the English loanwords that had come into the popular speech, and, by the 19th century, a highly literate Wales was equipped with reading material of every kind in the Welsh language. Meanwhile, however, the popular speech diverged further from the fixed literary norm, which was never spoken except in the pulpit or on the platform. Modern Wales has a literary language that no mother speaks to her child and widely differing dialects that appear in print only to represent dialogue in stories and novels. The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century first undermined the dominance of Welsh in Wales: English-speaking workers were brought into the mines and factories in such numbers that they could not be absorbed linguistically. By 1901 English speakers outnumbered Welsh speakers for the first time. Out of a population of 2,012,876, only 929,824 were reported as Welsh-speaking, though 280,985 people spoke Welsh alone. By the early 1980s the number of Welsh speakers had dropped to about 395,000, representing about 14 percent of an increased population. Most of rural Wales, however, is still Welsh speaking, and recent years have seen a great improvement in the official status of Welsh and a considerable increase in its use in the schools; it is certainly the most firmly rooted of the modern languages of Celtic origin. In addition, there are still about 8,000 Welsh speakers in parts of Patagonia, Argentina, which was colonized by Welsh settlers in 1865. These people maintain cultural contacts with the homeland but are all bilingual in Welsh and Spanish and seem fated to final assimilation. Breton Breton disappeared from sight after the early period, and no literary texts are available until the 15th century. These, mainly mystery plays and similar religious material, are written in a standardized language that is by now completely differentiated from Welsh and, to a lesser degree, from Cornish. The divergence between Breton and Cornish is largely a matter of the English loanwords in Cornish and the French loanwords in Breton. The present tense was retained in its original function, whereas a future and conditional were formed from the present and past subjunctive, respectively. Later, the Breton dialects became written and showed considerable divergencies in this form. Not until the 1920s was an attempt at standardization made, and even then it was necessary to adopt two norms. One was called KLT, from the initials of the Breton names of the dioceses of Cornouaille, Lon, and Trguier, the dialects of which agree with Welsh and Cornish in having the stress accent on the next to the last syllable. The other norm was the dialect of Vannes in the south, which has the stress accent on the final syllable and many other distinctive features, at least some of which can be explained by its close contacts with French. More recently, two norms have been evolved to cover all four dialects; one of these is used by most writers, whereas the other is officially recognized by the universities of Brest and Rennes, in both of which Breton is taught. Up until recently, Breton was the common language of the people in Cornouaille, Lon, Trguier and Vannes, within the boundaries of the dpartements of Ctes-du-Nord, Finistre, and Morbihan. Breton may still have more speakers than Welsh, but this is quite uncertain because no language statistics exist for France. There is, however, general agreement that very few children today are being brought up speaking Breton. This is at least partly the result of French official policy, which in effect excludes the language from primary and secondary schools, though the poor economic opportunities in Brittany also play a part. The literary movement is, therefore, confined to an intelligentsia of perhaps not much more than 10,000 people, many of whom live outside Brittany. The overwhelming mass of the remainder of Breton speakers are literate only in French, and chances for the survival of Breton seem very poor. Irish The history of the Isle of Man is imperfectly known. It was first inhabited by British speakers, then colonized from Ireland, and later became part of the Scandinavian Lordship of the Isles until 1266, when the King of Norway ceded both Man and the Hebrides to Scotland. From then on, it became involved in the wars between England and Scotland until 1346, when it passed finally to England. Though an Irish dialect survived as the speech of the majority of the people, these circumstances were not propitious for literary contacts with Ireland, and Manx was apparently not written until the Welsh bishop John Phillips translated the Anglican Book of Common Prayer in 1610, using an orthography based on that of English. This orthography makes Manx difficult to understand for readers of Irish and Scottish Gaelic, to whom it is of considerable interest because it represents a dialect entirely free of literary influences. The orthography soon became fixed, and a far-reaching series of later phonetic changes made the written form a highly inaccurate representation of the final stages of the language. Phonologically, it has more in common with the eastern dialects of Irish than with Scottish Gaelic, but its morphology and syntax are much more like those of Scottish Gaelic, probably because of the common British substratum. Its tense system is similar to that of Scottish Gaelic and Welsh, and its use of periphrastic verb forms (i.e., longer forms with several elements) with the auxiliary meaning to do goes further than either of these, especially in its final stages. In the beginning of the 18th century, English was still not understood by most of the people, but during the 19th century the decline of Manx was rapid, and the census of 1901 showed only 4,419 speakers of the language, all bilingual. Twenty years later, the language had ceased to be used as a normal means of communication, but, until recently, investigators have been able to find old people capable of giving useful information. British languages Britain was thoroughly romanized, and it is clear that the British language itself had been much affected by Latin; on the level of vocabulary, such an everyday word as Welsh pysg fish, for example, derives from Latin piscis. The vowel system lost independent vowel quantity, the length of vowels becoming determined by the structure of the syllable, a situation that also occurred when the later Latin developed into Romance. Even after the collapse of Roman rule, Latin retained the same prestige among British Christians that it had in the rest of the Western Empire. The Irish monks introduced to the British speakers the custom of writing down the vernacular language at about the end of the 8th century; they adapted the clumsy Irish orthography for that purpose. At this period, the British dialects were very close to one another and can hardly be classed as separate languages, though they soon began to diverge. Like Old Irish, they had lost their final syllables and had undergone many other changes from the state shown by the inscriptions. Notably, the languages show only the merest traces of the declension of the noun, although the verb preserves a full inflectional system (that is, it has a full series of endings). It is clear that no future tense existed in early British, though the separate languages were later to fill this gap by various means.