The Celtic Languages

Martin J. Ball, Nicole Muller, Martin J. Ball, Nicole Muller, Martin Ball

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781134100347
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Celtic Languages describes in depth all the Celtic languages from historical, structural and sociolinguistic perspectives with individual chapters on Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Breton and Cornish.

This second edition has been thoroughly revised to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date account of the modern Celtic languages and their current sociolinguistic status along with complete descriptions of the historical languages.

This comprehensive volume is arranged in four parts. The first part offers a description of the typological aspects of the Celtic languages followed by a scene setting historical account of the emergence of these languages. Chapters devoted to Continental Celtic, Old and Middle Irish, and Old and Middle Welsh follow. Parts two and three are devoted to linguistic descriptions of the contemporary languages. Part two has chapters on Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx, while Part three covers Welsh, Breton and Cornish. Part four is devoted to the sociolinguistic situation of the four contemporary Celtic languages and a final chapter describes the status of the two revived languages Cornish and Manx.

With contributions from a variety of scholars of the highest reputation, The Celtic Languages continues to be an invaluable tool for both students and teachers of linguistics, especially those with an interest in typology, language universals and the unique sociolinguistic position which the Celtic languages occupy.

Dr Martin J. Ball is Hawthorne-BoRSF Endowed Professor, and Director of the Hawthorne Research Center, at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Dr Ball has over 120 academic publications. Among his books are The Use of Welsh, Mutation in Welsh, and Welsh Phonetics.

Dr Nicole Müller is Hawthorne-BoRSF Endowed Professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Among her books are Mutation in Welsh, and Agents in Early Irish and Early Welsh.

PART I

HISTORICAL ASPECTS

CHAPTER 1

TYPOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE CELTIC LANGUAGES

James Fife

This book is concerned with the structure and status of the Celtic languages. At first glance this may appear to give the work a very definite focus. However, the question of what constitutes a ‘Celtic’ language is not as straightforward as linguists may suppose. This is because there are at least three different approaches to defining what is meant by such terms as ‘Celtic’, ‘Romance’ or ‘Slavic’. Historically all three approaches have been applied to the Celtic languages, each successive view further refining and narrowing the scope of enquiry. These are: an ethnological approach; a genetic approach; and a typological approach.

The original, and to some minds the only proper, use of the term ‘Celtic’ derives from the name Keltoi used by Greek geographers of the mid-first millennium BC for a people inhabiting parts of Central Europe. The first reference to this people is in the Ora Maritima of Festus Rufus Avienus, proconsul of Africa in AD 336, based on a Greek original of the sixth century BC, though accounts of the Celts occur also in works by Hecataeus of Miletus (c. 500 BC), Herodotus (450 BC) and Aristotle (c. 330 BC). Extensive descriptions are found in Polybius (second century BC) and in Poseidonius (first century BC); the latter was a major source for later accounts by Diodorus Siculus and Strabo, and may have influenced Caesar's Gallic War (see Tierney 1964).

The Keltoi of the Greeks appear to equate with an archaelogical record which reveals the existence of a war-like, iron-working culture originating in Central Europe, but eventually spreading throughout the length of the southern half of the continent. The Celts are associated with the material remains designated phases C and D of the Hallstatt culture (eighth to early fifth centuries BC). This phase gave way to a more flamboyant and wealthy successor known as the La Tène culture (late fifth to early first century BC), in whose style many of our greatest treasures of ‘Celtic’ art were produced. See Dillon and Chadwick (1972) for general background.

As the practitioners of La Tène culture made their political, economic and martial presence felt on the classical world, they began to appear in Roman histories and military reports. To the Romans they were known as Galli and acknowledged as a fearsome adversary who settled en masse in the vale of Lombardy, set the Etruscan state tottering, and sacked Rome in 390 BC. During the course of the fourth and third centuries, the Celts established themselves in areas stretching from the British Isles to Asia Minor.

It seems certain enough now that the Roman Galli and the Greek Keltoi were one and the same nation. However, the ancients apparently did not fully recognize the ethnic unity of the Celts (indeed, Caesar states that even the three parts of Gaul were linguistically disparate). Thus they were most often referred to by individual tribal designations (the Aedui, the Belgæ, the Helvetii, the Boii), sharing certain culture traits (for example, religious institutions and a warrior aristocracy). Their linguistic unity was occasionally remarked upon: Tacitus notes the similarity of the British and Gaulish languages, and St Jerome states that Galatian reminded him of the Gaulish dialect of the Treveri. Thus ‘celticity’ originally was more a matter of being the scion of a particular cultural and historical heritage rather than an explicit recognition of linguistic affiliation.

Rapidly as the Celts spread their language and culture over the map of Europe, just as rapidly they declined again. The Celtic-speaking populations of Spain, Gaul and Northern Italy came under the sway of Rome before the fall of the Republic and eventually assimilated to Latin, though some pockets survived a remarkably long time (witness the still extant Galatian speakers in the fourth century AD).

The corner of Romanitas where Celtic languages held on the longest was, of course, Britain. There the native language survived long enough to spread back to the continent and develop into languages of rule in several medieval states before they all started a continuing decline initiated with the loss of political independence and economic isolation in the sixteenth century. Interestingly, the fate of those who had remained beyond the pale of Roman rule differed little from that of those who were for centuries controlled by Rome. Irish, Manx and Scots Gaelic remained vital and viable languages through the millennium following Roman collapse, but eventually began a sad decline with the advent of the centralized state and capitalism.

If we look then at ‘Celtic’ as referring to the languages of peoples descended from the ancient Keltoi and Galli, as was once the case, we come up with a very varied group. For if present-day speakers of Irish and Welsh are to be united with those of Gaul by reason of heritage, the very same can be said of today's speakers of Hiberno-or Cambro-English. While the ethnological approach does capture the continuity of the development of the Celtic peoples, a process one might describe as a ‘cumulative de-Celticity’ (cf. Hawkes 1973), it does very little to discriminate the speech communities in a linguistically useful manner. In this sense, modern French is a ‘Celtic’ language, as it organically (i.e., via contact) partakes of the original Celtic heritage. Though one occasionally still meets with such a use of ‘Celtic’ (as with the efforts by Galician nationalists towards admission into the Celtic League), it has limited usefulness for modern linguists.

The genetic sense of what is a ‘Celtic’ language is clearly related to the ethnic in that it treats as Celtic any language lineally descended from the reconstructed proto-language. Of course we are still fraught with problems in deciding what constitutes lineal descent: is Scots not a descendant (perhaps on the ‘distaff’ side) of Gaelic? But we are at least on ground more familiar and acceptable to the modern linguist. The genetic criterion, while retaining the mechanism of inheritance, has switched focus to specifically linguistic features instead of populations or cultures.

This is the sense of ‘Celtic’ with which linguists are well acquainted and which appears to have a firm foundation in scientific evidence. Since the early days of modern comparative grammar, Celtic languages have had an important place in the development of the reconstruction of Indo-European. The seminal study by Zeuss (1853), revised edition (1871), is considered the fountainhead of modern research into diachronic Celtic. In the century and a half since Zeuss, much discussion and emendation of the structure of the Celtic language family and its relation to other Indo-European languages has taken place. Despite the lively debate, there are a number of basic questions still unresolved. One of the most hotly debated issues was the so-called Italo-Celtic hypothesis, that is, the theory that Celtic and Italic formed a Sprachbund, similar to that sometimes proposed for Baltic and Slavic. The argument, centred on isolated features such as the form of demonstratives and the use of deponents/passives in *-r, has raged back and forth for decades. For the past 40 years, the theory appeared to be out of fashion and Celtic and Italic were viewed as separate branches, but recent studies have breathed some new life into Italo-Celtic (see chapter 2).

The internal structure of the family has been just as controversial. The principal proposals for divisions, which ultimately are not necessarily competing theories, are the pseudo-geographic division into Insular and Continental Celtic and the more linguistically based division into P and Q Celtic languages. For further discussion of these theories, see Eska's discussion below in chapter 2. Here we make only a few orientating observations.

Despite the nomenclature, the Continental–Insular division is not a truly geographic one. In the first place, it is a misnomer to refer to Breton as geographically insular after some 1,500 years of residence on the continent. Second, there is not ne...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• The Celtic Languages
• Routledge Language Family Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Part I Historical Aspects
• Part II The Goidelic Languages
• Part III The Brythonic Languages
• Part IV The Sociolinguistics of the Celtic Languages
• Index