Insular Celtic languages

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Insular Celtic
Geographic
distribution:		 Ireland, Scotland, Mann, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany
Genetic
classification:		 Indo-European
 Celtic
  Insular Celtic
Subdivisions:

Insular Celtic languages are those Celtic languages that originated in the British Isles, in contrast to the Continental Celtic languages of mainland Europe and Anatolia. All surviving Celtic languages are from the Insular Celtic group; the Continental Celtic languages are extinct. The six Insular Celtic languages of modern times can be divided into:

Contents

Insular Celtic hypothesis

The "Insular Celtic hypothesis" is a theory that the Brythonic and Goidelic languages evolved together in those islands, having a common ancestor more recent than any shared with the Continental Celtic languages such as Celtiberian, Gaulish, Galatian and Lepontic, among others, all of which are long extinct.

The proponents of the Insular Celtic hypothesis (such as Cowgill 1975; McCone 1991, 1992; and Schrijver 1995) point to shared innovations among Insular Celtic languages, including inflected prepositions, shared use of certain verbal particles, VSO word order, and the differentiation of absolute and conjunct verb endings as found extensively in Old Irish and to a small extent in Middle Welsh (see Morphology of the Proto-Celtic language). They assert that a partition that lumps the Brythonic languages and Gaulish (P-Celtic) on one side and the Goidelic languages with Celtiberian (Q-Celtic) on the other may be a superficial one (i.e. owing to a language contact phenomenon), as the identical sound shift (/kʷ/ to /p/) could have occurred independently in the predecessors of Gaulish and Brythonic, or have spread through language contact between those two groups.

The family tree of the Insular Celtic languages is thus as follows:

The following table lists cognates showing the development of Proto-Celtic */kʷ/ to /p/ in Gaulish and the Brythonic languages but to /k/ in the Goidelic languages.

Proto-Celtic Gaulish Welsh Cornish Breton Irish Scottish Gaelic Manx English gloss
*kʷennos pennos pen penn penn ceann ceann kione "head"
*kʷetwar- petor pedwar peswar pevar ceathair ceithir kiare "four"
*kʷenkʷe pempe pump pymp pemp cúig còig queig "five"
*kʷeis pis pwy piw piv cé (older cia) cò/cia quoi "who"

A significant difference between Goidelic and Brythonic languages is the transformation of *an, am to a denasalised vowel with lengthening, é, before an originally voiceless stop or fricative, cf. Old Irish éc "death", écath "fish hook", dét "tooth", cét "hundred" vs. Welsh angau, angad, dant, and cant. Otherwise:

Insular Celtic as a language area

In order to show that shared innovations are from a common descent it is necessary that they do not arise because of language contact after initial separation. A language area can result from widepread bilingualism, perhaps because of exogamy, and absence of sharp sociolinguistic division. In Post-Roman Britain Goidelic and Brythonic seem to have been of roughly equal status, with several Goidelic loan words in Brythonic and several Brythonic loan words in Old Irish. There is historical evidence of Irish in Wales and England as well as of British in Ireland during this period. There is also archaeological evidence of substantial contact between Britain and Ireland in the Pre-Roman period and of Roman period contact.

Ranko Matasovic has provided a list of changes which affected both branches of Insular Celtic but for which there is no evidence that they should be dated to a putative Proto-Insular Celtic period[1]. These are :-

Possible Afro-Asiatic substratum

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The concept of the Insular Celtic languages being descended from Hebrew was mooted in Medieval times but the hypothesis that they had features from an Afro-Asiatic substratum was first proposed by John Morris-Jones in 1900.[2] Some well-known linguists have been adherents such as Julius Pokorny,[3] Heinrich Wagner,[4] and Orin Gensler.[5] There has been further work on the theory by Shisha-Halevy [6] and Theo Vennemann.

However, the theory has been strongly criticised by Graham Isaac[7] and by Kim McCone.[8] Isaac considers the twenty points identified by Gensler as trivial, dependencies or vacuous. Thus he considers the theory to be not just unproven but wrong.

Notes

  1. ^ Insular Celtic as a Language Area in The Celtic Languages in Contact, Hildegard Tristram, 2007.
  2. ^ Appendix to The Welsh People by John Rhys and David Brymore-Jones
  3. ^ Das nicht-indogermanische substrat im Irischen in Zeitschrift fur Celtische Philologie 16 and 19
  4. ^ Gaeilge theilinn (1959) and subsequent articles
  5. ^ A Typological Evaluation of Celtic/Hamito-Semitic Syntactic Parellels, University of California Press, 1993
  6. ^ “Celtic Syntax, Egyptian-Coptic Syntax”, in: Das Alte Ägypten und seine Nachbarn: Festschrift Helmut Satzinger, Krems: Österreichisches Literaturforum, 245-302
  7. ^ "Celtic and Afro-Asiatic" in The Celtic Languages in Contact (2007)
  8. ^ The Origins and Development of Insular Celtic Verbal Complex (2006)

References

v • d • e
Celtic languages
Continental Celtic
Insular Celtic
Mixed
Celtic-speaking areas
Immersive education
Italics indicate extinct languages.

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