Why almost no Keltic influence on the English language?

[Zelenius]

Some historians and linguists are puzzled by how the English language shows so little Keltic influence - not in grammar or vocabulary(although there are some English words of Keltic origin), even though most of the population in Britain before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons was largely Keltic-speaking.

Besides speaking Keltic languages, much of the population before the Anglo-Saxon invasion was Latin-speaking, especially among the elite, Roman settlers, and Latinized Kelts, especially in urban areas.

Slowly but surely, virtually all Kelts in the area that is now England were assimilated by the Anglo-Saxon invaders. In Wales, and Scotland the native Keltic languages have survived to this day, although fluent English is spoken by virtually all Scots and Welsh.

Genetic studies reveal that the Anglo-Saxons and other Germanic invaders didn't have a whole lot of influence on the gene pool of Britain, except in the extreme south-east of England. Western England and Wales in particular show very little to no Germanic influence. I've been told that the cultural level of the Anglo-Saxons was supposedly higher than the native Kelts, which may explain why the Keltic languages were largely supplanted by English and had little influence on English. However, much of the Keltic population had been Romanized and may have been at a higher cultural level than the barbarian Anglo-Saxon invaders(much of the Anglo-Saxons had been Roman mercenaries, although they were heathens).

Contrast Britain with Gaul(France) at around the same time and later. In the last decades of the Roman Empire, Gaul had also been invaded by several Germanic tribes; indeed, "France" gets its name from the Germanic-speaking Franks, who ruled much of Gaul after the fall of Rome. Eventually these invaders were assimilated by the vulgar-Latin speaking Gauls; the Germanic elite lost their native language. The vulgar Latin spoken there eventually evolved into modern French and various other closely related Romance languages, most of which have gone extinct except for Provencal(Occitan). Some scholars claim the unique French accent may even be due to a Keltic influence, or maybe a Germanic one.

Similarly, the Turks invaded and conquered Persia, the Byzantine Empire and the Arab lands a little after this, and the Turkish language was very influenced by Farsi(Persian), as well as Arabic. So why is the Keltic influence on English so negligable?

[malbui]

It's an interesting question and I think the basic answer boils down to power and prestige. The Celtic languages were on the defensive even before modern English took shape, and certainly after the Celtic regions were ruled from London (directly or indirectly) the use of those languages was leaned on quite seriously. All the pressure was on native speakers of the Celtic languages to speak English and there was no reason for the anglophone administrators and land-owners to adopt any of the vocabulary of the masses around them and for this to permeate into standard English.

Having said that... it's worth bearing in mind the impact of the Celtic languages on the local forms of English. My grandfather's generation, the last first-language Irish speakers in my family (my own Irish is decent but far from native), had many structures in their English which came directly from their way of thinking and expressing themselves in Irish. They'd say things like "I'm after going to the shops", because Irish has no real perfect tense and uses a prepositional construction instead, or "I saw a man and he going to..." which mapped from "chonaic mé fear agus é ag dul...". And then of course getting them to answer yes or no to a simple question was a challenge, Irish not working like that.

In terms of vocabulary there were a few items which crept across but very few which entered into mainstream English - sitting here now I can think of a couple of dozen but not many more.

[arthwollipot]

May be a silly and pointless diversion, but...

Why "Keltic" and not "Celtic"?

[SimonD]

There is no K in the Celtic alphabet

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/irish.htm

Which is way it is prononunced Celtic with a hard C and not 'seltic', or so I was told by my Irish speaking father, but I'm sure they will be a lot of Americans who will disagree with me

Some other letters are 'missing' also, like v. Which is why Niamb is spelt like that and not the way it sounds - 'Naiv'.

[SimonD]

I also started a thread a long while back about keeping the Irish language alive and got a resounding NO by this forum. So if a bunch of intelligent, broad minded people think it's a waste of time (to be fair it was to sign a partion which people may have thought would not achieve anything), communites under pressure of invasion, etc (sorry I'm in a rush to go home so thats a mighty big etc ) don't stand a chance.

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=76427

[six7s]

Originally Posted by SimonD

There is no K in the Celtic alphabet

THE Celtic alphabet (singular)? ? ? ?

Originally Posted by SimonD

...it is prononunced Celtic with a hard C and not 'seltic', or so I was told by my Irish speaking father, but I'm sure they will be a lot of Americans who will disagree with me

And maybe more than just a few Celtic fans in Glasgow
wikipedia: Celtic_Football_Club#Formation_and_history

Originally Posted by SimonD

Some other letters are 'missing' also, like v. Which is why Niamb is spelt like that and not the way it sounds - 'Naiv'.

Off topic... but I have noticed the same in Greek (Varvara = Barbara) and Hindi (Benares = Varanassi)

[SimonD]

Originally Posted by six7s

THE Celtic alphabet (singular)? ? ? ?

The Irish Alphabet...

Originally Posted by six7s

And maybe more than just a few Celtic fans in Glasgow

Yes, always wonder why it was 'seltic' in Scotland.

It has been my experience that when ever I have said 'seltic' around Irish people I have been quickly corrected to 'Celtic'. I would have thought it would be the same.

Originally Posted by six7s

Off topic... but I have noticed the same in Greek (Varvara = Barbara) and Hindi (Benares = Varanassi)

I think they are related as in they have come from a common root.

[six7s]

Sanskrit?

[moopet]

Originally Posted by SimonD

Yes, always wonder why it was 'seltic' in Scotland.

That's exclusively for the team.

[H3LL]

I would like to throw some speculation into the pot.

Perhaps there never was a Celtic language and it's more of a modern construct.

Elsewhere in the world groups of people in rugged/difficult terrain developed dialects so diverse as to be almost incomprehensible to other groups even one valley away.

I would be surprised if the Celtic speakers, perhaps quite isolated from other Celtic speaking communities by geography, conflict or politics, didn't also develop dialects. Celtic, as a useful single language perhaps only existed in the lowlands (now England) and as the Celtic tribes retreated into the more rugged areas of the British Isles language separation may have accelerated. It could be speculated that they were insufficiently similar to use in trading and therefore used a common tongue. Latin or whatever was widely available.

Alternatively, the UK still contains a surprisingly diverse range of dialects and accents in contrast to the US which is remarkably homogeneous. I understand that dispassionately looking at the US and its immigration history one would expect German to be the predominant language, particularly on the East coast.

Bryson covered the odd, homogeneous nature of US langauge in Mother Tongue. Perhaps there are some pointers to be had there? US - Dominant language German - English became the standard. UK - Dominant language Celtic - English became standard?

(I seem to recall he touched on the oddity of so little Celtic in English but forget if he resolved the issue).


.

[arthwollipot]

I've always been led to believe that the term "celtic" referred to quite a wide variety of ethnic/tribal groups, each sharing a common language base but with many different dialects. To describe something as "celtic" is approximately equivalent to describe something as "asian". Okay, maybe not quite, but at least "southeast asian".

[Rolfe]

Come in, Architect....

Rolfe.

[drkitten]

Originally Posted by arthwollipot

I've always been led to believe that the term "celtic" referred to quite a wide variety of ethnic/tribal groups, each sharing a common language base but with many different dialects. To describe something as "celtic" is approximately equivalent to describe something as "asian". Okay, maybe not quite, but at least "southeast asian".

"Dravidian," perhaps. Southeast Asia includes quite a few entirely separate language families, language groups with no apparent genetic relationship (for example, Thai, Cambodian, and Chinese are apparently independent) --- and if you include New Guinea as part of southeast Asia, then it includes more than half of the language families believed to currently or ever have existed.

It's very difficult, of course, to distinguish "dialect" from "language" in a principled way, but there doesn't seem to be much doubt that the various Celtic dialects were at least as closely related as the various Germanic ones. My understanding is that they were actually much closer (although I'm not a Celtic specialist); most of them shared very similar grammar[e.g. VSO word order, periphrasis to represent aspect and some forms of tense, &c] and core vocabulary, and the differences were largely morphological and (as far as we can tell) phonological.

[brodski]

Originally Posted by SimonD

There is no K in the Celtic alphabet

A lack of a C wouldn't explain spelling Celtic as Keltic though, would it?

[arthwollipot]

Originally Posted by brodski

A lack of a C wouldn't explain spelling Celtic as Keltic though, would it?

No, but a lack of a K would explain spelling Keltic as Celtic.

[Zelenius]

Everyone, thank you for the input, I appreciate it. It seems the culture, power, and military might of the Anglo-Saxons helped preserve a certain level of linguistic "purity" in the proper form of English. Undoubtedly, the various local dialects of spoken English throughout the isles, even within England but especially in Wales and Scotland do show some significant traces of Keltic influence in accent and grammar, as well as vocabulary. However, these are all far removed from mainstream, spoken English which is based on the English spoken in London and south-east England. The Keltic influence on this type of English is almost nonexistent, according to most linguists. Perhaps there was even something like an apartheid-like system in ancient Britain, with the Kelts only becoming Anglicized very slowly, too slow to have an impact on the development on mainstream English.

Although either "Celtic" or "Keltic" is acceptable, "Keltic" is more phonetic and considered more authentic. The word "Kelt" was first used by the Greeks, Hecataeus of Miletus in particular to refer to the people near Massilia in ancient Gaul. The Greeks called them "Keltoi", and this word may have been derived from the name of one of the Keltic tribes in Gaul.

The modern definition of Keltic refers to an important ethno-linguistic sub-division of the larger Indo-European speaking peoples. In ancient times, the word "Keltic" may have had a broader, fuzzier meaning and may have been used to refer to both the Keltic speaking peoples of ancient western and northwestern Europe as well as non-Keltic speaking peoples. Hence, at times it may have been used to refer to the Germanic speaking peoples and maybe even the Basques or pre-Indo-European peoples of the Iberian peninsula. By the modern usage, this would be erroneous; in its ancient usage, they may have been "right" insofar as they weren't basing this classification on language and more as an umbrella term for the barbarians of northern Europe. Certainly almost all ancient Kelts never called themselves "Kelts" or "Keltic". We may never know what they called themselves as a group, and they probably didn't have a term for themselves either, except local tribal names. They may have been vastly different over large enough distances, and according to some scholars, this may have been due to the "Kelts" being just a military aristocracy ruling over a non Indo-European speaking people, especially in parts of ancient Gaul and Spain(Keltiberians). Eventually the non-Indo-European common folk were "Kelticized", according to this view.

The Kelts used to occupy a much larger area of Europe. Most of ancient Gaul and a large part of what is now Germany, Spain, all of the British Isles and Ireland, parts of eastern Europe and for a time what is now central Turkey were dominated by the Kelts. Even before the Kelts of Britain had been conquered and assimilated by the Anglo-Saxons, much the same thing happened in continental Europe with the Germanic peoples displacing the Kelts in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium(This country takes its name from the "Belgae", an ancient Keltic tribe, but no Keltic languages are spoken in Belgium).

[davefoc]

I thought H3LL's idea sounded right.

Although the Irish are making a big effort to preserve Gaelic these days, there are numerous dialects of Irish and I think the government is promoting only one of them. Presumably, this means that some of the dialects are going to be left to die naturally as the native speakers move more towards the national standard Gaelic.

Presumably in the past where travel was limited there might have been many more dialects each spoken only by a few people. The invaders come in and their language dominated in the urban areas and pretty soon it became the lingua franca because there was no widely spoken common dialect to compete with it. So the local dialects fade away before they have much chance to affect the language of the invaders.

When the Normans came a single Saxon language was spoken throughout much of England, so the language of the invaders was much slower to take hold and in the end Modern English became a mix of Saxon and Norman.

That's my (H3LL inspired) theory anyway.

[gumboot]

Originally Posted by Zelenius

Although either "Celtic" or "Keltic" is acceptable, "Keltic" is more phonetic and considered more authentic. The word "Kelt" was first used by the Greeks, Hecataeus of Miletus in particular to refer to the people near Massilia in ancient Gaul. The Greeks called them "Keltoi", and this word may have been derived from the name of one of the Keltic tribes in Gaul.

You're missing a link in the chain. The word "Celt" comes from the Latin "Celtæ" which was derived from the Greek "Keltoi" which was an invention by Herodotus for the Gauls (which the Greeks already called "Galatai").

The Romans, apparently, only ever referred to the Gauls as the Celtæ and not British Celts, who were referred to as Brittonem.

The reason it's "C" not "K" is not because there's no K in the Irish Alphabet. It's because there's no K in the Latin alphabet. "C" has a hard sound in Latin, which is why the German "Kaiser" is derived from the Latin "Cæsar" (which is often incorrectly pronounced "See-zar").

[six7s]

As someone who is half Irish (down my left side) and a quarter Welsh (my right leg), I feel able to openly speculate that the demise of some dialects may well have been precipitated by the simple fact that even the speakers didn't understand a feckin word!

[ImaginalDisc]

Originally Posted by H3LL

Alternatively, the UK still contains a surprisingly diverse range of dialects and accents in contrast to the US which is remarkably homogeneous. I understand that dispassionately looking at the US and its immigration history one would expect German to be the predominant language, particularly on the East coast.

There's a popular myth that the founding fathers almost made German an official language of the U.S., or a co-official language, but that doesn't appear to be well supported by anything, really.

I'm trying to find reliable population estimates for the number and distributions of German speakers relative to English speakers in colonial North America, but I'm not finding much. Have you found something worth looking into?

I think this paper summarizes well why English in the early U.S. was more stable and homogeneous:

Quote:

Mid-Atlantic Anglophone colonials were, from the start, more mobile, more connected to commercial networks, and more involved with a demographically diverse population across a wider area. Those factors may have accelerated dialect leveling.

And:

Quote:

By the third quarter of the eighteenth century, many observers were describing this leveled colonial speech as well-established and well-known. In 1759, Franklin invoked as common knowledge that, although in England individuals’ geographical origins could be pinpointed by their speech, in North America they could not.

If you lived in Georgia and wanted to write a letter to a Virginian, a Bostonian, your cousin in Maryland, or your brother in Charleston, you wrote in English. There were certainly large German speaking populations in the colonies at that time, but English was spoken by the widest range of people along the Atlantic coast, and was spoken in the most important places of business and politics, as well as being spoken by the economic and political elite even when they lived in or near German speaking populations. Even if you assumed there were as many German speakers as English speakers, English would still be favored for those reasons.

[fuelair]

Originally Posted by SimonD

I also started a thread a long while back about keeping the Irish language alive and got a resounding NO by this forum. So if a bunch of intelligent, broad minded people think it's a waste of time (to be fair it was to sign a partion which people may have thought would not achieve anything), communites under pressure of invasion, etc (sorry I'm in a rush to go home so thats a mighty big etc ) don't stand a chance.

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=76427

Save It by getting it's vocabulary, alphabet and large quanties of spoken/sung versions of it. That saves it. Just no longer a living one.

[malbui]

Originally Posted by davefoc

Although the Irish are making a big effort to preserve Gaelic these days, there are numerous dialects of Irish and I think the government is promoting only one of them. Presumably, this means that some of the dialects are going to be left to die naturally as the native speakers move more towards the national standard Gaelic.

The Irish situation is pretty interesting. There is a national standard, the Caighdeán Oifigiúil, but it's actually fairly artificial: they looked at how things were said in the three main dialect areas (Munster, Connacht and Donegal) and cobbled something together. In my experience*, it has led to an odd situation in that it's the form that learners pick up (at least until they go and spend some time in the gaeltacht) and that the media use, but native speakers out in the wild don't find it that easy. Certainly a couple of older people I know from the wilds of Donegal (whose dialect is fairly unrepresented in the standard) are fairly baffled by the modern direction of the language.




* Habitual disclaimer: I'm not a native speaker, merely a linguistically aware descendant of native speakers.

[I Ratant]

Originally Posted by six7s

As someone who is half Irish (down my left side) and a quarter Welsh (my right leg), I feel able to openly speculate that the demise of some dialects may well have been precipitated by the simple fact that even the speakers didn't understand a feckin word!

.
I do believe this is the answer.

[Gravy]

I'm enjoying this thread!

–Gravy (Irish, Welsh, German, French)

[Nogbad]

Originally Posted by Zelenius

Everyone, thank you for the input, I appreciate it. It seems the culture, power, and military might of the Anglo-Saxons helped preserve a certain level of linguistic "purity" in the proper form of English. Undoubtedly, the various local dialects of spoken English throughout the isles, even within England but especially in Wales and Scotland do show some significant traces of Keltic influence in accent and grammar, as well as vocabulary. However, these are all far removed from mainstream, spoken English which is based on the English spoken in London and south-east England. The Keltic influence on this type of English is almost nonexistent, according to most linguists. Perhaps there was even something like an apartheid-like system in ancient Britain, with the Kelts only becoming Anglicized very slowly, too slow to have an impact on the development on mainstream English.

Although either "Celtic" or "Keltic" is acceptable, "Keltic" is more phonetic and considered more authentic. The word "Kelt" was first used by the Greeks, Hecataeus of Miletus in particular to refer to the people near Massilia in ancient Gaul. The Greeks called them "Keltoi", and this word may have been derived from the name of one of the Keltic tribes in Gaul.

The modern definition of Keltic refers to an important ethno-linguistic sub-division of the larger Indo-European speaking peoples. In ancient times, the word "Keltic" may have had a broader, fuzzier meaning and may have been used to refer to both the Keltic speaking peoples of ancient western and northwestern Europe as well as non-Keltic speaking peoples. Hence, at times it may have been used to refer to the Germanic speaking peoples and maybe even the Basques or pre-Indo-European peoples of the Iberian peninsula. By the modern usage, this would be erroneous; in its ancient usage, they may have been "right" insofar as they weren't basing this classification on language and more as an umbrella term for the barbarians of northern Europe. Certainly almost all ancient Kelts never called themselves "Kelts" or "Keltic". We may never know what they called themselves as a group, and they probably didn't have a term for themselves either, except local tribal names. They may have been vastly different over large enough distances, and according to some scholars, this may have been due to the "Kelts" being just a military aristocracy ruling over a non Indo-European speaking people, especially in parts of ancient Gaul and Spain(Keltiberians). Eventually the non-Indo-European common folk were "Kelticized", according to this view.

The Kelts used to occupy a much larger area of Europe. Most of ancient Gaul and a large part of what is now Germany, Spain, all of the British Isles and Ireland, parts of eastern Europe and for a time what is now central Turkey were dominated by the Kelts. Even before the Kelts of Britain had been conquered and assimilated by the Anglo-Saxons, much the same thing happened in continental Europe with the Germanic peoples displacing the Kelts in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium(This country takes its name from the "Belgae", an ancient Keltic tribe, but no Keltic languages are spoken in Belgium).

Given that modern English would be incomprehensible to an Anglo Saxon I am not entirely convinced by the hegemony argument. Modern English has developed from a cocktail of Old and Middle English, Norman French, Norse and some Celtic influences. Also, given that none of the native languages of Britain employ the letter K, I am buggered if I am going to be told that it is more authentic to use K because the Greeks happened to like the letter. Whether the western tribes were actually Celts in the sense that they were the same ethnic peoples that originally gave rise to this distinctive culture is moot. However, it is true that these western tribes continued the cultural traditions, most obviously expressed in their art and metal working, that indicates they were part of the broader Celtic culture and ultimately became the last torch bearers of that culture. These Western tribes and their languages can be found in North West Iberia, Brittany, Britain and Ireland.

The demise of Celtic languages in these Celtic lands has been long and drawn out. It was really the standardisation of Empires - Spain, France and Britain - in recent history with compulsory schooling for all that caused a major decline. As a child it was common for me to hear workman in the street talking Gaelic - a rare occurrence these days. In Britain this economic and cultural imperative relates to the Anglo Saxons only in so much that the economic and political centres where they prevailed most thoroughly (the South East of England) ultimately became the administrative centre for all the British Isles (including Ireland). With Empire in full swing the inconvenience of multiple languages was frowned upon and devices such as a large rope knot were placed around children's necks to remind them that Welsh or Gaelic was not spoken at school.

Another factor which may have some bearing on the insulation of the South Eastern Saxon language in Britain is that the sixth century was a difficult period with poor weather and a major plague which caused considerable population decline across Europe. It perhaps wasn't culture or military strength that protected Old English from the local population but a lack of population itself. It is certainly the case that English made little dent on the rest of the Britain until many hundreds of years later.

[H3LL]

Originally Posted by ImaginalDisc

There's a popular myth that the founding fathers almost made German an official language of the U.S., or a co-official language, but that doesn't appear to be well supported by anything, really.

Nothing without a re-read, pro or con. I'll try to dive in for a look soon.

Thanks for the linky, ID. It would be nice if I could nail my speculation down a bit better.

Not to be confused with the myth (I'd not heard of it as a myth), it was more a "This is what you would expect but it isn't what you get" sort of thing.

It is some time since I read Mother Tongue, but I also think Pinker brushed over the topic and Diamond dips his toe in as well.

I understand that communication/trade over distance using a common standard language or method of communication isn't really much of a debate. It's very apparent today. So much so we have international standards for many things. ISO standards, for example, are a language of sorts (certainly communication).

This was why I would be surprised if it wasn't the case for the (K)Celtic peoples. I'll see what develops here.

.

[H3LL]

Found some bits:

Bill Bryson - Mother Tongue P 160-163

On the "myth".

Quote:

The story has been repeated many times, even by as eminent an authority as Randolph Quirk.* But it appears to be without foundation.

*`At the time when the United States split off from Britain, for example, there were proposals that independence should be linguistically acknowledged by the use of a different language from that of Britain' (The Use of En,glish, page 3).

I remembered wrong, he mentioned New York not the East coast:

Quote:

At the turn of the century, New York had more speakers of German than anywhere in the world except Vienna and Berlin, more Irish than anywhere but Dublin, more Russians than in Kiev, more Italians than in Milan or Naples. In 1890 the United States had 800 German newspapers and as late as the outbreak of World War I Baltimore alone had four elementary schools teaching in German only.

Suggestions he made for uniform speech and why it was so different than in the UK:

Quote:

It was natural to suppose that the existence of these linguistic pockets would lead the United States to deteriorate into a variety of regional tongues, rather as in Europe, or at the very result in widely divergent dialects of English, each heavily influenced by its prevailing immigrant group.

Quote:

There were three main reasons. First, the continuous movement of people back and forth across the continent militated against the formation of permanent regionalisms. Americans enjoyed social mobility long before sociologists thought up the term. Second, the intermingling of people from diverse backgrounds worked in favour of homogeneity. Third, and above all, social pressures and the desire for a common national identity encouraged people to settle on a single way of speaking.

and some comments:

Quote:

People who didn't blend in risked being made to feel like outsiders. They were given names that denigrated their backgrounds: zoop from the Italian guappo (a strutting fellow), kraut (from the supposed German fondness for sauerkraut), yid (for Yiddish speakers), dago from the Spanish Diego, kike (from the -ki and -ky endings on many Jewish names), bohunk from Bohemian-Hungarian, micks and paddies for the Irish. As we saw in the chapter on dialects, the usual pattern was for the offspring of immigrants to become completely assimilated - to the point of being unable to speak their parents' language.

Bold mine. Probably appropriate for the OP.

I hope that helps.

I must read his book again. Simple to read and fascinating.

.

[I Ratant]

"As we saw in the chapter on dialects, the usual pattern was for the offspring of immigrants to become completely assimilated - to the point of being unable to speak their parents' language."
.
I see Hispanic children talking in English to their siblings, and Spanish to their parents.
Sweet Thang is multi-linquistic, English, Spanish and Ebonics.

[Delvo]

Originally Posted by I Ratant

"As we saw in the chapter on dialects, the usual pattern was for the offspring of immigrants to become completely assimilated - to the point of being unable to speak their parents' language."

But even then, second-language errors can creep into the way the next generation speaks that language even if it's their first. For example, in part of the USA which once had a lot of German immigrants, some things have become local normal standards for the local version of English which perfectly match what you'd expect a German immigrant to do by mistake after having English not quite mastered...

1. They replace various time words like "already" and "still" with "yet". In German, which represents our Y-sound with J, the word "jetzt" seems to be a cognate of "yet" and is usually translated as "now" but can also be used for those other functions.

2. They say "let" when they mean "leave" or "leave" when they mean "let", essentially merging the two into one verb, spelled and pronounced as "let" in present tense and "left" in past tense. In German, one verb is given as the translation for both of those English verbs: "lassen", the past form of which is "lässt". (The umlauts make the "a" sound more like an "e".)

3. They say "what for" to ask about type or kind, rather than reason or purpose. For example, "What for pizza do you want?" doesn't mean "what do you want a pizza for?" or "why do you want a pizza?"; it means "what kind of pizza do you want?". In German, the words that, individually translated, would be "What for a..." actually form a phrase that means "What kind of a..." to German speakers.

[Gurdur]

1) There is a theory that Celtic tribes in Britain were actually far less in numbers by the time of the Saxon invasions than is commonly believed; that Germanics had already immigrated in large numbers -- and possibly even before the Romans; that indeed much of England was Germanicized extremely early.


2) The invading Saxons seem to have practiced a form of apartheid, and surrounding tribes seem to have imitated the Saxons in customs and language to a great deal, accounting for much cultural loss and disappearence on their part.

[dudalb]

Originally Posted by arthwollipot

May be a silly and pointless diversion, but...

Why "Keltic" and not "Celtic"?

BUt almost all Celtic scholars spell it with a C when writing in English.
I know a professor of Celtic languages in the California University system who says that among Celtic scholars, there is a joke that 90% of the people writing "Celtic" with a K instead of a C in English are either Poseurs or crackpots.

[Nogbad]

Thinking about this a little bit more, a simple observation of a modern English person attempting to speak French might explain much

[Jeff Corey]

Originally Posted by SimonD

I also started a thread a long while back about keeping the Irish language alive and got a resounding NO by this forum. So if a bunch of intelligent, broad minded people think it's a waste of time (to be fair it was to sign a partion which people may have thought would not achieve anything), communites under pressure of invasion, etc (sorry I'm in a rush to go home so thats a mighty big etc ) don't stand a chance.

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=76427

We were here two years ago. It's alive and well...http://www.odireain.com/

[Wudang]

And Scots gaelic is still doing well where my cousins live on Mull and Harris - it's still their normal language.

And these guys help

YouTube Video This video is not hosted by the JREF. The JREF can not be held responsible for the suitability or legality of this material. By clicking the link below you agree to view content from an external website.

I AGREE

[davefoc]

Thanks for the link Wudang. That was both interesting and entertaining.

Would somebody fluent in Irish have been able to understand much of this? Would they have recognized it as a form of Gaelic?

I tried to match the written words with the words being sung and it was somewhat difficult for me. The pronunciation of some of the words seemed to be indistinct or mostly swallowed to my ear. I suspect that I was just so unfamiliar with the sounds of the language that I didn't detect them as language sounds.

[Soapy Sam]

I suspect the suppression of Celtic language was a natural result of the dominance of Latin.
The language of the Empire and of the mediaeval church

I remember being surprised that the Arabic for a knife was "siqin" (all spellings here are fonnetik). How odd that it should be so like the Gaelic "sgian".
Then I realised both probably derive from the Latin "siccare" meaning "to cut".
(Also why "scissors and scythe have that odd , surplus "c", I suppose).

I 'd guess the Celtic languages were just swamped by the universality of Latin, except in specific contexts like placenames. The ubiquity of "Avon" (Afon, abhainn) as a river name in once Celtic areas is an example.

[politas]

Originally Posted by SimonD

Some other letters are 'missing' also, like v. Which is why Niamb is spelt like that and not the way it sounds - 'Naiv'.

That would be "Niamh", actually. Gaelic "lenition" adds an "h" after another letter: "bh", "ch", "dh", "fh", "gh", "mh", "ph", "sh" and "th".

There is actually a system to it, if you can get your head around the difference between the "v" sounds of "bh" and "mh".

[this charming man]

It's a Druish conspiracy.

[six7s]

Originally Posted by davefoc

The pronunciation of some of the words seemed to be indistinct or mostly swallowed to my ear. I suspect that I was just so unfamiliar with the sounds of the language that I didn't detect them as language sounds.

Is that a euphemism for drunk?

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[davefoc]

Originally Posted by six7s

Is that a euphemism for drunk?

I thought you were talking about my inability to hear the words of the singer in the linked to video. I was sober, but I'm old so maybe that was it.

In the interest of Scottish-American relations let me make it clear I was not suggesting excess alcohol consumption on the part of the group as the reason I couldn't quite make out the words they were singing. My sense of it is that if I had the slightest familiarity with Scottish Gaelic I would have done better.