| Insular Celtic | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution | Brittany,Cornwall,Ireland, theIsle of Man,Scotland, andWales |
| Ethnicity | Insular Celts |
| Linguistic classification | Indo-European
|
| Subdivisions | |
| Language codes | |
| Glottolog | insu1254 |
Insular Celtic languages are the group ofCeltic languages spoken inBrittany,Great Britain,Ireland, and theIsle of Man. All surviving Celtic languages are in the Insular group, including Breton, which is spoken on continental Europe in Brittany,France. TheContinental Celtic languages, although once widely spoken inmainland Europe and inAnatolia,[1] are extinct.
Six Insular Celtic languages are extant (in all cases written and spoken) in two distinct groups:
TheInsular Celtic hypothesis is the theory that these languagesevolved together in those places, having a latercommon ancestor than any of theContinental Celtic languages such asCeltiberian,Gaulish,Galatian, andLepontic, among others, all of which are long extinct. This linguistic division of Celtic languages into Insular and Continental contrasts with theP/Q Celtic hypothesis.
The proponents of the Insular hypothesis (such as Cowgill 1975; McCone 1991, 1992; and Schrijver 1995) point to shared innovations among these – chiefly:
The proponents assert that a strong partition between the Brittonic languages withGaulish (P-Celtic) on one side and the Goidelic languages withCeltiberian (Q-Celtic) on the other, may be superficial, owing to alanguage contact phenomenon. They add the identical sound shift (/kʷ/ to/p/) could have occurred independently in the predecessors of Gaulish and Brittonic, or have spread through language contact between those two groups. Further, theItalic languages had a similar divergence betweenLatino-Faliscan, which kept/kʷ/, andOsco-Umbrian, which changed it to/p/.
Some historians, such asGeorge Buchanan in the 16th century, had suggested the Brythonic or P-Celtic language was a descendant of thePictish language. Indeed, the tribe of the Pritani has a corresponding Q-Celtic form in Old Irish,Cruthin, but this could also simply be a loanword from Brythonic.[2][a][clarification needed][relevant?]
Under the Insular hypothesis, the family tree of the insular Celtic languages is thus as follows:
| Insular Celtic | |
This table lists cognates showing the development of Proto-Celtic*/kʷ/ to/p/ in Gaulish and the Brittonic languages but to/k/ in the Goidelic languages.
| Proto- Celtic | Gaulish and Brittonic languages | Goidelic languages | English Gloss | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gaulish | Welsh | Cornish | Breton | Primitive Irish | Modern Irish | Scottish Gaelic | Manx | ||
| *kʷennos | pennos | pen | penn | penn | *kʷennos | ceann | ceann | kione | "head" |
| *kʷetwar- | petuar | pedwar | peswar | pevar | *kʷetwar- | ceathair | ceithir | kiare | "four" |
| *kʷenkʷe | pempe | pumpa | pymp | pemp | *kʷenkʷe | cúig | còig | queig | "five" |
| *kʷeis | pis | pwy | piw | piv | *kʷeis | cé (oldercia) | cò/cia | quoi | "who" |
A significant difference between Goidelic and Brittonic languages is the transformation of*an,*am to a denasalised vowel with lengthening,é, before an originally voiceless stop or fricative,cf. Old Irishéc "death",écath "fish hook",dét "tooth",cét "hundred" vs. Welshangau,angad,dant, andcant. Otherwise:
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 widespreadbilingualism, perhaps because ofexogamy, and absence of sharp sociolinguistic division.
Ranko Matasović 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.[3] These are:
The Insular Celticverb shows a peculiar feature unknown in any other attestedIndo-European language: verbs have differentconjugational forms depending on whether they appear in absolute initial position in the sentence (Insular Celtic havingverb–subject–object or VSO word order) or whether they are preceded by a preverbalparticle. The situation is most robustly attested inOld Irish, but it has remained to some extent inScottish Gaelic and traces of it are present in MiddleWelsh as well.
Forms that appear in sentence-initial position are calledabsolute, those that appear after a particle are calledconjunct (seeDependent and independent verb forms for details). Theparadigm of thepresentactiveindicative of the Old Irish verbbeirid "carry" is as follows; the conjunct forms are illustrated with the particlení "not".
| Absolute | Conjunct | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Old Irish | English Gloss | Old Irish | English Gloss | ||
| singular | 1st person | biru | I carry | ní biur | I do not carry |
| 2nd person | biri | you carry | ní bir | you do not carry | |
| 3rd person | beirid | s/he carries | ní beir | s/he does not carry | |
| plural | 1st person | bermai | we carry | ní beram | we do not carry |
| 2nd person | beirthe | you carry | ní beirid | you do not carry | |
| 3rd person | berait | they carry | ní berat | they do not carry | |
In Scottish Gaelic this distinction is still found in certain verb-forms across almost all verbs (except for a very few). This is aVSO language. The example given in the first column below is theindependent orabsolute form, which must be used when the verb is in clause-initial position (or preceded in the clause by certain preverbal particles). Then following it is thedependent orconjunct form which is required when the verb is preceded in the clause by certain other preverbal particles, in particular interrogative or negative preverbal particles. In these examples, in the first column we have a verb in clause-initial position. In the second column a negative particle immediately precedes the verb, which makes the verb use the verb form or verb forms of thedependent conjugation.
| Absolute/Independent | Conjunct/Dependent |
|---|---|
| cuiridh mi "I put/will put" | cha chuir mi "I don't put/will not put" |
| òlaidh e "he drinks/will drink" | chan òl e "he doesn't drink/will not drink" |
| ceannaichidh iad "they buy/will buy" | cha cheannaich iad "they don't buy/will not buy" |
The verb forms in the above examples happen to be the same with any subject personal pronouns, not just with the particular persons chosen in the example. Also, the combination oftense–aspect–mood properties inherent in these verb forms is non-past but otherwise indefinite with respect to time, being compatible with a variety of non-past times, and context indicates the time. The sense can be completely tenseless, for example when asserting that something is always true or always happens. This verb form has erroneously been termed 'future' in many pedagogical grammars. A correct, neutral term 'INDEF1' has been used in linguistics texts.
In Middle Welsh, the distinction is seen most clearly in proverbs following the formula "X happens, Y does not happen" (Evans 1964: 119):
The older analysis of the distinction, as reported by Thurneysen (1946, 360 ff.), held that the absolute endings derive fromProto-Indo-European "primary endings" (used in present and future tenses) while the conjunct endings derive from the "secondary endings" (used in past tenses). Thus Old Irish absolutebeirid "s/he carries" was thought to be from*bʰereti (compareSanskritbharati "s/he carries"), while conjunctbeir was thought to be from*bʰeret (compare Sanskrita-bharat "s/he was carrying").
Today, however, most Celticists agree that Cowgill (1975), following an idea present already in Pedersen (1913, 340 ff.), found the correct solution to the origin of the absolute/conjunct distinction: anenclitic particle, reconstructed as*es after consonants and*s after vowels, came in second position in the sentence. If the first word in the sentence was another particle,*(e)s came after that and thus before the verb, but if the verb was the first word in the sentence,*(e)s was cliticized to it. Under this theory, then, Old Irish absolutebeirid comes from Proto-Celtic*bereti-s, while conjunctní beir comes from*nī-s bereti.
The identity of the*(e)s particle remains uncertain. Cowgill suggests it might be a semantically degraded form of*esti "is", while Schrijver (1994) has argued it is derived from the particle*eti "and then", which is attested in Gaulish. Schrijver's argument is supported and expanded upon by Schumacher (2004), who points towards further evidence, viz., typological parallels in non-Celtic languages, and especially a large number of verb forms in all Brythonic languages that contain a particle-d (from an older *-t).
Continental Celtic languages cannot be shown to have any absolute/conjunct distinction. However, they seem to show onlySVO andSOV word orders, as in other Indo-European languages. The absolute/conjunct distinction may thus be an artifact of the VSO word order that arose in Insular Celtic. Still, the development of the verbal complex in Insular Celtic is difficult to explain as independent in Goidelic and Brythonic, and is hence strong evidence for Insular Celtic as a true branch of Celtic. Moreover, Goidelic and Brythonic uniquely share the development of /s/ (voiced to [z]) to /ð/ in front of a voiced stop.
Insular Celtic, unlikeContinental Celtic, shares some structural characteristics with variousAfro-Asiatic languages which are rare in other Indo-European languages. These similarities includeverb–subject–objectword order, singular verbs with plural post-verbal subjects, a genitive construction similar toconstruct state, prepositions with fused inflected pronouns ("conjugated prepositions" or "prepositional pronouns"), and oblique relatives with pronoun copies. Such resemblances were noted as early as 1621 with regard to Welsh and theHebrew language.[4][5]
The hypothesis that the Insular Celtic languages had features from an Afro-Asiaticsubstratum (Iberian and Berber languages) was first proposed byJohn Morris-Jones in 1899.[6] The theory has been supported by several linguists since:Henry Jenner (1904);[7]Julius Pokorny (1927);[8] Heinrich Wagner (1959);[9]Orin Gensler (1993);[10]Theo Vennemann (1995);[11] and Ariel Shisha-Halevy (2003).[12]
Others have suggested that rather than the Afro-Asiatic influencing Insular Celtic directly, both groups of languages were influenced by a now lost substrate. This was suggested by Jongeling (2000).[13]Ranko Matasović (2012) likewise argued that the "Insular Celtic languages were subject to strong influences from an unknown, presumably non-Indo-European substratum" and found the syntactic parallelisms between Insular Celtic and Afro-Asiatic languages to be "probably not accidental". He argued that their similarities arose from "a large linguistic macro-area, encompassing parts of NW Africa, as well as large parts of Western Europe, before the arrival of the speakers of Indo-European, including Celtic".[14]
The Afro-Asiatic substrate theory, according toRaymond Hickey, "has never found much favour with scholars of the Celtic languages".[15] The theory was criticised by Kim McCone in 2006,[16] Graham Isaac in 2007,[17] and Steve Hewitt in 2009.[18] Isaac argues that the 20 points identified by Gensler are trivial, dependencies, or vacuous. Thus, he considers the theory to be not just unproven but also wrong. Instead, the similarities between Insular Celtic and Afro-Asiatic could have evolved independently.
{{cite book}}:ISBN / Date incompatibility (help){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
