Influence of Celtic on English? (Specific Languages) Language Learning Forum

Influence of Celtic on English?
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montmorency
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Message 1 of 7

25 September 2012 at 3:13pm | IP Logged

This is a spin-off from the Icelandic/Old Norse thread.
See here:

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=4661&PN=1&TPN=1

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=4661&PN=1&TPN=1

and specifically these posts:

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=4661&PN=1&TPN=3#404272

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=4661&PN=1&TPN=3#404272

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=4661&PN=1&TPN=3#404316

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=4661&PN=1&TPN=3#404316

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=4661&PN=1&TPN=4#404343

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=4661&PN=1&TPN=4#404343

& these links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_tan_tethera

http://www.archaeologyuk.org/ba/ba46/ba46int.html

Edit: I've now "cleaned the links up"(?) with Firefox, but I'm leaving the plain text (no URL tags) versions, in case the clickable links are still rubbish. You will have to remove the space between "T" and "ID" if pasting into a browser address bar.

(Would that problem really be so difficult to fix, for goodness' sake?)

Edited by montmorency on 25 September 2012 at 7:16pm
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hrhenry
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Message 2 of 7

25 September 2012 at 4:34pm | IP Logged

You might want to re-check your links. They're badly formed.

R.
==
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montmorency
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Message 3 of 7

25 September 2012 at 7:07pm | IP Logged

hrhenry wrote:

You might want to re-check your links. They're badly formed.

R.
==

Yes, I know. The well known Forum effect plus the well-known Forum plus Chrome effect.

I am going to try cleaning them up in Firefox, but I still won't get rid of the dratted space.

"You might want to" talk to Admin about that one....
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hrhenry
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Message 4 of 7

25 September 2012 at 7:29pm | IP Logged

montmorency wrote:

I am going to try cleaning them up in Firefox, but I still won't get rid of the dratted
space.

When you're including links in your message, try assigning a short text to the "screen
display text" instead of the full URL. It helps, at least in my experience with Chrome.

I'm assuming you're using the link button when you're composing your message and not
just pasting a complete URL into your text.

R.
==
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montmorency
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Message 5 of 7

26 September 2012 at 12:58am | IP Logged

Some links:

http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/6361Lovis.htm
http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/6361Lovis.htm

Quote:

Celtic Influence on the English Language

Claire Lovis

Copyright 2001

http://greenash.net.au/thoughts/2010/08/the-english-language -and-the-celtic-question

Quote:

The English Language and The Celtic Question

According to most linguistic / historical sources, the English language as we know it today is a West Germanic language (the other two languages in this family being German and Dutch). Modern English is the descendant of Old English, and Old English was essentially born when the Anglo-Saxons migrated to the isle of Great Britain in the 5th c. C.E., from their traditional homeland in the north-west of modern Germany. Prior to this time, it's believed that the inhabitants of all parts of the British Isles were predominantly Celtic speakers, with a small Latin influence resulting from the Roman occupation of Britain.
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But what about Celtic? It's believed that the majority of England's pre-Anglo-Saxon population spoke Brythonic (i.e. British Celtic). It's also been recently asserted that the majority of England's population today is genetically pre-Anglo-Saxon Briton stock. How, then — if those statements are both true — how can it be that the Celtic languages have left next to no legacy on modern English?
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The Brythonic language is now long since extinct, and the fact is that we'll never really know how it was that English came to wholly displace it, without being influenced by it to any real extent other than the preservation of a few geographical place names (and without the British people themselves disappearing genetically). The Celtic question will likely remain unsolved, possibly forever. But considering that modern English is the world's first de facto global lingua franca (not to mention the native language of hundreds of millions of people, myself included), it seems only right that we should explore as much as we can into this particularly dark aspect of our language's origins.

The following is quite interesting, so I'll quote at length:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004037.h tml

Quote:

January 14, 2007
Are we ready yet to let a historian claim that English is a Celtic language with Germanic words?

There has long been a kind of secret society of scholars who consider English grammar to be deeply imprinted by Celtic language's structure. The idea is that the reason that English is, in terms of its grammar, a kind of twisted sister in the Germanic family (an Anglophone doesn't precisely feel "at home" when learning German, whereas a Swede, Frisian or even Afrikaans speaker does) is because the Celts who learned the language of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes learned it in a Celtic-infused way, and their way gradually became THE way English was spoken by everybody.

The more extreme advocates even claim that English is Celtic grammar with Germanic words. As you might expect, this idea has never penetrated mainstream work on English in any serious way (although none other than J.R.R. Tolkien was a fellow traveller). As such, I was fascinated to run across a casual espousal of the Celtic Hypothesis by a nonspecialist.

It's in Roger Osborne's oddish and fine new Civilization: A New History of the Western World, in which he describes post-fifth century Britain as "a combination of British and Germanic cultures -- the resulting language, for instance, was Germanic in vocabulary, but Celtic in construction." (p. 41)

Where Osborne picked this up is unclear: he happens to give only a very broad "Useful Sources"-type list of bibliography for his chapters. However, he certainly didn't get this from any standard source on the history of English, in which it is regularly stated that the Celts were overwhelmed by Germanic speakers and left no imprint on English beyond place names.

Yet I am not taking this as an occasion to do a grand old Language Log-style post highlighting Osborne as one more non-linguist disseminating linguistic falsehoods to the general public. That's because I have come to think that the Celtic Hypothesis crowd is, in fact, on to something.
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There are a passel of English grammar features like this, weird as Germanic goes but perfectly ordinary as Celtic. And on top of that, the wonders of the ongoing project tracing the migrations and blendings of humans since the emergence of our species via variations in DNA are currently deep-sixing the old idea that Celts somehow "disappeared" in most of Britain and wound up huddling on the margins in Wales or giving it the old college try in Cornwall but dying out eventually.

Rather, modern Brits are, genetically, full to bursting with chromosomal Celticity (a recommended source is Stephen Oppenheimer's new The Origins of the British). The Celts held on just fine -- and increasing evidence suggests that one of their most vibrant legacies has been leaving many of the features of their notoriously unique languages in English.

Not so many that English is really Celtic with Germanic words -- that is a tasty notion in its counterintuitiveness, but ultimately cannot stand. However, there is increasing evidence that there is enough Celtic in English that standard treatments might well one day start covering it substantially.

As such, I was tickled, albeit perplexed, to find a historian writing casually as if the Celtic Hypothesis were accepted canon -- because I have come to hope that someday it will be.
Posted by John McWhorter at January 14, 2007 02:57 AM

(phew! Full to bursting with chromosomal Celticity! Think I'd better go for a walk to clear my head!
I was thinking about looking up "deep-sixing" to see what it meant, but that might be too much excitement for
one day ... :-) )

http://www.bbc.co.uk/irish/articles/view/720/english

(The P-Celtic and Q-Celtic designation is not universally accepted, as far as I can tell).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittonicisms_in_English

Quote:

The Brittonic substratum influence on English has historically been considered slight, but a number of publications in the 2000s (decade) suggested that its influence had been underestimated. Many of the developments differentiating Old English from Middle English are proposed as an emergence of a previously unrecorded Brittonic influence.[2][3]

There are many, often obscure, characteristics in English that have been proposed as Brittonicisms. White (2004) enumerates 92 items, of which 32 are attributed to other academic works.[2]
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The review of the extent of Romano-British influence has been encouraged by developments in several fields. Significant survival of Brittonic peoples in Anglo-Saxon England has become a more widely accepted idea thanks primarily to recent archaeological and genetic evidence.[14][page needed] According to a previously held model, the Romano-Britons of England were to a large extent exterminated or somehow pushed out of England — affecting their ability to influence language.[15][16] There is now a much greater body of research into language contact and a greater understanding of language contact types. The works of Sarah Thompson and Terence Kaufman[17] have been used in particular to model borrowing and language shift. The research uses investigations into varieties of "Celtic" English (that is Welsh English, Irish English, etc.) which reveal characteristics more certainly attributable to "Celtic" languages and also universal contact trends revealed by other varieties of English.
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Old English
Diglossia model

Endorsed particularly by Hildegard Tristram (2004), the Old English diglossia model proposes that much of the native Romano-British population remained in England while the Anglo-Saxons gradually took over the rule of the country. Over a long period, the Brittonic population imperfectly learnt the Anglo-Saxons' language while Old English was maintained in an artificially stable form as the written language of the elite and the only version of English preserved in writing. After the Anglo-Saxon rule was removed by the Norman conquerors, the language of the general population, which was a Brittonicised version of English, was eventually recorded and appears as Middle English.[18][19] This kind of variance between written and spoken language is attested historically in other cultures and may be common.
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Substansive verb – consuetudinal tense Byð

Old English is unusual as a Germanic language in its use of two forms of the verb to be. The b- form is used in a habitual sense and the 3 person singular form, Byð, has the same distinction of functions and is associated with a similar phonetic form in the Brittonic *bið (Welsh bydd). Biðun, the 3rd person plural form is also used in Northern texts and seems to parallel the Brittonic byddant. The byðun form is particularly difficult to explain as a Germanic language construct but is consistent with the Brittonic system.[20]
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Transition to Middle English
Change from syntheticism towards analyticism

The development from Old English to Middle English is marked particularly by a change from syntheticism (expressing meaning using word-endings) to analyticism (expressing meaning using word order). Old English was a highly synthetic language. There are different word endings for case (roughly speaking, endings for the object of a sentence, the subject of a sentence and similarly for 2 other grammatical situations (not including instrumental)) varying for plural forms, gender forms and 2 kinds of word form (called weak and strong).[21] This system is partially retained in modern Germanic languages. Brittonic, however, was already highly analytic and so Brittonic peoples may have had difficulty learning Old English. It has been suggested that the Brittonic Latin of the period demonstrates difficulty in using the Latin word endings.[22] Today, Welsh and English are conspicuously analytic compared with the Indo-European languages of Western Europe.[23]
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Various Possible Brittonicisms [headings only given here]:

Loss of wurth

Rise in use of some complex syntactic structures

Uses of himself, herself etc.

Northern subject rule

Lack of external possessor

Tag questions and answers

Phonetics
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Welsh_ origin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Celtic _origin

( This link hardly at all to do with Celtic, but some interesting stuff on origins of English and Scots. See also a reference to Norn:
http://www.dsl.ac.uk/dsl/SCOTSHIST/output4.php?file=NEW-Revi sed2Origins.htm

"2 The origins and spread of Scots"
)

Edited by montmorency on 26 September 2012 at 1:02am
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Iversen
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Message 6 of 7

26 September 2012 at 1:15pm | IP Logged

I have read the texts which Montmorency refers to, and it would be impossible to address all the claims made for and against a Celtic substraum. However the idea that Middle English would be more likely to show Celtic influence than the written sources in OE is fundamentally sound. The situation vaguely resembles the early phase of the Romance languages, which developed from the simple grunts of vox populi and not from the learned writings of Cicero et al. I have one problem, namely that I don't know much about Welch (or COrnish or Breton for that matter) but...

Let me take up some of the points in the article "Brittonicisms in English" in Wikipedia.

Old English is unusual as a Germanic language in its use of two forms of the verb to be.

Good point. I don't know any other Germanic language with the same duplicity of the copula - but I know it from Irish.

Change from syntheticism towards analyticism...
Today, Welsh and English are conspicuously analytic compared with the Indo-European languages of Western Europe.

Not clear. In South Africa English has retained its European form, but Dutch became Afrikaans and in the process it lost most of its inflections. Native African nannies are sometimes quoted as the driving force behind this change, and native Britons in service under Anglosaxon masters could have done something similar to some kind of 'Vulgar Anglosaxon' without leaving marks in the written sources. But the upheavals after the Norman conquest would be an even more likely explanation. Besides Modern Irish has a rich morphology, and still it is just a shadow of the morphology of Old Irish. Welsh may however have lost its endings in the turmoil. In the article it is claimed that the language of the Britons had very little morphology. The simple answer to that comes from another Wikipedia article: No documents written in the British language have been found, but a few inscriptions have been identified. Goodnight, claim.

It has been suggested that the Brittonic Latin of the period demonstrates difficulty in using the Latin word endings.]

So had any writer of Latin at the time. It was only after the year 1000 (and maybe in isolated cases before) that the literate clergy tried really hard to reintroduce Classical written Latin.

Language innovations occurred primarily in texts from Northern and South-Western England — in theory, the areas with the greater density of Brittonic people. In the Northern zone of that period, there was partial replacement of the Anglo-Saxon rule by Norse invaders.

Isn't that reason enough? More turmoil -> loss of morphology

Old English had several versions of the word 'the' while at the time Brittonic only had one. The variations of 'the' were lost in English. The lack of different forms of 'the' is an unusual language feature shared only by Celtic and English in this region.

Wrong. The Jutish dialects have one form, which may be "a" or "æ" (and Low German has also dropped the different article forms, though I don't know when). The postclitic articles in the Nordic languages do differ, because they came from the demonstrative pronoun "hinn". The different articles in OE were probably also borrowed from a demonstrative pronoun.

English developed a fixed word order, which was present earlier in Brittonic

So? Where are the texts which should show this English-like word order? Again my minimal knowledge of Irish makes me suspicious, because the word order in Irish is very different from that of English. For instance the normal place of the verb is at the start of the sentence, and adjectives come after 'their' nouns.

Rise of the periphrastic aspect, particularly the progressive form (i.e. BE verb-ing: I am writing, she was singing etc.). The progressive form developed in the change from Old English to Middle English. Similar constructs are rare in Germanic languages and not completely analogous.

The inspiration could also come from Latin - Britain had been christianized for a long time when the 'progressive revolution' really took off. I can't say whether Welsh and Cornish used (and use) the construction with a copula verb + a present participle (and if yes, how common it is), but Irish use different constructions - including past tenses divided by aspectlike considerations.

Modern English is dependent on a semantically neutral 'do' in some negative statements and questions, e.g. 'I don't know' rather than 'I know not". This feature is linguistically very rare. Celtic languages use a similar structure, but without dependence. The usage is frequent in Cornish and Middle Cornish

I can't beat the references in the article to Cornish, but the do-construction is also used in Modern Low German - and the predecessor of this language was the Saxon language. Worth checking out, if the early stages of Platt can be documented.

Among the phonetic anomalies is the continued use of w, θ and ð in Modern English (win , breath, breathe). English is remarkable in being the only language (except Welsh/Cornish) to use all three of these sounds in the region. The use of the sounds in Germanic languages has generally been ephemeral

Old Norse had at least two of these sounds (and Modern Icelandic still has got them). And a reference to any continued use of something is irrelevant. The question is: did it develop just after the contact with the Celts or not? The only thing I can say is that 'w' is a very common letter in Anglosaxon texts, but I have no idea whether it was missing in Saxon from before the Hengest and Horsa incident. But if the transcriptions can be trusted there were two w's on one of the golden horns found in Denmark (Southern Jutland near Gallehus), which date to around 400: "Ek hlewagastir holtijar horna tawido" ('I Lægæst from (or of) Holte horn made'). Lægæst's grandchildren may have invaded Britain.

In short I still don't think that the Celtic substrate theory is very convincing, although the loss of word endings might have a parallel in the developments that led from Dutch to Afrikaans (read: morphology challenged nannies!). However the almost total lack of really old Celtic loanwords and the rarity of Celtic place names weigh more in this perspective. If the Britons stayed they must have been subjugated completely and brutally, and if you are the master you don't remodel your language after that of your serfs and servants.

Edited by Iversen on 26 September 2012 at 6:53pm
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Elexi
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Message 7 of 7

26 September 2012 at 2:34pm | IP Logged

On the issue of Stephen Oppenheimer being used to argue that 'modern Brits are,
genetically, full to bursting with chromosomal Celticity' - here is what the Wikipedia
page for Oppenheimer says: 'Oppenheimer argued that neither Anglo-Saxons nor Celts had
much impact on the genetics of the inhabitants of the British Isles, and that British
ancestry mainly traces back to the Palaeolithic Iberian people, now represented best by
Basques, instead'.

It should be pointed out that Oppenheimer is also a proponent of proto-English theory
(http://www.proto-english.org/) and is somewhat of a gentleman hobbyist - neither a
geneticist nor a linguistics expert by training.

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