Celtic Language

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Celtic Language

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Ogham Stone
courtesy of Jon O'Sullivan

Intro ~ Overview ~ Spoken ~ Written ~ Art

"A large Celtic vocabulary survives in modern French." (Peter Ellis, The Druids, p. 32)

INTRO

"...language is at the heart of culture...."
An exciting research project is being undertaken by a multidisciplinary team of scholars at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies. The project, titled The Celtic Languages and Cultural Identity: a Multidisciplinary Synthesis, seeks to give us a better-developed understanding of Celtic cultural identity or "Celticity."
The approach, as the title asserts, is multidisciplinary, a rare and wonderful thing in academic settings. By bringing together scholars from several usually single-focused academic disciplines (archaeology, linguistics, Celtic and IndoEuropean studies, folklore, literature, and other disciplines), it aims to reveal a more accurate portrait of "Celtic Identity" than the current "chronically vague and indefinable concept."
The study focuses on "the connections between the story of the Celtic languages and the cultural history of Europe" by "tracing the evidence of Celtic speech and the cultures of its speakers from the pre-Roman Iron Age to today."
"To a great extent, our understanding of the proper place and status of Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and Brittany -- as nations in Europe and as parts of the world -- will depend on the significance one attaches to 'Celticity'." (Project 5: The Celtic Languages and Cultural Identity: a Multidisciplinary Synthesis)
I've spent several years wading through books and classes and the webworld, trying to get a better picture, for myself, of all kinds of things, including Celtic Language and Culture. It's a daunting course of study, broad and encompassing, and knowing that a university has decided the topic needs a whole team of scholars working over a long period of time to put together such a picture helps me in several ways:
- First, it affirms my sense of how vast and demanding a topic this is.
- Second, it expresses what I have experienced: a concern about how difficult it is to move between the mists of Celtic myth and Celtic history and also about how to determine the credibility of any given source or any particular information, whether from
  - the writings of Hecataeus, a Greek geographer who wrote a two-volume piece, Periodos Ges ("Trip around the World")" in which he made the first written reference to a people he called the Keltoi in 517 BCE,
  - or the writings of Caesar (De Bello Gallico) as he was challenging and conquering the Celts a little over 2,000 years ago,
  - or the writings of the Irish monks who recorded some of the oral histories of the Celts about 1,000 years ago,
  - or the writings of Robert Graves in his influential The White Goddess (1946),
  - or the writings and teachings of Janet and Stewart Farrar or John and Caitlinn Mathews, not to mention the many other numerous writers and teachers from the 20th century neopagan movement,
  - or even the writings of someone like Peter Berresford Ellis (The Druids and other works), an acknowledged scholar in the field.
- Third, it also allows me to acknowledge that this study, for the purposes of this report, is incomplete and tentative in some of its particulars and to say that I think it's a good start and enough to fulfill my Cella activity, but that my studies and my reporting of them will continue to happen beyond my Cella years.

OVERVIEW

Of Celtic cultural identity, the scholar-researchers at The University of Wales (see the Intro, above) say:
"The customs, traditions, literature, social institutions, and material culture of Celtic-language speakers show enough commonality to allow us to postulate such an overarching identity, working from language at the base." (An Atlas for Celtic Studies)
So let's take a look at the roots of Celtic language to learn about the origins of the Celtic people and Celtic culture:
- The Celtic Language is a subgroup (or branch) of IndoEuropean, which is one of the major "language families" of our world. (A language family is a collection of languages that share common, though sometimes distant, origins).
- IndoEuropean is currently, in fact, "the single largest language family (with) about 150 languages and about three billion speakers. Languages include Hindi and Urdu (400 million), Bengali (200 million), Spanish (300 million), Portuguese (200 million), French (100 million), German (100 million), Russian (300 million), and English (400 million) in Europe and the Americas. With English, one can reach approximately one billion people in the world." (The Language Families of the World)
- Indo-European languages "are a family of kindred dialects spread over a large part of Europe, and of Asia as far as India."
- Subgroups of the IndoEuropean language family can be sorted into two groups:
  - The "centum-group" -- Western and entirely European:
    - Greek
    - Italic (including Latin and the Romance languages)
    - Celtic, including:
      - the Q-~Ce1tic languages, Irish, Manx and Scotch Gaelic,
      - the P-Celtic, including the language of ancient Gaul, Welsh, Cornish and Breton
    - Germanic or Teutonic languages, including:
      - Gothic
      - Scandinavian languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, all descended from Old Norse)
      - West Germanic, including English and Frisian
      - Low Frankish (from which modern Dutch and Flemish are descended)
      - Low and High German.
  - The "satem-group" -- Eastern (with one exception) and primarily Asian:
    - Indo-Iranian, including Sanskrit and its descendants (Zend and Old Persian, "from which is ultimately descended Modern Persian, largely modified, however, by Arabic words.")
    - Armenian, which is full of borrowed Iranian words and is probably "related to, or the descendant of, the ancient Phrygian, which spread into Asia from Thrace by the migration of tribes across the Hellespont."
    - Albanian (with many elements from Latin, Greek, Turkish and Slavonic).
    - Balto-Slavic
      - Baltic languages:
        
        Lithuanian
        
        Lettish
        
        Old Prussian (extinct)
      - Slavonic languages:
        
        an eastern and southern group, including:
        
        Old Bulgarian
        
        Russian (varieties: Great Russian, White Russian, Little Russian or Ruthenian)
        
        Servian
        
        Slovene
        
        a western group:
        
        Polish with minor dialects
        
        Czech or Bohemian
        
        Sorb
    Primary Source: Indo-European Languages
- Regarding Indo-European and the Indo-European protolanguage:

"Linguistics, the scientific study of language...developed from the study of the Indo-European superfamily of languages, by far the largest in number of languages and number of speakers. Nearly half of the world's population speaks an Indo-European language as a first language...."
"Over the past 200 years, linguists have reconstructed the vocabulary and syntax of the postulated IndoEuropean protolanguage with increasing confidence and insight. They have tried to unravel the paths by which the language broke into daughter languages that spread throughout Eurasia, seeking at the origin of those paths the homeland of the protolanguage itself."
Early linguists identified Europe as the homeland of the IndoEuropean protolanguage. "More recent evidence now places the probable origin of the Indo-European language in western Asia."
"The landscape described by the protolanguage as now resolved must lie somewhere in the crescent that curves around the southem shores of the Black Sea, south from the Balkan peninsula, east across ancient Anatolia (today the non-European territories of Turkey) and north to the Caucasus Mountains. Here the agricultural revolution created the food surplus that impelled the Indo-Europeans to found villages and city-states from which, about 6,000 years ago, they began their migrations over the Eurasian continent and into history."
"Some of the migrants invaded Anatolia from the East around 2000 (BCE) and established the Hittite kingdom, which held all of Anatolia in its power by 1400 (BCE). Its official language was among the first of the Indo-European languages to find its way into writing."
"The appearance of Hittite and other Anatolian languages at the tum of the third to the second millennium B.C. sets an absolute chronological limit for the breakup of the Indo-European protolanguage. Because the Anatolian protolanguage had already fissioned into daughter languages by that point, investigators estimate that it departed from the parent Indo-European no later than the fourth millennium (BCE) and possibly much earlier."
The Early History of Indo-European Languages

SPOKEN CELTIC LANGUAGES

Celtic languages can be divided geographically and chronologically into two branches:
- Continental Celtic, spoken by the ancient Celts of mainland continental Europe:
  - Gaulish, which was spoken in the are known today as France (dead)
- Insular Celtic (insular = of the islands), which is further split into the "more modern":
  - Goidelic (Q-Celtic) including Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic and Manx
  - Brythonic (P-Celtic) including Welsh, Breton, and Cornish
    "The differences between P and Q languages are most easily seen in the word for son, mac in Q (hard K sound) and map in P languages. P-languages have a slightly simpler structure and may be younger than the Q-languages." (Wikipedia)
  - Concerning these (insular) Celtic languages today:
    - Welsh -- There are approximately 700,000 Welsh speakers in Wales.
      - Also called Cymraeg. The language of Wales was the earliest of the Celtic Brythonic languages still in existence. It is quite strong as a native language. Learning Welsh is encouraged in schools, and new Welsh literature is being written. The Welsh Parliament met in 1999 for the first time in centuries, so Welsh nationalism is on the rise, and interest in the language is growing.
      - Welsh is notable for its frequent use of the letters y and w, which are considered vowels in the language. Welsh has circumflex accents on some of its vowels. There is mythic Welsh literature with traditions going back to the Dark Ages, and a Welsh Bible dating to 1588.
      - Over 500,000 people in Wales can speak Welsh, of which 32,700 know only Welsh. There are television broadcasts in the language. The Welsh-speaking colony in Patagonia, Argentina...keeps close cultural ties with Wales even today.
        Alternative Market Place
    - Irish Gaelic--"Taught today in Irish schools, Modern Irish is spoken as a native language mainly on the western and southern coasts of Ireland and in a few inland communities." (Celtic Languages)
      - Also called Gaeilge, Erse, or simply Irish.
      - Irish Gaelic developed over four historical periods: 1) age of ogham inscriptions, 300-500 A.D. 2) Old Irish period, 600-900 3) Middle Irish, 900-1200 and 4) Modern Irish, 1200 to present.
      - Irish and Scots Gaelic use the letters of the modern European alphabet, except for j,k,q,v,w,x,y,z. Irish Gaelic uses acute accent marks ('), but has no grave accents (`). In general, the sentences begin with the predicate (verb form), then the subject, object, and then extensions of the predicate. Irish Gaelic declines its nouns by case, and there are five cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and vocative (as opposed to the three cases of English nouns--nominative, objective, and possessive).
      - Gaelic is a compulsory subject in all Irish schools, so about a million people in Ireland have at least some knowledge of the language. About a 300,000 people in Ireland can read Gaelic, probably more than ever before. About 100,000 people use some Gaelic every day, and for fewer than 50,000 people, Gaelic is the mother tongue (though almost all of these have adequate command of English as well). Gaelic is one of the two official languages of Ireland, along with English, and knowledge of Gaelic is required for civil service employment and for other posts.
        Alternative Market Place
    - Scots Gaelic -- "Scots Gaelic, which diverged significantly from Irish by the 16th century, today has roughly 81,000 speakers, excluding many Gaelic speakers in Nova Scotia, living mainly in the Highlands and Western Islands of Scotland...." (Celtic Languages)
      - Also called Scottish Gaelic, or Gaidhlig. To some extent Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, and Manx are mutually intelligible. Still, Scots Gaelic is a separate language, and the differences between it and Irish Gaelic are like the differences between standard German and Swiss dialects. There are variances in Gaelic that are easy to notice. For example, whereas Irish Gaelic has no grave accents, Scots Gaelic does use them.
      - There are about 80,000 people in Scotland who can speak Scots Gaelic, mostly in the highlands and surrounding islands. The vast majority of these can also speak English, though there are about 477 people who can speak only
        Scots Gaelic. Literacy is high in Scots Gaelic, because most are Protestants who read their Bibles in their own vernacular language. Below is a sample of Scots Gaelic that these folks would be familiar with.
      - That Scotland has a Gaelic language, not a Briton-Celtic language, is due to historical circumstances. In the early 500s A.D. a tribe of Irish Celts called the Scotti colonized what became Scotland, the tribe giving the land its name. Also around 560, St. Columba and a large stream of Irish monks came from Ireland and began establishing monasteries all over Scotland. From these Irish settlers and monks, Gaelic took firm hold of the language of Celtic-speakers in Scotland, and has remained.
        Alternative Market Place
    - Breton -- Four main dialects of this Celtic language are still widely spoken in Brittany. It includes many words borrowed from French. (Celtic Languages)
      - Also called Brezhoneg or Bretagne. Breton and Cornish were in many ways mutually intelligible until the 15th century. Because the French do not keep secondary language statistics, it is hard to tell just how many people speak Breton. Some estimate that about 250,000 people in Brittany are now fluent in Breton, and that about one million people there have some knowledge of the language. Breton is notable for its frequent usage of the letter "z", and use of n-tildes.
      - Breton and the French province of Brittany got their names from circumstances in history. The province was colonized by Celtic peoples from Great Britain from the late 400s A.D. to the 7th century, such people who
        were fleeing the onslaught of Anglo-Saxon invaders in what is now England. The people of Brittany have since kept strong their Celtic traditions, and have maintained ancestral connections with Cornwall, across the English channel. This also serves to explain why Breton, while a Celtic language spoken on the European mainland, is an Insular Brythonic language, not a Gaulish Celtic language or Common Celtic.
        Alternative Market Place
    - Manx -- "Manx Gaelic passed into oblivion as a native spoken language on the 24 December 1974 with the death of Edward (`Ned') Maddrell, the last reputed native speaker of the language. With him an Indo-European language disappeared, the first this century, one branch less on the tree.
      Manx Gaelic died on the geographical and social peripheries of Manx society, unlamented save by the few of Yn Cheshaght Ghailckagh (`The Manx Language Society'). Their enthusiasm had resulted in a sound recording program of the last native speakers, the learning of the language itself from those same speakers, the teaching of Manx in evening classes, and a publication program of learner materials. (Neo-)Manx is now on the curriculum in primary and secondary schools." (Manx Gaelic)
      Manx (was) first written down early in the 17th century....Both Manx and Scottish Gaelic have absorbed many Norse loanwords. (Celtic Languages)
      - Also called Gaelgey.
      - This is the language of the Isle of Man, a crown dependency of the United Kingdom that strongly asserts its own autonomy. The Isle of Man has its own Parliament, laws, currency, and taxation. By the
        mid-20th century, the language of the Isle of Man had become extinct as a mother tongue, a native language taught to the children by their mothers and family. But there is now a revival of Manx and a large body of literature written in the language, including a Bible dating back to 1773.
      - Manx is the only of the three Gaelic languages to use the letter y, and along with Cornish, is one of the two Celtic languages to use the letter j. Manx is also the only Celtic language to use a c-cedilla, and to be written using non-Celtic phonetic rules (it largely uses the phonetic rules of English). Manx uses double vowels.
      - There are a lot of Scandinavian loan words in Manx. This dates back to the centuries before 1266 when the Vikings controlled the island. A society on the Isle of Man promotes the usage of Manx, and a Manx Gaelic Advisory Council arrives at opinions about its usage. There are about 300 people fluent in Manx, mainly who learned the language as adults and who use it as a second language.
        Alternative Market Place
    - Cornish -- Cornish was first recorded in the 10th-century Bodmin Gospels.
      - Also called Kernewek.
        This, the Celtic language of Cornwall, died out as a primary language in 1777, but is now in use again via a very active revival. While Cornish is no longer a mother-tongue, and its users are fluent in English, it is a lively second language. Cornish is notable for its frequent usage of the letter "k".
      - There are now about 150 people fluent in Cornish, and a few thousand have studied it and have some knowledge of the tongue. There are evening classes in Cornish, as well as correspondence courses, summer camps, and children's
        play groups in Cornish. A Cornish Language Board governs its usage. There is a broad amount of literature written in Cornish, including a Bible translation.
        Alternative Market Place
    - Both Manx and Cornish were "nearly extinct by the 20th century... Now both have hundreds of speakers, and there is also a wide literature in both languages. Cornish is the Celtic language of Cornwall, the southwest tip of England. Manx is the language of the Isle of Man, an island in the Irish Sea between Ireland and Great Britain. " (Celtic Languages)
Pronunciation Guide (the living Celtic languages)

WRITTEN CELTIC

The Celts were an oral tradition culture. Power was in the spoken word. Writing was restricted to writing on stone, the effort required for stone carving being a litmus test of the importance and/or value of capturing words in writing. All the writings about the Celts come from Greek and Roman writers and later, from the Catholic monks who wrote down latter-day versions of Celtic tales. Note that in all cases, the writings are by those outside of Celtic culture and, in most cases, by those who've conquered the Celts or converted and assimilated them into a new culture.
- "There is not much written Celtic material from the pre-Christian era, but what exists is almost always written in the Roman alphabet, Greek alphabet, or an Iberian script (which can resemble runes, but is actually quite different). Runes, on the other hand, is an alphabet developed by the Germanic tribes (Saxons and Scandinavians) and used for short inscriptions on twigs or carved in stone.
  ...A new alphabet developed in Ireland called Ogam. Unlike Runes, Ogam was used on stone grave monuments only. The difference between the two scripts is quite clear."
  Bad Celtic Page
- "Although the ancient Celts had no written language, the Insular Celts had a form of inscription writing called ogham (or ogum/ogam). It was a very cumbersome form and could only be used to express names or short phrases. The main ogham alphabet had about 18 letters which were represented by straight or diagonal lines drawn across a longer horizontal line. These ogham inscriptions go back to the 300s A.D. and were used for several centuries.
  Oghams were mostly an Irish Gaelic phenomena. Of the 375 known ogham inscriptions, 318 are in Ireland--the vast majority of them in the southern counties. There are forty ogham inscriptions in Wales, and other oghams in small numbers in Devon, Cornwall, and Silchester, all in southern England. In the Isle of Man there are oghams that combine Celtic language with Norse runes.
  In Scotland there are a number of oghams that are in Pictish, the language of the Picts. There is much controversy among scholars regarding the Picts, but for simplicity sake, many experts believe that the Picts were natives of Scotland, and developed a Celtic dialect later. Some contend that the pre-Celtic Picts spoke a language of their own that was not Indo-European.
  When St. Patrick (circa 435 A.D.) brought Christianity to Ireland, the newly converted Irish monks quickly figured out that they could apply the Latin alphabet and writing scheme to native Gaelic oral traditions. By the middle of the 500s, the memories of Irish bards were preserved in books, capturing Celtic myths for posterity. By the 8th century, the Irish monks had taught the Welsh and other Britons how to apply the new writing to their Celtic subject matter, resulting in a literature spanning from Taliesen to King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table."
  Alternative Market Place
an excellent overview of writing and alphabets

"g-o-d-d-e-s-s"
(from the Beth-Luis-Nion Truetype font of Curtis Clark)

Ogham

"Ogham inscriptions are not found outside the British Isles, and are predominantly found on carved ceremonial stones in west Wales and the southwest of Ireland. There are certain resemblances between Ogham and Runic alphabets, both having letters made with straight strokes branching out of a stem line. and both being divided up into groups or classes of letters." (The Fabrication of 'Celtic' Astrology)
Ogham is an alphabet. Alphabets form the material basis for written language. Alphabet systems arose independently (apparently) in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Modern alphabets are derived from proto-Sinaitic (proto-Canaanite), from the Afro-Asiatic Language Family), an alphabet system derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics.
- "Although the origins of the Ogham alphabet are disputed, it is clear that the graphically innovative system has its roots in already existing alphabets, probably the runes and/or the Etruscan and Latin alphabet.
  The similarities between Ogham and runes are...remarkable. Both systems are based on phonological and phonetic knowledge: in the case of Ogham, the vowels are in one row, dental /d, t/ and velar /k, k_w/ stops are all placed next to each other as well as fricatives /f, s/ and velar sounds /g, N/. It is also interesting to note that all Ogham letters, including the odd [st]-symbol (sometimes transcribed as <z>, DB 341), have Anglo Saxon runic counterparts. Of course, it is necessary to examine whether these letters are due to phonetics and/or phonology or rather to the model given by another alphabet (runic or Latin). Also, it is not clear how this symbol was actually pronounced.
  ...Ogham letters symbolized either Gaelic or Pictish phonemes. The alphabet was probably created around the 4th century BC. It can be found on rocks, stones and pottery in Wales and Ireland. According to Babaev, Old Irish ogam is not a Celtic word. Although Pictish is probably a non-Indo-European language, Celtophiles argue that due to the fact that there is no /p/ letter in Ogham Pictish itself must be a Celtic language. Babaev assumes that there was probably some Celtic influence on Pictish."
  (Spelling Systems)
- Oghma or Ogma is a Celtic god who represents power as wisdom and the ability to use words to shape manifest reality -- the power of persuasion -- the Celtic esthetic known to us because of the history of bards and druids.
- "Another son of Brigit's was Ogma, master of poetry and inventor of ogham writing, the word being derived from his name.' It is more probable that Ogma's name is a derivative from some word signifying "speech" or "writing," and that the connection with "ogham" may be a mere folk-etymology. Ogma appears as the champion of the gods,' a position given him perhaps from the primitive custom of rousing the warrior's emotions by eloquent speeches before a battle.
  Ogma's high position is the result of the admiration of bardic eloquence among the Celts, whose loquacity was proverbial, and to him its origin was doubtless ascribed, as well as that of poetry.
  Most usually Ogma is called Brigit's son. Her functions were like his own, but in spite of the increasing supremacy of gods over goddesses, he really never eclipsed her."
  The use and power of the ogham is evidenced by "..the binding force of the magic ogham symbols as used by Cú Chulainn in Táin Bó Cuailnge to stay the advance of the Connacht army"
  (Ogmios-Oghma)
- It is speculated that the Ogham inscriptions on stones are tribal boundary markers or dolmen dedications.
- "Carved on stones by Celts in Britain and Eire; representation of an older alphabet consisting of plant names." (Truetype Fonts by Curtis Clark)
- Each ..." represents a phonetic value as well as a certain tree, for this reason it is commonly referred to as the alphabet of the trees." (The Celtic Ogham)
- A compelling explanation of the origins of the Celtic Ogham
- Ogham is "...an alphabet found on a number of Irish and Pictish carvings dated from the 4th century AD. The characters touch or cross the edges of the stone." (Ogham Fonts)
- Ogham chart
- "Oghams were used to write very old Irish, from 3rd to 6th century of our era. Ogham inscriptions are found exclusively in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Mostly they are horribly boring inscriptions in the form of 'X son of Y'on corners of large stone slabs." (Ogham, Ancient Scripts)

CELTIC ART

I include Celtic art as a category of the language page, because I did the same with Minoan art. However, this page is too long already. To read about Celtic art, go here.