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The Proto-Celtic language, also called Common Celtic, is the putative ancestor of all the known Celtic languages. Probably spoken around 800 BC, its lexis can be confidently reconstructed on the basis of the comparative method of historical linguistics. Proto-Celtic is a direct daughter-language of Proto-Indo-European and is widely regarded as the first of the Indo-European languages to spread in North-Western and Atlantic Europe. The area in which the language seems to have first become distinguishably Proto-Celtic, as opposed to earlier Centum dialect, corresponds to the Hallstatt culture, on the western fringes of the Urnfield. From roughly 800 BC, this culture by influence of "Thraco-Cimmerian" elements introduced the Iron Age to Europe. The contemporary Cimmerians were variously claimed as ancestors of the Cimbri, Sugambri and Cymru, although other etymologies better explain the latter term (see also British Israelism). The reconstruction of Proto-Celtic is currently being undertaken. While Continental Celtic presents much substantiation for phonology, and some for morphology, recorded material is largely still too scanty to allow a secure reconstruction of syntax. Although some complete sentences are recorded in Gaulish and Celtiberian, the oldest substantial Celtic literature is found in Old Irish, the earliest recorded of the Insular Celtic languages.
Consonants The phonological changes from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Celtic consonants may be summarised as follows. (An asterisk * prior to a letter or word designates that the phoneme or lexeme is not attested but is a hypothetical, reconstructed form.) In contrast to the parent language, Proto-Celtic does not use aspiration as a feature for distinguishing phonemes. So the Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops Proto-Indo-European In Gaulish and the Brythonic languages, a new The terms P-Celtic and Q-Celtic are useful when we wish to group the Celtic languages according to the way they handle this one phoneme. However a simple division into P- and Q-Celtic may be untenable, as it does not do justice to the evidence of the ancient Continental Celtic languages. The large number of unusual shared innovations among the Insular Celtic languages are often also presented as evidence against a P-Celtic vs Q-Celtic division, but they may instead reflect a common substratum influence from the pre-Celtic languages of the British Isles *, in which case they would be irrelevant to Celtic language classification. Q-Celtic languages may also have /p/ in loan words, though in some early borrowings from Welsh into Irish /k/ was used by sound substitution, as in Gaelic Cothrige, an early form of "Padraig". Gaelic póg "kiss" was a later borrowing (from the second word of the Latin phrase osculum pacis "kiss of peace") at a stage where p was borrowed directly as p, without substituting c. Vowels The Proto-Celtic vowel system is highly comparable to that reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European by Antoine Meillet. Dissimilarities include the incidence of Celtic The vowel Transition to Welsh The regular consonantal sound changes from Proto-Celtic to the Welsh language may be summarised in the following table. Where the Welsh graphemes have a different value from the corresponding IPA symbols, the IPA equivalent is indicated between solidi. V represents a vowel; C represents a consonant. Morphology The morphology (structure) of nouns and adjectives demonstrates no arresting alterations from the parent language. The Insular Celtic verb, on the other hand, shows a peculiar feature unknown in any other attested Indo-European language: verbs have different conjugational forms depending on whether they appear in absolute initial position in the sentence (Insular Celtic having Verb Subject Object or VSO word order) or whether they are preceded by a preverbal particle. The situation is most robustly attested in Old Irish, but it has remained to some extent in Scottish Gaelic and traces of it are present in Middle Welsh as well. Forms that appear in sentence-initial position are called absolute, those that appear after a particle are called conjunct. The paradigm of the present active indicative of the Old Irish verb beirid "carry" is as follows; the conjunct forms are illustrated with the particle ní "not". In Scottish Gaelic this distinction is still found in the future tense: 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 from Proto-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 absolute beirid "s/he carries" was thought to be from 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: an enclitic particle, reconstructed as The identity of the Continental Celtic languages cannot be shown to have any absolute/conjunct distinction. However, they seem to show only SVO and SOV 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. See also | ||||||||
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