Brittonic languages

“ A linguistic invasion such as that of English by Old French is almost unparalleled. We have instances of the expulsion of one tongue by another, e.g., of the Celtic dialects of Gaul by Latin and of those of Britain by Anglo-Saxon. But a real blending of two languages can only occur when a large section of the population is bilingual for centuries. ”

“ Latin and Celtic, further, show intimate relations in having in common an î in the gen. sing, of the o- declension (originally a locative) , -tion- verbal nouns, a future in b, and the passive in -r.
The Celtic group now comprises five living languages; in. the 18th century there were six, when Cornish still lived. These six Celtic languages are grouped again into two branches, which may be named the Brittonic and the Gadelic. The former includes the Welsh, Cornish, and Breton; the Gadelic comprises Irish, Manx, and (Scottish) Gaelic. ”

“ But this Celtic civilization was not one and undivided. In late prehistoric times it evolved from one mother tongue two dialects which afterward displayed all the differences of separate languages springing from a common stock. These are the Goidelic, the tongue spoken by the Celts of Scotland, Ireland, and the Isle of Man, and the Brythonic, the language of the Welsh, the Cornish, and the people of Brittany. ”

“ There is no point on which so much misconception exists as that of the precise amount of divergence between two languages necessary to prevent those speaking them from understanding each other. It is frequently asserted that a Welshman can understand an Irishman, and conversely; and it is invariably assumed that the three dialects of British—the Welsh, Cornish, and Breton—are mutually intelligible. ”

“ In this way, Spain, Portugal, France, and Belgium now talk languages that have grown from the Latin, the language of Rome. The Celts in the British Isles now all talk English, because the English, who were a Germanic people, conquered them and forced them to use their language. Patriotic Irishmen and Welshmen (who are descendants of the Celtic tribes) are trying to keep alive the Irish and Welsh languages, but all of the young people in the British Isles learn English, and they are generally content to talk only one language. ”

“ In some cases a common origin has been proved for the widely dissimilar languages of different nations; in others, the influence of one people upon its less civilised neighbors is clearly shown. If, on the other hand, we confine our inquiries to our own language, the historical associations which it presents are no less interesting. The successive races which predominated in the early days of the history of Great Britain, have each left its impress upon our language, in which Celtic, Latin, Saxon, Danish, and Norman elements are strangely intermingled. ”

“ In this case, out of 122 words we find no less than 46 are of foreign origin. Though this large proportion sufficiently shows the amount of our indebtedness to the classical languages for our abstract or specialised scientific terms, the absolutely indisputable nature of the English substratum remains clearly evident. The tongue which we use to-day is enriched by valuable loan words from many separate sources; but it is still as it has always been, English and nothing else. It is the self-same speech with the tongue of the Sleswick pirates and the West Saxon over-lords. ”

“ As a matter of fact, languages often preserve their existence, and even their territory, with surprising tenacity in the face of conquest, new religions and culture, and the economic disadvantages of unintelligibility. To-day, Breton, a Keltic dialect, maintains itself in France as the every-day language of the people in the isolated province of Brittany—a sort of philological fossil. It has withstood the influence of two thousand years of contact, first with Latin, then with Frankish German, at last with French. ”

“ But so far as European languages go, the Englishman, in more or less constant and intimate relation with each of the peoples of Europe, has been so well satisfied of his own superiority to each that it has seemed vastly more fitting that they should learn his language than that he should trouble to learn theirs. Under any circumstances, is it not obviously easier for each one of the European peoples to learn to talk English than for the Englishman to learn eight European tongues with eighty miscellaneous dialects? ”

“ If it's a matter of not dumbing down, why do we not include all the languages of the world here? There is a collection of Anglo-Saxon literature, that the Cambridge Bibliography of English literature spends all of 43 pages on; it's a tiny corpus compared to Middle English or any language that has a Wikisource. The literature of England includes all the works of the Cornish language, as well as a huge volume of Latin and French literature. Anglo-Saxon is not a part of the English language, emphasis on the singularity of the word language. ”

“ When this is not done, the old language, slowly dying out,—if, indeed, it dies at all,—has time to convey the national traditions into the new language, thus perpetuating the enmities that keep the two nations asunder. We see this illustrated in the Irish language, which, with all the ideas and feelings of which that language is the representative and the vehicle, has been permitted by the English government to die a lingering death of seven or eight centuries. The coexistence of two languages in a state is one of the greatest misfortunes that can befall it. ”

“ But for a certain utterance to be given by Comparative Philology on the question of the origin of language it is necessary that not merely for these languages but also for those in other quarters of the globe, the facts should be collected, sifted and tabulated. England rules an empire which contains a greater variety of languages by far than were ever held under one sway before. ”

“ The vocabulary, then, which has to be used for the interpretation of the British place-names of the Roman period, is not that of modern or even of early Welsh, but is a vocabulary reconstructed by means of a comparative study of the Celtic languages. It would, of course, be absurd to suppose that the whole of the language of early Britain can be recovered by the inferential methods that I have described. In all probability the ancient language contained many words that have been lost both in Welsh and Irish ”

“ It is but the transient reaction against the Empire of the first Napoleon, based on the false belief that language and race are convertible terms. But the endeavour, however flattering to nations without a history, is doomed to failure. Little by little the weaker languages and dialects of Europe are disappearing before the schoolmaster and the railway, and artificial nurture [212] can alone protract their lingering existence. Gaelic and Welsh in our own islands, like Breton in France or Lithuanian in Germany and Russia, must share the fate which has already overtaken Cornish and Wendic. ”

“ Some people think that it is a pity that we have borrowed so many words, and say that we should speak and write "pure English." But we must remember that Britain has had the most wonderful history of all the nations. She has had the greatest explorers, adventurers, and sailors. She has built up the greatest empire the world has ever seen. It is only natural that her language should have borrowed from the languages of nearly every nation in the world, even from the Chinese and from the native languages of Australia and Africa. ”

“ The knowledge of a foreign tongue may also be imparted by writing, as when we learn classical Latin 382 and Greek; but in this case, the influence exerted by the foreign tongue is felt only by the better educated classes of society.
In all cases where nations have been brought into contact, and have been mixed on a large scale, bilingualism is common. It is natural to expect that, of the two languages employed, that of the more prominent nation will gain a preponderance over the other, whether its prominence be due to its power, or industrial or intellectual capacity. ”

“ It seems probable that the languages of Europe are largely due to the grafting of Alpine or Eurasian tongues upon the different tongues already spoken by Mediterranean man. We have still in Britain a Celtic language, though it is spoken by people of Mediterranean characters, and it is an extraordinary fact that a people should impose its language and culture upon another race, and yet be itself unable to keep its footing among that race. ”

“ Finally, it is the ax which is laid at the root of a delicate sense of language in our mother tongue, which thereby is incurably injured and destroyed. The two nations which have produced the greatest stylists, the Greeks and the French, learned no foreign languages; but as human intercourse grows more cosmopolitan, and as, for instance, a good merchant in London must now be able to read and write eight languages, the learning of many tongues has certainly become a necessary evil ”

“ The acquisition of any one of that great family of languages, all derived, more or less remotely, from the Latin, which extends over the whole south and west of Europe, cannot fail to cast a strong light upon the other cognate dialects; as the knowledge of any one of the Oriental tongues facilitates, nay almost confers, a mastery over the thousand others, which are less languages of distinct type than dialects of the same speech, offshoots from the same stock. ”

“ And this wider divergence between the order of languages spoken in Northern Europe and the order of languages spoken in Southern Europe, answers to the longer time that has elapsed since their differentiation commenced. Further, these two orders of modern European languages, as well as Latin and Greek and certain extinct and spoken languages of the East, are shown to have traits in common which unite them into one great class known as Aryan languages; radically distinguished from the classes of languages spoken by the other main divisions of the human race. ”

“ There must be a series of words in the languages compared of the same or similar meanings, but whose forms have been altered by the phonetic laws peculiar to the group, for such lists of words to merit the attention of a scientific linguist.
The question how far languages can be accepted as indicating the relationships of peoples has been a bone of contention. One principle we may lay down, with unimportant exceptions—No nation has ever willingly adopted a foreign tongue. ”

“ Yet many of the profoundest linguists of this century have maintained that a fully inflected language, like the Greek or Latin, is for that very reason ahead of all others. We may suspect that when a writer lauds his native tongue at the expense of others, he is influenced by a prejudice in its favor and an absence of facility in the others.
Those best acquainted with American tongues praise them most highly for flexibility, accuracy, and resources of expression. They place some of them above any Aryan [15] language. ”

“ It has been said that the ancient Britons were such firm believers in a future state, that they would even lend each other money, to be repaid in the spiritual world. Their language was a dialect of the Gaelic—the language spoken in more ancient times over the greater portion of Western Europe. ”

“ It is not only that official prose was always either Latin or, like Britton’s Epitome of English Law, French. Englishmen habitually wrote their letters in French. If a body of tradesmen or craftsmen met together to draw up the rules of their guild, such rules would be in French rather than English. An official proclamation addressed even to humble people is always in French, if it is not in Latin; it seems to be assumed that, if a man can read or write at all, he can of course read French. ”

“ Thus, for example, Italy affords no linguistic contrast so violent as that presented by Great Britain with its English dialects alongside of the Celtic dialects of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, or by France with the French dialects alongside of the Celtic dialects of Brittany, not to speak of the Basque of the Pyrenees and other heterogeneous elements. ”

“ Welsh and Erse may be very long in dying out, as we hope they will be; yet nothing can prevent the people of Wales and Ireland becoming bi-lingual, and this can only have one ultimate result. Commercially, a single language is necessary to the nation, and there has never been any doubt as to which that language must be. And some of those who cling to their vernacular as a proof of their Celticism may be making a great mistake; speech is never a proof of race, and survivals of other blood than Celtic adopted dialects of the Celtic speech. ”

“ In the like sort, if we turn to our own country, whenever within the bounds of Great Britain we find any tongue spoken other than English, we at once ask the reason and we learn the special historic cause. In a part of France and a part of Great Britain we find tongues spoken which differ alike from English and from French, but which are strongly akin to one another. We find that these are the survivals of a group of tongues once common to Gaul and Britain, but which the settlement of other nations, the introduction and the growth of other tongues, have brought down to the level of survivals. ”

“ And where Britannia's banner waves, and her laws are paramount, and the honest, kindly Anglo-Saxon tongue is the language of the land, there surely needs no great effort of imagination for a Briton to think himself still at home, though a thousand leagues of ocean roll between him and his native isle. ”