Celtic languages

“ Of the extent of the changes which the Celtic languages have undergone since the first arrival of the Celts in Europe, we possess proofs of far more ancient date than the earliest literary specimens of the living dialects of the Celtic in the Local names of Celtic regions, as preserved in Roman Maps, and in the existing languages of the French, English, and other nations, who occupy countries of which the Celts were the first inhabitants. ”

“ The cleavage between the dialects of the “Q” Celts and the “P” Celts was probably less marked two thousand years ago than at present, since in their modern form they are both Neo-Celtic languages. What vestiges of Celtic languages remain in France belong to Brythonic. Celtic was not generally spoken in Aquitaine in Cæsar’s time.
When the two Celtic-speaking races came into conflict in Britain their original relationship had been greatly obscured by the crossing of the Goidels with the underlying dark Mediterranean race of Neolithic culture and by the mixture of the Belgæ with Teutonic tribes. ”

“ He further suggested that these alien invaders were the Alpine inhabitants of the Swiss lake-dwellings. [466]
This paper was received with hostile criticism and derision, especially by some German students of Celtic tongues. [467] It had little better reception in France, and the British and Irish Celtic scholars, with a few exceptions, treated the idea with contempt. The theory has never received the consideration and fair criticism which a paper from so eminent an authority on Celtic languages deserved.
The main facts as to the Celtic and Italic dialects are not in dispute. ”

“ It has for some years been recognised, at least by several English scholars, that there is a remarkable similarity between the Celtic languages and Latin. In the case of Welsh it was, I believe, at first supposed that the words must have been introduced by the Roman dominion in Britain; but when the likeness was found to exist in the Erse, and that the Erse was even more like to Latin (as regards the consonants) than the Welsh is, this idea of course fell to {358}the ground. ”

“ Neither the Irish nor the Welsh, nor a combination of all the Celtic dialects, will be found to afford a complete solution of the Topographical nomenclature of the ancient Celtic regions of Europe. Names undoubtedly occur in these countries which have been preserved in none of the Celtic tongues, names which I shall indisputably show to be positive transcripts, in many instances, of appropriate terms occurring in the Hebrew and other languages, with which, in other parts of this work, the original Celtic dialects will be proved to have been originally identical. ”

“ The peoples that have longest preserved dialects of the Celtic languages appear from anthropometric researches to contain a dominant strain of a different race, perhaps that of the pre-Indo-European inhabitants of Western Europe. It may be, therefore, that what Arnoldians now refer to the "Celts" is after all not Celtic. At best it is unsafe to search for racial traits in the work of genius ”

“ 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. ”

“ THE PROBLEM FOR the last fifteen hundred years the Celtic tongues have been spoken only in the extreme north-west of Europe, in parts of Ireland, the west of Scotland, and the Isle of Man, in Wales, Cornwall and Brittany, and for some little time these languages have ceased to be spoken in Cornwall and the Isle of Man. ”

“ CELTIC ETYMOLOGY. (Vol. ix., p. 136.)
Mr. Crossley seems to confine the word Celtic to the Irish branch of that dialect. My notion of the words iosal and iriosal is taken from the Highland Gaelic, and the authorised version of the Bible in that language. Let Celtic scholars who look to the sense of words in the four spoken languages, decide between us. There can be no doubt of the meaning of the two words in the Gaelic of Job v. 11. and Ps. iv. 6. In Welsh, and (I believe) in bas-Breton, there is no word similar to uim or umhal, in the senses of humus and humilis, to be found. ”

“ Suffice it to say, that philologists have come to class the Gaelic with the other Celtic tongues among the great family of Aryan languages, having affinities, some closer, some more distant, with almost all the languages of Europe. It is of much interest to scholars in respect both of the time and the place which it has filled, and fills still, and it is gratifying to all Scottish Celts to know that it has become more than ever a subject of study among literary men. ”

“ The researches of the ethnologist carry us back somewhat beyond that epoch, and confirm many of those conclusions, especially in relation to the close affinity between the native arts and Celtic races of Scotland and Ireland, at which we have arrived by means of archæological evidence. Of the six Celtic dialects known, either as living languages or preserved in books, the Irish and the Scottish Gaelic most nearly approximate, the former being to a great extent only a cultivated and more artificial modification of the other. ”

“ Modern philologists discover a clear affinity between the Celtic dialects and the languages known by the general title of Indo-European, affording confirmation of that eastern origin assigned to them, both by tradition and history, but which is no less true of the newer races which supplanted them. ”

“ Gebelin, who has, with great industry, investigated the origin of the European languages, is of opinion that the Celtic was spoken from the borders of the Hellespont to the ocean, and from Troy to Cape Finisterre and Ireland. "La langue Celtique, dans son sens le plus extendu, est la langue que parlerent les premiers habitans de l'Europe, depuis les rives de l'Hellespont & de la Mer Egée, jusques a celle de l'Ocean; depuis le cap Sigée aux portes de Troie, jusques au cap de Finisterre en Portugal, ou jusques en Irelande."——Dis. Prelim. art. ”

“ It is thus from Anglo-Saxon, and not from Gaelic or Cymric, that the language we speak to-day comes.
Yet our Celtic forefathers have given something to our literature which perhaps we could never have had from English alone. The Celtic literature is full of wonder, it is full of a tender magic and makes us feel the fairy charm of nature, although it has not the strength, the downrightness, we might say, of the English. It has been said that every poet has somewhere in him a Celtic strain. ”

“ I, on certain terms, wish to make a great deal more of it than is made now; and I regard the Welsh literature,—or rather, dropping the distinction between Welsh and Irish, Gaels and Cymris, let me say Celtic literature,—as an object of very great interest. My brother Saxons have, as is well known, a terrible way with them of wanting to improve everything but themselves off the face of the earth; I have no such passion for finding nothing but myself everywhere; I like variety to exist and to show itself to me, and I would not for the world have the lineaments of the Celtic genius lost. ”

“ Celtic tradition is not only rich and varied beyond all others in this respect, it often thus secures its chief artistic effects. The talismans of Celtic romance, the fairy branch of Cormac, the Ga-bulg of Cuchullain, the sounding-hammer of Fionn, the treasures of the Boar Trwyth after which Prince Kilhwch sought, the glaives of light of the living folk-tale, have one and all a weird, fantastic, half-human existence, which haunts and thrills the imagination. ”

“ It seems incredible that the bulk of the population should have been of Celtic blood and yet that the Celtic language should not merely have disappeared, but have stamped few traces of itself upon the speech of the conquerors. ”

“ Few of us have any notion what a mass of Celtic literature is really yet extant and accessible. One constantly finds even very accomplished people, who fancy that the remains of Welsh and Irish literature are as inconsiderable by their volume, as, in their opinion, they are by their intrinsic merit; that these remains consist of a few prose stories, in great part borrowed from the literature of nations more civilised than the Welsh or Irish nation, and of some unintelligible poetry. ”

“ What the French call the science des origines, the science of origins,—a science which is at the bottom of all real knowledge of the actual world, and which is every day growing in interest and importance—is very incomplete without a thorough critical account of the Celts, and their genius, language, and literature. This science has still great progress to make, but its progress, made even within the recollection of those of us who are in middle life, has already affected our common notions about the Celtic race ”

“ This brings us to say a word on the kindred theme of the religious sentiment of the Celtic race, their inborn reverential feeling, one of their most prominent and honourable characteristics. Like the romantic sentiment we have just been considering, which has drawn the Celtic mind toward the mystery of Nature, it is a plant rooted and grounded in the same soil, nurtured by the dews of the same Idealism. ”

“ It is because the Celtic tongues, whether qu or p, are spoken chiefly by people of this small brunette type, that it is frequently called the Celtic race, and yet all the evidence of ancient authorities goes to show that 2,000 or 2,500 years ago the Celts were looked upon as a tall, fair people. ”

“ We must now take up again the tale of the bronze-using Q-speaking Celts, the story of fresh Gaelic movements, but this time a story of flight rather than of invasion. This was not a question only of Gaelic lords, for the Alpine peasants, who doubtless spoke a Celtic dialect and called themselves Celts, were also involved in this ruin. They fled by divers routes to the north and the west. ”

“ Ah, those old, drystone walls dividing the fields—pale and granite-blenched! Ah, the dark, sombre grass, the naked sky! the forlorn horses in the wintry morning! Strange is a Celtic landscape, far more moving, disturbing than the lovely glamor of Italy and Greece. Before the curtains of history lifted, one feels the world was like this—this Celtic bareness and sombreness and air. But perhaps it is not Celtic at all: Iberian. Nothing is more unsatisfactory than our conception of what is Celtic and what is not Celtic. ”

“ If it is desirable that the Welsh should talk English, it is monstrous folly to encourage them in a loving fondness for their old language. Not only the energy and power, but the intelligence and music of Europe have come mainly from Teutonic sources, and this glorification of everything Celtic, if it were not pedantry, would be sheer ignorance. ”

“ But, at any rate, let us consider that of the shrunken and diminished remains of this great primitive race, all, with one insignificant exception, belongs to the English empire; only Brittany is not ours; we have Ireland, the Scotch Highlands, Wales, the Isle of Man, Cornwall. They are a part of ourselves, we are deeply interested in knowing them, they are deeply interested in being known by us; and yet in the great and rich universities of this great and rich country there is no chair of Celtic, there is no study or teaching of Celtic matters; those who want them must go abroad for them. ”

“ There has never been a homogeneous, independent, and cultivated Celtic state, capable of protecting its idiom from the encroachment of other tongues; and only such protection, now unattainable, can, as it seems, save Celtic speech from utter extinction. ”

“ By what criterion do we recognise any ancient population to have been Celts? The answer is undoubted—every ancient people that is known to have spoken any Celtic language is said to be a Celtic people. The term Celtic is indicative of language, not of race. We give the name Celts to the Irish and the Britons because we know that the ancient language of each people is a Celtic language.
A certain amount of enthusiasm, culminating in what is called Pan-Celticism, has gathered around the recognition of this fact that the Irish, the Gaels of Scotland, the Welsh and the Bretons are Celtic peoples. ”

“ It is important, therefore, if we are to have before us all the factors which enter into the problem, that we should inquire what people were here before the first Celts arrived, and that we should make ourselves to some extent familiar with all the different races and cultures which preceded the Celtic invaders. ”

“ If, therefore, we transfer the term Celtic to people, we can, if we use our words accurately, mean nothing but people who speak a Celtic language, the true exponent, aye, the very life of Celtic nationality. Whatever people, whether Romans, or Saxons, or Normans, or, as some think, even Phœnicians and Jews, settled in Cornwall, if they ceased to speak their own language and exchanged it for Cornish, they are, before the tribunal of the science of language, Celts, and nothing but Celts ”

“ The Celtic race, as we know, occupies the outlying promontories of Western Europe, having been pushed in the pressure of the ages into remote fastnesses and picturesque, but shadowy, glens overlooking the western main. Brittany, Ireland, Wales, and our Western Highlands stand out as the fortresses of the Gael, the bluffs and promontories to which the Celtic speech has now retired. But although the Celtic-speaking population is thus squeezed into a corner, the Celtic element in Europe is of much wider extension, and is not limited to the Celtic-speaking area. ”