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Thread: What influence did the Celtic languages have on English?

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    Elephant CRSP's avatar
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    Default What influence did the Celtic languages have on English?

    What influence did the Celtic languages, present in the British isles, have on the formation of English? As far as I can see, there seems to be no clear example of a major Celtic influence, other than a few loan words. Rather, there's many suspected instances of Celtic influence (c.f. the Northern subject rule), although even these seem to be hotly disputed.

    Why is the Celtic influence so small, seeing as some places in England were still speaking Celtic languages until very late, and two of England's bordering nations have native Celtic languages which survive to this day?
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    Default Re: What influence did the Celtic languages have on English?

    There are other things that at least some people suspect to be Celtic imports. One is the fact that in English we use the progressive aspect when most languages don't -- that is, for instance, I am reading a book instead of I read a book, which is how it goes in English's closest relatives. Same goes for the use of do in negatives and questions; this is not something familiar in any of the foreign languages we study nowadays, and in fact it's a pretty weird kind of phenomenon. Again, it has a close parallel in the Celtic languages. The evidence is just circumstantial here -- it just happens to me that English shares a couple unusual grammatical phenomena with the Celtic languages that are not present in the rest of the Germanic languages; this could be all coincidence, or it could be the result of contact.

    It is pretty weird, as you say, that there aren't that many words in English of Celtic origin (at least not when you compare them with other situations of close, long-term language contact), and most of those are quite recent. I don't know what the explanation is for that. I don't really know much about the circumstances of English's contact with the Celtic languages.

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    Default Re: What influence did the Celtic languages have on English?

    The relatively few Celtic words that moved into English are mostly place names, or geographic features.

    Crag, tor, combe(Wycombe) are examples. Avon means river.

    But Celtic influence survives in poetry and other forms of linguistic expression. Many of the greatest poets and actors are of Welsh or Irish heritage.

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    Default Re: What influence did the Celtic languages have on English?

    Does anyone know what the native Briton population was before the Anglo-Saxons arrived? And what it was around 300 years later? Did the geramnic tribes come over in such numbers that they were able to overwhelm the Brits and absorb them into their population. We know many fled to the ends of the island - Wales, Scotland, Cornwall? Seems like in the historical fiction novels (Sarum, London, etc.) I've read, native Britons in England were uncommon.

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    Head Heathen Katriona's avatar
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    Default Re: What influence did the Celtic languages have on English?

    I have the vaguest memory of reading somewhere that some syntax that reamins (mostly in the US South) came from some of the Scots that came over after the '45.

    The examples I remember are phrases like "of a weekend" (as in, "I like to be outdoors of a weekend," rather than "I like to be outdoors on weekends."), and the a', like, "I'm a'coming!"

    I just can't remember where I read/heard it.

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    Default Re: What influence did the Celtic languages have on English?

    Remember that the British Celtic languages, which place-name evidence tells us were spoken over the whole of what is now England, are poorly attested before the late Middle Ages. We have modern Welsh and Breton now, quite a lot of Cornish, and a little Pictish (and "Cumbrian"), but for ancient Britain we have a few place-names in Roman disguise.

    There are probably some other Celtic loan-words in English, unrecognized in part because most of the people etymologizing English are good at Old English, Old Norse, Old High German, Latin, Greek, French, modern German, and possibly Old Irish, but not so hot on Gaulish, Old Welsh, or Old Cornish, languages which might be more useful to help spot Celtic loans. This was especially true in generations past, and Gaulish in particular was poorly known then anyway. [Not that Gaulish is ancestral to anything spoken in Britain, just it helps if you know a variety of ancient Celtic languages.] If you look up "bug" or "hog," most sources do not cite these as Celtic words, but they probably are.

    For "bug," part of the problem is that the attestations in English are older than the attestations in Celtic, which makes a Celtic > English borrowing difficult to prove. Another problem is that English "bug" clearly WAS borrowed back into Welsh, obsuring the traces even further. "Hog" is probably cognate with Welsh "hwch," Cornish "hoc'h," but it cannot have been borrowed from either of those two languages. So we're left with postulating that English borrowed the word from some unknown Celtic language that was cognate but died out, and again, where does that get you?

    Most of the Celtic borrowings in English are probably at this level: unproven, and backed up by sketchy evidence if anything. So authorities quite resonably prefer to list them as "etymology unknown" or "possibly Celtic," but then more popular souces state definitively that there are almost no Celtic words. To my certain knowledge, there has been no attempt to take those English words without Germanic cognates and classify them with regards to Celtic. Such a study would be interesting and, I think, illuminating, but none of the Celticists I know care much about English, and who else would do it?

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    Default Re: What influence did the Celtic languages have on English?

    Quote Originally posted by Katriona
    I have the vaguest memory of reading somewhere that some syntax that reamins (mostly in the US South) came from some of the Scots that came over after the '45.

    The examples I remember are phrases like "of a weekend" (as in, "I like to be outdoors of a weekend," rather than "I like to be outdoors on weekends."), and the a', like, "I'm a'coming!"

    I just can't remember where I read/heard it.
    In "I'm a-coming," the "a-" is what's left of Old English ge-, just like German ge- in verbs. Nothing Celtic about it. "Of a weekend," similarly, seems odd as a Celtic construct. In Welsh, you wouldn't use a preposition in such a construction, you'd just mutate the adverb. I'm not sure how it works in Gaelic, but a quick check of feasgar ("afternoon") in dictionaries shows that no preposition is used in the equivalent of "of an afternoon."

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    Default Re: What influence did the Celtic languages have on English?

    Quote Originally posted by Excalibre
    There are other things that at least some people suspect to be Celtic imports. One is the fact that in English we use the progressive aspect when most languages don't -- that is, for instance, I am reading a book instead of I read a book, which is how it goes in English's closest relatives. Same goes for the use of do in negatives and questions; this is not something familiar in any of the foreign languages we study nowadays, and in fact it's a pretty weird kind of phenomenon. Again, it has a close parallel in the Celtic languages. The evidence is just circumstantial here -- it just happens to me that English shares a couple unusual grammatical phenomena with the Celtic languages that are not present in the rest of the Germanic languages; this could be all coincidence, or it could be the result of contact.

    It is pretty weird, as you say, that there aren't that many words in English of Celtic origin (at least not when you compare them with other situations of close, long-term language contact), and most of those are quite recent. I don't know what the explanation is for that. I don't really know much about the circumstances of English's contact with the Celtic languages.
    I recently heard an interview with a Linguist who has written a book about this. I can't for the life of me remember the name of the book or the author, but I remember being sure that he's one of the regular posters at Language Log.

    His idea is that we should think of English as being, in part, the result of native Celtic speakers learning to speak Old English. He conjectures that as they did so, the imported Celtic grammatical forms into the language they came to speak. (I know I certainly have sometimes imported English grammatical forms into German utterances in which they do not belong on the occasions in which I have attempted to produce novel German sentences.)

    He thinks this was part of the move from Old to Middle English. It's not a well documented process because the written records during this period were all in (IIRC) Latin and then French. Once records started being kept in English, the change had already been solidified. During the interim, no one had been interested in noting the way these silly Celtic people were screwing up their attempts to speak the language, and then later, no one thought it notable because it was now a perfectly normative part of the language.
    I am Frylock at the SDMB.

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    Default Re: What influence did the Celtic languages have on English?

    (BTW is this thread in the right forum?)
    I am Frylock at the SDMB.

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    Default Re: What influence did the Celtic languages have on English?

    I'm betting you're talking about John McWhorter, who is a pretty famous creolist (I wrote a term paper addressing one of his claims once!) He's not a regular Language Log contributor, but he has posted there in the past, and a quick look reveals that he posted at least one post there linking Celtic and English grammar. It's quite possible that his posts are where I first heard this claim.

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    Default Re: What influence did the Celtic languages have on English?

    That's the one. And the book is Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.

    And oo! There's a Kindle version.
    I am Frylock at the SDMB.

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    Default Re: What influence did the Celtic languages have on English?

    A good test-case for the hypothesis of Celtic syntactical influence on English is Breton. Breton is a language that developed in what is now SW England before its speakers moved to Brittany in the 3rd-6th centuries. Thereafter, there wasn't sustained contact between Breton and English speakers, and the influence of French on Breton is substantial. Nevertheless, Breton grammar is very easy for English speakers:

    Me a zo o tont da welout ac'hanout
    I <particle> am of coming to seeing at-you

    As opposed to say, French, which is:

    Je viens à te voir
    I come to you see.

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    Default Re: What influence did the Celtic languages have on English?

    Quote Originally posted by Katriona
    I have the vaguest memory of reading somewhere that some syntax that reamins (mostly in the US South) came from some of the Scots that came over after the '45.
    I'm curious about what you mean by "the '45", and what your perception of "Scots" is?

    Editing: I'm not being aggressive or anything, genuinely curious, and I have made the gigantic assumption that you live in North America. Feel free to disabuse me of this notion.

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    Default Re: What influence did the Celtic languages have on English?

    Quote Originally posted by Struan
    Quote Originally posted by Katriona
    I have the vaguest memory of reading somewhere that some syntax that reamins (mostly in the US South) came from some of the Scots that came over after the '45.
    I'm curious about what you mean by "the '45", and what your perception of "Scots" is?

    Editing: I'm not being aggressive or anything, genuinely curious, and I have made the gigantic assumption that you live in North America. Feel free to disabuse me of this notion.
    Hee, probably from reading the Diana Gabaldon books about the uber-Scotsman Jamie and his buds who came to the usofa after all that Charles-the-whatever stuff in the 17's. Just guessing and goofing because I can. Feel free to slap me down if I'm wrong Katriona, it was just the first thing that popped into my mind when I read Straun's post.

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