Search

Old Irish is a notoriously difficult language, and the chapter begins with an account of why this is so, exploring the features such as consonant mutations, palatalization, the absolute and conjunct inflections of verbs, conjugated prepositions, verb-initial sentences, and infixed pronouns that make it so distinct from the other languages considered so far. But even so, it is still of Indo-European stock, and a couple of selections from the Táin Bó Cuailnge reveal some of this shared ancestry. The chapter also offers an extended comparison with Welsh, another important member of the Celtic branch, highlighting, with an excerpt from the Mabinogion, the Celtic features common to it and Irish, as well as the points of difference between the two.

In twenty-four chapters, Arthurian tradition in Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Irish, or Scottish Gaelic is surveyed by writers from Wales, Germany, the USA, and beyond. What they offer is familiar enough, with no surprises. The surprises are in what is ignored, not what is said. Before we reach that, however, a summary of contents.

When we talk of the modern Celtic languages today we refer to the Insular Celtic varieties that have maintained (or indeed regained) a degree of their linguistic vitality and that are practised, to varying extents and in various forms, by users of the Breton, Cornish, Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh languages. Further to their common linguistic derivation, the Celtic languages share a number of additional characteristics that lend themselves well to a common analytical framework (features that they indeed share with many other ‘small’ languages). Each of the languages has, for a long time, been functioning in a bilingual, if not multilingual, environment. Consequently, in global terms, each of the languages is reliant on a relatively small pool of speakers for their survival. Perhaps unsurprisingly for those familiar with the dynamics of minority languages, then, language maintenance, revitalisation and revival projects have been among of the hallmarks of the Celtic-language experience for some time. This speaks to a familiar appetite among at least some users, as well as non-users, to go against the grain of language loss and to try to ensure that the Celtic languages are used into the future despite an extremely challenging climate.

Tristram (2009) applied Greenberg’s (1960) synthetism index to compare three of the Celtic languages: Irish, Welsh, and Breton. She did not analyse samples of the other three Celtic languages – Scottish Gaelic, Manx, and Cornish. This paper expands on her work by comparing all six Celtic languages, including two periods of Irish (Early Modern and Present Day). The analysis is based on a random sample of 210 parallel psalm texts (30 for each language). However, Greenberg’s synthetism index is problematic because there are no operational standards for counting morphemes within words. We therefore apply a newer typological indicator (B7; Popescu, Mačutek & Altmann, 2009), which is based solely on lexical rank-frequency statistics. Following Kelih (2010), we also explore whether type-token counts alone can provide similar information. The B7 indicator shows that both varieties of Irish, together with Welsh and Cornish, tend more towards synthetism, whereas Manx tends more towards analytism. Breton and Scottish Gaelic do not show a clear tendency in either direction. Rankings using type-token statistics vary considerably and do not tell the same story.

The present and future situation of the Celtic languages is intrinsically interesting. Two are moribund, while the other four possess varying degrees of strength and institutional support. From the weakest to the strongest, however, there are pressing concerns about stability and maintenance, to say nothing of possible revitalisation. All are faced with powerful linguistic neighbours, and all have heartlands under pressure from the surrounding non-Celtic-speaking ‘mainstream’. The activist community remains small and sometimes internally fragmented, and it struggles to transform a broad but passive societal goodwill – one that has, quite importantly, grown in recent years – into energised support for the language. But the Celtic languages also have a real and generalisable significance for other ‘small’-language settings, inasmuch as the features that bear upon their health and development are commonly found elsewhere. This article focuses mainly upon the difficulties besetting these varieties.

The Celts are commonly regarded as one of the Indo-European ethnolinguistic groups, speaking Celtic languages derived from Proto-Celtic. Numerous archaeobotanical, palaeogenetic and historical linguistic analyses demonstrate that the most ancient European pulse crops, such as chickpea (Cicer arietinum), grass pea (Lathyrus sativus), lentil (Lens culinaris), lupins (Lupinus spp.), pea (Pisum sativum), vetches (Vicia spp.) and faba bean (Vicia faba), were widely used in everyday life as early as sixth millennium BC. The Latin word denoting ‘pea’, pisum, was borrowed by both Brythonic and Goidelic languages, spoken during the first centuries AD in Britain and Ireland, and produced the words denoting ‘pea’ in their modern members. The ultimate origin of the words denoting ‘faba bean’ in all living and attested Celtic languages is the Proto-Indo-European root *bhabh-, denoting the same crop, literally meaning something swollen and imported from both the Latin faba and the Old Norse baun. The majority of the words denoting ‘grain’ in the Celtic languages are descendants of the Proto-Celtic root *grāno, denoting ‘grain’ and originating from the Proto-Indo-European *g'er[a]n-, *grān-, denoting ‘grain’ and ‘corn’.