The Linguistic Celts
If French is a Romance language, then Welsh is a Brittonic one.
The linguistic Celts, unlike the historical ones, are centred around the ancient languages of Britain and Ireland. Brittonic is the earliest known language from the island of Britain, and Gaelic (or Goidelic) is the earliest known language from the island of Ireland. Both of these have since split into modern languages, in much the same way that Latin split into the Romance languages of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and so on. Brittonic gave rise to Cymraeg (Welsh), Kernuak (Cornish) and Brezhoneg (Breton), while the original Gaelic language divided into Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic.
Much of the story of how this happened will be mentioned in later chapters. But if no historical source ever called these people Celts, where did this label come from?
The name Celts was first used in this way in the 16th century by the Scottish scholar George Buchanan. However, he only applied it to Gaelic speakers, thinking that the historical Celts had introduced that language into Ireland from southern Gaul. Brittonic, he thought, had been brought to Britain across the channel from northern Gaul, in keeping with the distinction mentioned in The Historical Celts above. Although impossible to prove conclusively, this, for reasons which we shall see later, is a very feasible idea.
Following on from Buchanan, at the beginning of the 18th century, the scholar Edward Lhuyd noticed similarities between the Welsh and Irish languages. It had long been known that the modern Brittonic languages were from the same source, and likewise the Gaelic languages, but the link between the Brittonic group and the Gaelic group was a revelation. In addition, Lhuyd asserted that both these groups also shared links with the languages of ancient Gaul. This new wider grouping needed a name, and, possibly because Brittonic would have been linked to the United Kingdom of the day, and Gaulish similarly linked with the French state, the Celtic label was the one that became established.
However, it’s important to remember that this label refers to a family of languages believed to have sprung from a common source, and not to any one single language of the time. There is not one single word of evidence from a language called Celtic, what we have are various ancient languages believed to have their origins in this theoretical tongue. The most important of these ancient languages were:
Brittonic spoken predominantly in Britain Gaelic spoken predominantly in Ireland Gaulish spoken predominantly in Gaul Celtiberian spoken predominantly in Iberia Lepontic spoken predominantly in northern Italy
These individual languages are real enough, having left evidence of their existence in inscriptions, place names, personal names, coinage and so on. However, due to differences already in existence between them, they have themselves been sub-divided into ‘P-Celtic’ and ‘Q-Celtic’, labels which were chosen because many words containing a P or B sound in the one group, have an quivalent word with a Q or C sound in the other.
Brittonic, Lepontic and most Gaulish ‘dialects’ are ‘P-Celtic’, while Gaelic, Celtiberian and a small amount of Gaulish is ‘Q-Celtic’. As Lepontic, Gaulish and Celtiberian were all dead by about 500AD at the latest, it is best to show examples from the Brittonic and Gaelic languages.
English Brittonic (Welsh) Scottish Gaelic Four Pedwar Ceithir Head Pen Ceann Son Mab Mac
Many linguists believe that the ‘Q-Celtic’ languages, particularly the Gaelic ones, show older features than the others, although, ironically, Gaelic is the latest language of them all to be attested, with no actual evidence prior to about the fourth century AD.
In any event, the oldest actual attestation of one of these languages is in Lepontic, with scholars’ dates for the Sesto Calende inscription ranging from ‘at least the fourth century BC, probably older’ to ‘unquestionably at least 500BC’. What this means, of course, is that from the time of the earliest ever historical reference to the Celts, the linguists’ ‘Celtic’ language had already undergone the P/Q split, and was therefore at least two different languages. Whatever language the historical Celts were speaking, it was not the linguists’ Common Celtic.
At this point it must be said that the links between Brittonic and Gaelic do argue strongly for their originating from a common source. That is not in dispute here.What is in dispute is the timing of that common source and its relation to the Celts of history. We know, for example, without a shadow of doubt, that both French and Spanish are derived from Latin, the language of the Romans, yet no historian argues that England was conquered by the Romans in 1066 or South America by Roman conquistadors.
At no point in history (until it was pointed out to them in the 18th century) did Brittonic and Gaelic speakers have any idea that their languages had a common origin, nor did they ever call themselves Celts. The linguists’ parent Celtic must belong to an earlier period, prior to 500BC, in the Bronze Age.
The link between Brittonic and Gaelic, although remarkable for the time, was part of an era of discovery which later claimed even more links between other languages of Europe, Asia Minor and the Indian sub-continent. In 1786, Sir William Jones claimed stronger affinities between Latin, Greek and Sanskrit ‘than could possibly have been produced by accident’, which would eventually result in a hypothetical ancestor to them all, known today as Indo-European, usually represented in the form a family tree.
The Celtic languages are constantly being placed on the wrong level of this tree, resulting in statements such as ‘French is a Romance language, Welsh is a Celtic one’. This is not comparing like with like. Latin is the parent language of French, whereas Celtic is (at least) the grandparent of Welsh. If French is a Romance language, then Welsh is a Brittonic one.
The fact that certain linguistic groups share the same ancestry is no justification for continuing to call them by names that no longer apply. From the very earliest historical times, the Britons and the Gaels are distinct, mutually unintelligible entities, and it is no more logical to refer in history books to the Celts of Britain or the Celts of Ireland than it is to talk of the Roman Indo-European Empire or Greek Indo-European city states.
Ironically, in recent years, this is precisley what has happened, as the known, historically-named inhabitants of Britain (the Britons), speaking a known, attested language (Brittonic), have been by-passed in favour of an historical group from southern Europe, who have had a theoretically reconstructed parent language (Celtic) named after them.