The Celtic languages are the languages descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic", a branch of the greater Indo-European language family. During the 1st millennium BC, they were spoken across Europe, from the Bay of Biscay and the North Sea, up the Rhine and down the Danube to the Black Sea and the Upper Balkan Peninsula, and into Asia Minor (Galatia). Today, Celtic languages are now limited to a few areas in the British Isles, eastern Canada, Patagonia, scattered groups in the United States and Australia, and on the peninsula of Brittany in France.
Proto-Celtic apparently divided into four sub-families:
Scholarly handling of the Celtic languages has been rather argumentative owing to lack of primary source data. Some scholars distinguish Continental and Insular Celtic, arguing that the differences between the Goidelic and Brythonic languages arose after these split off from the Continental Celtic languages. Other scholars distinguish P-Celtic from Q-Celtic, putting most of the Continental Celtic languages in the former group (except for Celtiberian, which is Q-Celtic).
The Breton language is Brythonic, not Gaulish. When the Anglo-Saxons moved into Great Britain, some of the native Brythons or "Welsh" (from a Germanic word for "foreigners") fled across the English Channel and landed in Brittany. They brought their Brythonic language with them, which evolved into Breton — which is still partially intelligible with Modern Welsh and Cornish.
The distinction of Celtic into these four sub-families probably occurred about 1000 BC. The early Celts are commonly associated with the archaeological Urnfield culture, the La Tène culture, and the Hallstatt culture.
Classification
There are two competing schemata of categorization. One scheme, argued for by Schmidt (1988) among others, links Gaulish with Brythonic in a P-Celtic node, leaving Goidelic as Q-Celtic. The difference between P and Q languages is the treatment of Proto-Celtic *kw, which became *p in the P-Celtic languages but *k in Goidelic. An example is the Proto-Celtic verb root *kwrin- "to buy", which became pryn- in Welsh but cren- in Old Irish.
The other scheme, defended for example by McCone (1996), links Goidelic and Brythonic together as an Insular Celtic branch, while Gaulish and Celtiberian are referred to as Continental Celtic. According to this theory, the "P-Celtic" sound change of [kʷ] to [p] occurred independently or areally. The proponents of the Insular Celtic hypothesis point to other shared innovations among Insular Celtic languages, including inflected prepositions, VSO word order, and the lenition of intervocalic [m] to [β̃], a nasalized voiced bilabial fricative (an extremely rare sound). There is, however, no assumption that the Continental Celtic languages descend from a common "Proto-Continental Celtic" ancestor. Rather, the Insular/Continental schemata usually considers Celtiberian the first branch to split from Proto-Celtic, and the remaining group would later have split into Gaulish and Insular Celtic.
There are legitimate scholarly arguments in favour of both the Insular Celtic hypothesis and the P-Celtic/Q-Celtic hypothesis. Proponents of each schema dispute the accuracy and usefulness of the other's categories. Since the realization that Celtiberian was Q-Celtic in the 1970s, the division into Insular and Continental Celtic is the more widespread opinion.
When referring only to the modern Celtic languages, since no Continental Celtic language has living descendents, "Q-Celtic" is equivalent to "Goidelic" and "P-Celtic" is equivalent to "Brythonic".
Within the Indo-European family, the Celtic languages have sometimes been placed with the Italic languages in a common Italo-Celtic subfamily, a hypothesis that is now largely discarded, in favour of the assumption of language contact between pre-Celtic and pre-Italic communities.
Assuming the Insular/Continental hypothesis, the family tree of the Celtic languages would be:
Assuming the P-Celtic/Q-Celtic hypothesis, the Celtic family would be organised this way:
Characteristics of Celtic languages
Although there are many differences between the individual Celtic languages, they do show many family resemblances. While none of these characteristics is necessarily unique to the Celtic languages, there are few if any other languages which possess them all. They include:
- Initial consonant mutation (Insular Celtic only)
- Inflected prepositions (Insular Celtic only)
- VSO word order as standard (Insular Celtic only)
- Two grammatical genders (modern Insular Celtic only; Old Irish and the Continental languages had three genders)
- Definite but no indefinite article (Insular Celtic only; no evidence for a definite article in Continental languages)
- Counting by twenties.
Examples:
Ná bac le mac an bhacaigh is ní bhacfaidh mac an bhacaigh leat. (Irish example)
(Literal translation) Don't bother with son the beggar's and not will-bother son the beggar's with-you.
- bhacaigh is the genitive of bacach. The i is the genitive inflection; the bh is a mutation.
- leat is the second person form of the preposition le.
- The order is VSO in the second half.
pedwar ar bymtheg a phedwar ugain (Welsh example)
four on fifteen and four twenties
- bymtheg is a mutated form of pymtheg, which is pump five plus deg ten. Likewise, phedwar is mutated from pedwar.
- The multiples of ten are deg, ugain, deg ar hugain, deugain, hanner cant, trigain, deg a thrigain, pedwar ugain, deg a phedwar ugain, cant.
