Insular Celtic

Insular Celtic languages are those Celtic languages that originated in the British Isles, in contrast to the Continental Celtic languages of mainland Europe and Anatolia. All surviving Celtic languages are from the Insular Celtic group; the Continental Celtic languages are extinct. The six Celtic languages of modern times can be divided into:

• the Goidelic languages: Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic
• the Brythonic languages: Breton, Cornish, and Welsh (another language or dialect, Cumbric, is extinct.)

Insular Celtic hypothesis

The "Insular Celtic hypothesis" is a theory that the Brythonic and Goidelic languages evolved together in those islands, having a common ancestor more recent than any shared with the Continental Celtic languages such as Celtiberian, Gaulish, Galatian and Lepontic, among others, all of which are long extinct.

The proponents of the Insular Celtic hypothesis (such as Cowgill 1975; McCone 1991, 1992; and Schrijver 1995) point to shared innovations among Insular Celtic languages, including inflected prepositions, shared use of certain verbal particles, VSO word order, and the differentiation of absolute and conjunct verb endings as found extensively in Old Irish and to a small extent in Middle Welsh (see Proto-Celtic language#Morphology). They assert that a partition that lumps the Brythonic languages and Gaulish (P-Celtic) on one side and the Goidelic languages with Celtiberian (Q-Celtic) on the other may be a superficial one (i.e. owing to a language contact phenomenon), as the identical sound shift (/kʷ/ to /p/) could have occurred independently in the predecessors of Gaulish and Brythonic, or have spread through language contact between those two groups.

The family tree of the Insular Celtic languages is thus as follows:

• Insular Celtic
  • Goidelic
    • Primitive Irish, ancestral to:
      • Old Irish, ancestral to:
        • Middle Irish, ancestral to:
          • Irish
          • Scottish Gaelic
          • Manx
  • Brythonic
    • Pictish (possibly)
    • British
      • Cumbric (extinct)
      • Old Welsh, ancestral to
        • Middle Welsh, ancestral to:
          • Welsh
      • Southwestern Brythonic, ancestral to:
        • Breton
        • Cornish

The following table lists cognates showing the development of Proto-Celtic */kʷ/ to /p/ in Gaulish and the Brythonic languages but to /k/ in the Goidelic languages.

A significant difference between Goidelic and Brythonic languages is the transformation of *an, am to a denasalised vowel with lengthening, é, before an originally voiceless stop or fricative, cf. Old Irish éc "death", écath "fish hook", dét "tooth", cét "hundred" vs. Welsh angau, angad, dant, and cant. Otherwise:

• the nasal is retained before a vowel, i̯, w, m, and a liquid:
  • Old Irish ben "woman" (< *benā)
  • Old Irish gainethar "he/she is born" (< *gan-i̯e-tor)
  • Old Irish ainb "ignorant" (< *anwiss)
• the nasal passes to en before another n:
  • Old Irish benn "peak" (< *banno) (vs. Welsh bann)
  • Middle Irish ro-geinn "finds a place" (< *ganne) (vs. Welsh gannaf)
• the nasal passes to in, im before a voiced stop
  • Old Irish imb "butter" (vs. Breton aman(en)n, Cornish amanyn)
  • Old Irish ingen "nail" (vs. Old Welsh eguin)
  • Old Irish tengae "tongue" (vs. Welsh tafod)
  • Old Irish ing "strait" (vs. Middle Welsh eh-ang "wide")

Insular Celtic as a language area

In order to show that shared innovations are from a common descent it is necessary that they do not arise because of language contact after initial separation. A language area can result from widepread bilingualism, perhaps because of exogamy, and absence of sharp sociolinguistic division. In Post-Roman Britain Goidelic and Brythonic seem to have been of roughly equal status, with several Goidelic loan words in Brythonic and several Brythonic loan words in Old Irish. There is historical evidence of Irish in Wales and England as well as of British in Ireland during this period. There is also archaeological evidence of substantial contact between Britain and Ireland in the Pre-Roman period and of Roman period contact.

Ranko Matasovic has provided a list of changes which affected both branches of Insular Celtic but for which there is no evidence that they should be dated to a putative Proto-Insular Celtic period^[1]. These are :-

• Phonological Changes
  • The lenition of voiceless stops
  • Raising/i-Affection
  • Lowering/a-Affection
  • Apocope
  • Syncope
• Morphological Changes
  • Creation of conjugated prepositions
  • Loss of case inflection of personal pronouns
  • Creation of the equative degree
  • Creation of the imperfect tense
  • Creation of the onditional mood
• Morphosyntactic and Syntactic
  • Rigidisation of VSO order
  • Creation of preposed definite articles
  • Creation of particles expressing sentence affirmation and negation
  • Creation of periphrasic construction
  • Creation of object markers
  • Use of ordinal numbers in the sense of "one of".

Possible Afro-Asiatic substratum

The concept of the Insular Celtic languages being descended from Hebrew was mooted in Medieval times but the hypothesis that they had features from an Afro-Asiatic substratum was first proposed by John Morris-Jones in 1900.^[2] Some well-known linguists have been adherents such as Julius Porkony,^[3] Henrich Wagner,^[4] and Orin Gensler.^[5] There has been further work on the theory by Shisha-Halevy ^[6] and Theo Vennemann.

However, the theory has been strongly criticised by Graham Isaac ^[7] and by Kim McCone.^[8] Isaac considers the twenty points identified by Gensler as trivial, dependencies or vacuous. Thus he considers the theory to be not just unproven but wrong.

Notes

References

• Cowgill, Warren (1975). "The origins of the Insular Celtic conjunct and absolute verbal endings". in H. Rix (ed.). Flexion und Wortbildung: Akten der V. Fachtagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft, Regensburg, 9.–14. September 1973. Wiesbaden: Reichert. pp. 40–70. ISBN 3-920153-40-5. 
• McCone, Kim (1991). "The PIE stops and syllabic nasals in Celtic". Studia Celtica Japonica 4: 37–69. 
• McCone, Kim (1992). "Relative Chronologie: Keltisch". in R. Beekes, A. Lubotsky, and J. Weitenberg (eds.). Rekonstruktion und relative Chronologie: Akten Der VIII. Fachtagung Der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft, Leiden, 31. August–4. September 1987. Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck. pp. 12–39. ISBN 3-85124-613-6. 
• Schrijver, Peter (1995). Studies in British Celtic historical phonology. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ISBN 90-5183-820-4.