Proto-Celtic language

Language classification
Indo-European Celtic Proto-Celtic

The Proto-Celtic language, also called Common Celtic, is the putative ancestor of all the known Celtic languages. Probably spoken around 800 BC, its lexis can be confidently reconstructed on the basis of the comparative method of historical linguistics. Proto-Celtic is a direct daughter-language of Proto-Indo-European and is widely regarded as the first of the Indo-European languages to spread in North-Western and Atlantic Europe. The area in which the language seems to have first become distinguishably Proto-Celtic, as opposed to earlier Centum dialect, corresponds to the Hallstatt culture, on the western fringes of the Urnfield. From roughly 800 BC, this culture by influence of "Thraco-Cimmerian" elements introduced the Iron Age to Europe. The contemporary Cimmerians were variously claimed as ancestors of the Cimbri, Sugambri and Cymru, although other etymologies better explain the latter term (see also British Israelism).

The reconstruction of Proto-Celtic is currently being undertaken. While Continental Celtic presents much substantiation for phonology, and some for morphology, recorded material is largely still too scanty to allow a secure reconstruction of syntax. Although some complete sentences are recorded in Gaulish and Celtiberian, the oldest substantial Celtic literature is found in Old Irish, the earliest recorded of the Insular Celtic languages.

Phonological reconstruction

Consonants

The phonological changes from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Celtic consonants may be summarised as follows (an asterisk [*] prior to a letter or word designates that the phoneme or lexeme is not attested but is a hypothetical, reconstructed form):

PIE	Proto-Celtic!Example
*	*	* > * 'father'
*	*	* > * 'three'
*	*	* > * 'sing' * > * 'hundred'
*	*	* > * 'four'
*	*	* > * 'deep'
*	*	* > * 'see'
*	*	* > * 'to glue' * > * 'jaw'
*	*	* > * 'woman'
*	*	* > * 'carry'
*	*	* > * 'suck'
*	*	* > * 'take' * > * 'sickness'
*	*	* > * 'kill, wound'
*	*	* > * 'old'
*	*	* > * 'mother'
*	*	* > * 'nephew'
*	*	* > * 'lick'
*	*	* > * 'king'
*	*	* > * 'young'
*	*	* > * 'dominion'

In contrast to the parent language, Proto-Celtic does not use aspiration as a feature for distinguishing phonemes. So where the Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops *, *, * merged with *, *, *. The voiced aspirate labiovelar * did not merge with *, though: plain * became * in Proto-Celtic, while aspirated * became *. Thus, while PIE * 'woman' became Old Irish ben and Welsh benyw, PIE * 'to kill, to wound' is the source of Old Irish gonaid and Welsh gwanu.

Proto-Indo-European * was lost in Proto-Celtic, apparently going through the stages * (as in the table above) and * (perhaps attested by the toponym Hercynia if this is of Celtic origin) before being lost completely word-initially and between vowels. Adjacent to consonants, Proto-Celtic * underwent different changes: the clusters * and * became * and * respectively already in Proto-Celtic. PIE * became Old Irish s and Brythonic f; while Schrijver (1995, 348) argues there was an intermediate stage * (in which * remained an independent phoneme until after Proto-Insular Celtic had diverged into Goidelic and Brythonic), McCone (1996, 44â€"45) finds it more economical to believe that * remained unchanged in PC, that is, the change * to * did not happen when * preceded. (Similarly, Grimm's law did not apply to *p, t, k after s in Germanic.)

Proto-Celtic	Old Irish! Welsh
* > * 'shine'	las-aid	llach-ar
* > * 'seven'	secht	seith
* or * 'heel'	seir	ffêr

In Gaulish and the Brythonic languages, a new * sound has arisen as a reflex of the Proto-Indo-European * phoneme. Consequently one finds Gaulish petuar[ios], Welsh pedwar "four", compared to Old Irish cethair and Latin quattuor. In so far as this new /p/ fills the space in the phoneme inventory which was lost by the disappearance of the equivalent stop in PIE, we may think of this as a chain shift.

The terms P-Celtic and Q-Celtic are useful when we wish to group the Celtic languages according to the way they handle this one phoneme. However a simple division into P- and Q-Celtic may be untenable, as it does not do justice to the evidence of the ancient Continental Celtic languages. The large number of unusual shared innovations among the Insular Celtic languages are often also presented as evidence against a P-Celtic vs Q-Celtic division, but they may instead reflect a common substratum influence from the pre-Celtic languages of the British Isles [1], in which case they would be irrelevant to Celtic language classification.

Q-Celtic languages may also have /p/ in loan words, though in some early borrowings from Welsh into Irish /k/ was used by sound substitution, as in Gaelic Cothrige, an early form of "Padraig". Gaelic póg "kiss" was a later borrowing (from the second word of the Latin phrase osculum pacis "kiss of peace") at a stage where p was borrowed directly as p, without substituting c.

Vowels

The Proto-Celtic vowel system is highly comparable to that reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European by Antoine Meillet. Dissimilarities include the incidence of Celtic Ä« for Proto-Indo-European Ä" (e.g., Gaulish rix and Irish rí, "king"; compare Latin rÄ"x) and Ä� in place of Å�.

PIE	Proto-Celtic! Example
*	*	* > * 'river'
*	*	* > * 'brother'
*	*	* > * 'old'
* (any laryngeal between consonants)	*	* > * 'father'
*	*	* > * 'true'
*	*	* > * 'wheel'
*	in final syllable, *	* > * 'nephew'
	elsewhere, *	* > * 'gift'
*	*	* > * 'world'
*	*	* > * 'number'
*	*	* > * 'blind' * > * 'age'
*	*	* > * 'god'
*	*	* > * 'one'
*	before ,	* > * 'young'
	elsewhere, *	* > * 'stream'
*	*	* > * 'mystery'
*	*	* > * 'silent'
*; *	*	* > * 'people' * > *
*	before stops, *	* > * 'wide'
	before other consonants, *	* > * 'rooster'
	before stops, *	* > * 'act of bearing; mind'
	before other consonants, *	* > * 'dead'
*	*	* > * 'subdue'
*	*	* > * 'tooth'
*	before obstruents, *	* > * 'lordship'
	before sonorants, *	* > * 'hand'
*	before obstruents, *	* > * 'betrayal'
	before sonorants, *	* > * 'grain'
*	* (presumably same distribution as above)	(none?)
*	* or * (presumably same distribution as above)	probably * > * 'knowing'

The vowel * is the so-called "schwa indogermanicum", now interpreted as a laryngeal between two consonants.

Transition to Welsh

The regular consonantal sound changes from Proto-Celtic to the Welsh language may be summarised in the following table. Where the Welsh graphemes have a different value from the corresponding IPA symbols, the IPA equivalent is indicated between solidi. V represents a vowel; C represents a consonant.

Proto-Celtic consonant	Welsh consonant
*b-	b
*-bb-	b
*-VbV-	f /v/
*d-	d
*-dd-	d
*-VdV-	dd /ð/
*g-	g
*-gg-	g
*-VgV-	(lost)
*h-	(lost)
*-h-	(lost)
*j-	i
*k-	c
*-kk-	ch /x/
*-VkV-	g
*kÊ·-	p
*-kÊ·-	b
*l-	ll /ɬ/
*-ll-	l
*-VlV-	l
*m-	m
*-mb-	m
*-Cm-	m
*-m-	f /v/
*n-	n
*-n-	n
*-nd-	n, nn
*-nt-	nt, nh
*r-	rh /r̥/
*-r-	r
*s-	h, s
*-s-	s
*t	t
*-t-	d
*-tt-, *-ct-	th /θ/
*w-	gw
*sw-	chw /xw/

Morphology

The morphology (structure) of nouns and adjectives demonstrates no arresting alterations from the parent language. The Insular Celtic verb, on the other hand, shows a peculiar feature unknown in any other attested Indo-European language: verbs have different conjugational forms depending on whether they appear in absolute initial position in the sentence (Insular Celtic having Verb Subject Object or VSO word order) or whether they are preceded by a preverbal particle. The situation is most robustly attested in Old Irish, but it has remained to some extent in Scottish Gaelic and traces of it are present in Middle Welsh as well.

Forms that appear in sentence-initial position are called absolute, those that appear after a particle are called conjunct. The paradigm of the present active indicative of the Old Irish verb beirid "carry" is as follows; the conjunct forms are illustrated with the particle ní "not".

	Absolute! Conjunct
1st person singular	biru "I carry"	ní biur "I do not carry"
2nd person singular	biri "you carry"	ní bir "you do not carry"
3rd person singular	beirid "s/he carries"	ní beir "s/he does not carry"
1st person plural	bermai "we carry"	ní beram "we do not carry"
2nd person plural	beirthe "you carry"	ní beirid "you do not carry"
3rd person plural	berait "they carry"	ní berat "they do not carry"

In Scottish Gaelic this distinction is still found in the future tense:

Absolute	Conjunct
cuiridh "will put"	cha chuir "will not put"
òlaidh "will drink"	chan òl "will not drink"
ceannaichidh "will buy"	cha cheannaich "will not buy"

In Middle Welsh, the distinction is seen most clearly in proverbs following the formula "X happens, Y does not happen" (Evans 1964: 119):
*Pereid y rycheu, ny phara a'e goreu "The furrows last, he who made them lasts not"
*Trenghit golut, ny threingk molut "Wealth perishes, fame perishes not"
*Tyuit maban, ny thyf y gadachan "An infant grows, his swaddling-clothes grow not"
*Chwaryit mab noeth, ny chware mab newynawc "A naked boy plays, a hungry boy plays not"

The older analysis of the distinction, as reported by Thurneysen (1946, 360 ff.), held that the absolute endings derive from Proto-Indo-European "primary endings" (used in present and future tenses) while the conjunct endings derive from the "secondary endings" (used in past tenses). Thus Old Irish absolute beirid "s/he carries" was thought to be from * (compare Sanskrit bharati "s/he carries"), while conjunct beir was thought to be from * (compare Sanskrit a-bharat "s/he was carrying").

Today, however, most Celticists agree that Cowgill (1975), following an idea present already in Pedersen (1913, 340 ff.), found the correct solution to the origin of the absolute/conjunct distinction: an enclitic particle, reconstructed as * after consonants and * after vowels, came in second position in the sentence. If the first word in the sentence was another particle, * came after that and thus before the verb, but if the verb was the first word in the sentence, * was cliticized to it. Under this theory, then, Old Irish absolute beirid comes from Proto-Celtic *, while conjunct ní beir comes from *.

The identity of the * particle remains uncertain. Cowgill suggests it might be a semantically degraded form of * "is", while Schrijver (1994) has argued it is derived from the particle * "and then", which is attested in Gaulish.

Continental Celtic languages cannot be shown to have any absolute/conjunct distinction. However, they seem to show only SVO and SOV word orders, as in other Indo-European languages. The absolute/conjunct distinction may thus be an artifact of the VSO word order that arose in Insular Celtic.

References

*Cowgill, Warren (1975). The origins of the Insular Celtic conjunct and absolute verbal endings. In Flexion und Wortbildung: Akten der V. Fachtagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft, Regensburg, 9.â€"14. September 1973, ed. H. Rix, 40â€"70. Wiesbaden: Reichert.

*

See also

*Italo-Celtic

External links

A reference for Proto-Celtic vocabulary is provided by the University of Wales at the following sites:
*Proto-Celtic English dictionary
*English Proto-Celtic dictionaryAlternatively, the University of Leiden provides a Proto-Celtic dictionary:
*Database query to An etymological lexicon of Proto-Celtic

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