Related Research Articles
The Brittoniclanguages form one of the two branches of the Insular Celtic language family; the other is Goidelic. It comprises the extant languages Breton, Cornish, and Welsh. The name Brythonic was derived by Welsh Celticist John Rhys from the Welsh word Brython, meaning Ancient Britons as opposed to an Anglo-Saxon or Gael.
Breton is a Southwestern Brittonic language of the Celtic language group spoken in Brittany, part of modern-day France. It is the only Celtic language still widely in use on the European mainland, albeit as a member of the insular branch instead of the continental grouping.
The Celtic languages are a group of related languages descended from Proto-Celtic. They form a branch of the Indo-European language family. The term "Celtic" was first used to describe this language group by Edward Lhuyd in 1707, following Paul-Yves Pezron, who made the explicit link between the Celts described by classical writers and the Welsh and Breton languages.
Cornish is a Southwestern Brittonic language of the Celtic language family. It is a revived language, having become extinct as a living community language in Cornwall at the end of the 18th century. However, knowledge of Cornish, including speaking ability to a certain extent, continued to be passed on within families and by individuals, and a revival began in the early 20th century. The language has a growing number of second language speakers, and a very small number of families now raise children to speak revived Cornish as a first language. Cornish is currently recognised under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, and the language is often described as an important part of Cornish identity, culture and heritage.
Cumbric was a variety of the Common Brittonic language spoken during the Early Middle Ages in the Hen Ogledd or "Old North" in what is now the counties of Westmorland, Cumberland, northern Lancashire in Northern England and the southern Scottish Lowlands, alongside the Kingdom of Elmet in modern day Yorkshire. It was closely related to Old Welsh and the other Brittonic languages. Place name evidence suggests Cumbric may also have been spoken as far south as Pendle and the Yorkshire Dales. The prevailing view is that it became extinct in the 12th century, after the incorporation of the semi-independent Kingdom of Strathclyde into the Kingdom of Scotland.
Consonant mutation is change in a consonant in a word according to its morphological or syntactic environment.
The Celtic calendar is a compilation of pre-Christian Celtic systems of timekeeping, including the Gaulish Coligny calendar, used by Celtic countries to define the beginning and length of the day, the week, the month, the seasons, quarter days, and festivals.
Insular Celtic languages are the group of Celtic languages spoken in Brittany, Great Britain, Ireland, and the Isle of Man. All surviving Celtic languages are in the Insular group, including Breton, which is spoken on continental Europe in Brittany, France. The Continental Celtic languages, although once quite widely spoken in mainland Europe and in Anatolia, are extinct.
Primitive Irish or Archaic Irish, also called Proto-Goidelic, is the oldest known form of the Goidelic languages. It is known only from fragments, mostly personal names, inscribed on stone in the ogham alphabet in Ireland and western Great Britain between the 4th and the 6th century AD.
The Southwestern Brittonic languages are the Brittonic Celtic languages spoken in what is now South West England and Brittany since the Early Middle Ages. During the period of their earliest attestation, the languages appear to be indistinguishable, but they gradually evolved into the Cornish and Breton languages. They evolved from the Common Brittonic formerly spoken across most of Britain and were thus related to the Welsh and Cumbric varieties spoken in Wales and the Hen Ogledd, respectively.
Proto-Celtic, or Common Celtic, is the ancestral proto-language of all known Celtic languages, and a descendant of Proto-Indo-European. It is not attested in writing but has been partly reconstructed through the comparative method. Proto-Celtic is generally thought to have been spoken between 1300 and 800 BC, after which it began to split into different languages. Proto-Celtic is often associated with the Urnfield culture and particularly with the Hallstatt culture. Celtic languages share common features with Italic languages that are not found in other branches of Indo-European, suggesting the possibility of an earlier Italo-Celtic linguistic unity.
The Continental Celtic languages are the now-extinct group of the Celtic languages that were spoken on the continent of Europe and in central Anatolia, as distinguished from the Insular Celtic languages of the British Isles and Brittany. Continental Celtic is a geographic, rather than linguistic, grouping of the ancient Celtic languages.
The Britons, also known as Celtic Britons or Ancient Britons, were the people of Celtic language and culture who inhabited Great Britain from at least the British Iron Age until the High Middle Ages, at which point they diverged into the Welsh, Cornish and Bretons. They spoke Common Brittonic, the ancestor of the modern Brittonic languages.
French is a Romance language that specifically is classified under the Gallo-Romance languages.
The phonology of Welsh is characterised by a number of sounds that do not occur in English and are rare in European languages, such as the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative and several voiceless sonorants, some of which result from consonant mutation. Stress usually falls on the penultimate syllable in polysyllabic words, while the word-final unstressed syllable receives a higher pitch than the stressed syllable.
The Gallo-Brittonic languages, also known as the P-Celtic languages, are a subdivision of the Celtic languages of Ancient Gaul and Celtic Britain, which share certain features. Besides common linguistic innovations, speakers of these languages shared cultural features and history. The cultural aspects are commonality of art styles and worship of similar gods. Coinage just prior to the British Roman period was also similar. In Julius Caesar's time, the Atrebates held land on both sides of the English Channel.
Common Brittonic, also known as British, Common Brythonic, or Proto-Brittonic, was a Celtic language spoken in Britain and Brittany.
The Cornish language separated from the southwestern dialect of Common Brittonic at some point between 600 and 1000 AD. The phonological similarity of the Cornish, Welsh, and Breton languages during this period is reflected in their writing systems, and in some cases it is not possible to distinguish these languages orthographically. However, by the time it had ceased to be spoken as a community language around 1800 the Cornish language had undergone significant phonological changes, resulting in a number of unique features which distinguish it from the other neo-Brittonic languages.
The New Quantity System, or the Great British Vowel Shift, was a radical restructuring of the phonological system of the Common Brittonic language which occurred sometime after the middle of the first millennium AD, resulting in the collapse of the early Brittonic system of phonemic vowel length oppositions, which was inherited from Proto-Celtic, and its replacement by a system in which the formerly allophonic qualitative differences between long and short vowels is phonemicized, and vowel length becomes allophonic, and is determined by stress and syllable structure.
Old Irish was affected by a series of phonological changes that radically altered its appearance compared with Proto-Celtic and older Celtic languages. The changes occurred at a fairly rapid pace between 350 and 550 CE.
References
- ↑ Neo-Brittonic at MultiTree on the Linguist List
- ↑ Schmidt, Karl Horst (1993). "Insular Celtic: P and Q Celtic". In Ball, Martin J. (ed.). The Celtic Languages. London: Routledge.
- ↑ Jackson, Language and History in Early Britain, 1953.
- ↑ Schmidt, Karl Horst, in: Martin J Ball and James Fife (eds.), The Celtic Languages, Routledge, 1993 (2005 repr.), p. 77: "Among the phonological changes which mark the end of Late British, four transformations are particularly important: (a) the dropping of final syllables (as well as of interior ones) caused by the penultimate stress access and resulting in the change of inflection type (from synthetic to analytic)... (b) lenition of consonants in intervocalic position... (c) vowel affection, e.g. umlaut... (d) quantity collapse with the lengthening of short stressed vowels before short consonants..."
- ↑ Koch, John T. (January 1985). "When Was Welsh Literature First Written Down?". Studia Celtica. 20 (1): 43–66. ISSN 0081-6353.
- ↑ Schmidt, Karl Horst, in: Martin J Ball and James Fife (eds.), The Celtic Languages, Routledge, 1993 (2005 repr.), p. 77
- ↑ Stifter, David , "Lenition of s in Gaulish?", in: Benedicte Nielsen Whitehead, Thomas Olander, Birgit Anette Olsen, Jens Elmegård Rasmussen (eds), The Sound of Indo-European. Phonetics, Phonemics, and Morphophonemics, Copenhagen: 2012, 523–544.
- ↑ Stifter, David, "Notes on Châteaubleau (L-93)", Keltische Forschungen 4 (2009), pp. 229–244
- ↑ Schrijver, Peter, "The Châteaubleau tile as a link between Latin and French and between Gaulish and Brittonic", Études celtiques, Vol. 34, 1998, pp. 135-142
- ↑ Fortson, IV, Benjamin W. Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction. John Wiley & Sons, 2011, p. 317.