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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 branch of the Indo-European language family, descended from Proto-Celtic. 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. Along with Welsh and Breton, Cornish is descended from the Common Brittonic language spoken throughout much of Great Britain before the English language came to dominate. For centuries, until it was pushed westwards by English, it was the main language of Cornwall, maintaining close links with its sister language Breton, with which it was mutually intelligible, perhaps even as long as Cornish continued to be spoken as a vernacular. Cornish continued to function as a common community language in parts of Cornwall until the mid 18th century, and there is some evidence for traditional speakers of the language persisting into the 19th century.
In linguistics, lenition is a sound change that alters consonants, making them more sonorous. The word lenition itself means "softening" or "weakening". Lenition can happen both synchronically and diachronically. Lenition can involve such changes as voicing a voiceless consonant, causing a consonant to relax occlusion, to lose its place of articulation, or even causing a consonant to disappear entirely.
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 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, and the ancestor of all languages within this family.
Proto-Celtic, or Common Celtic, is the hypothetical 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 an indigenous Celtic people 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 proposed subdivision of the Celtic languages containing the 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, is an extinct Celtic language spoken in Britain and Brittany.
Gaulish is an extinct Celtic language spoken in parts of Continental Europe before and during the period of the Roman Empire. In the narrow sense, Gaulish was the language of the Celts of Gaul. In a wider sense, it also comprises varieties of Celtic that were spoken across much of central Europe ("Noric"), parts of the Balkans, and Anatolia ("Galatian"), which are thought to have been closely related. The more divergent Lepontic of Northern Italy has also sometimes been subsumed under Gaulish.
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.