I wondered for some time, but I guess I was afraid to ask anyone.
The proper noun Celtic. How do you pronounce it?
I’ve heard /SEL-tic/ and /KEL-tic/. Actual Celtic people (from other countries, if that helps) tend to pronounce it Keltic. But are both valid? So please offer support for your claim too.
Thank you in advance for your helpful replies:).
:):):)
Sell-tic if you mean the football club
Kell-tic all the other times
(no, I don’t actually know why…)
‘C’ was pronounced as ‘K’ in Latin. (The Latin alphabet had a separate ‘K’ but it was rarely used.)
Many of those Cs came to be pronounced as S in English (under the influence of French?), e.g. ‘century,’ but ‘Celtic’ resisted that change.
Many old texts avoid the problem by writing ‘Keltic’ but this spelling has fallen into disuse.
Ahem, basketball team.
Also, the football team that predates the basketball team by nearly sixty years. In a rather more historically Celtic part of the world than Boston, MA.
Up to the early 20th century Seltic was was the standard English pronunciation. The football club was founded in the 19th century, and the pronunciation has stayed the same.
The ‘English’ pronunciation of Latin (greatly influenced by French) made all C’s soft, so
Caesar -> Seesar
Cicero -> Sisero
Celtae -> Seltee
In the early 20th century, the restored classical pronunciation of Latin started to be taught, with the C’s hard - equivalent to K’s. The ancient Romans and Greeks pronounced Celtae (the name of the tribal/ethnological group) with a hard C, Kelt-ai.
At the same time, scholars working with Celtic mythology, history, languages, culture, etc. started to use the hard C as being more correct. It’s pronounced with a hard C in Celtic languages like Irish and Welsh.
But the older English pronunciation with a soft C is still around to some extent.
A useful mnemonic is “do they sell tix?” If so then pronounce it sell-tik. Otherwise, keltik.
Excuuuuse me!
I’ll show myself out.
A friend who is in a hardcore Celtic band pronounces it Keltic.
Hardcore Celtic bands used to run into battle naked, covered in blue paint. I am assuming the modern versions take to battle/the stage in the same way.
Can one really be “hardcore” and use both “k” and “c” in the same word? Surely he must spell it as keltik.
Heh. In place of the blue paint, they’ve some Celtic tattoos. And for real hardcore, how’s about këltik?
I had long heard that the Boston basketball is the Sell-tix, but that all other usages are Kell-tix. But this thread convinces me that it is not that simple.
Should cis-gendered be pronounced KISS-gendered?
Put me in the “only use of sell-tic is to refer to the sports team” camp.
Also we who are in a small, acoustic Celtic folk band. 
This was definitively settled back in 2005 when Van Morrison released “Celtic New Year” as a track on the album “Magic Time”.
Trivia for another Hoosier- The elementary school I went to sports teams were the Celts. We pronounced it “kelts.”
He settled it much earlier, in 1982 with Celtic Ray.
This is one of those things where both answers are equally valid, because English is not a strongly prescriptive language. But you’re going to sound weird or ignorant if you use the soft form for anything besides the Boston or Glasgow teams, and the languages used by the Celtic language should all use the /k/ phoneme for C.
Degenerates like them belong on a cross.
In the pre-1900s church Latin, it would start with an S sound, but we’ve since changed our minds about how we should pronounce Latin. So outside of sports, it’s mostly “keltik” now. So I’m wondering when we’ll start talking about Iulius Kaisar (“weni widee wiki”) and Kikero in history class.
For that matter, what do they do in Latin classes nowadays? Do they teach the old pronunciations or the newer, more ancient variety? If I wanted to learn Latin as the late Republic would have spoken it, are there classes I can take, or is it all still based on Church Latin?