The decision has been reversedby the Court of Appeal.
I wasn’t very familiar wth the Celto-Iberian connection(since 900 BC) in terms of the languages. But given the Celtic migration south, it does explain the similarities in the languages.
http://www.spainthenandnow.com/spanish-history/the-celts-in-spain/default_35.aspx
The first arrivals appear to have established themselves in Catalonia, having probably entered via the eastern passages of the Pyrenees. Later groups (more identifiably Celtic) ventured west through the Pyrenees to occupy the northern coast of the peninsula, and south beyond the Ebro and Duero basins as far as the Tagus valley. Why the Celts did not continue down the Mediterranean coast is not known, but probably the strong Iberian presence was an inhibiting factor.
Except that, as with John Mace, I’m not aware of any similarities in the languages, beyond those explained by their common Indo-European source. While there may have been connections between the modern Celtic languages and whatever the Iberians spoke before the Romans arrived, Spanish as we know it is a romance language; it supplanted the previous Iberian language.
There may be some relics of Iberian in Spanish, and they may have parallels in the modern Celtic languages, but if so it’s news to me.
Thanks UDS. This connection has piqued my interest, though. So I’m wondering if there aren’t some cultural and linguistic connections that are not obvious to non-native speakers of Gaelic and Spanish.
The seventh century was a time of intense and creative intellectual activity in Ireland, of a dynamic synthesis of native and imported concepts and traditions which was fundamental to the evolution of Gaelic culture. At just this time, links with Spain seem to have been close and important: not just the writings of Isidore, but other learned works as well, found their way from Spain to Ireland and played a key role in shaping the world-view of the monastic men of letters. At a time when scholars in Ireland felt themselves to be receiving so much from Spain, not least in the fields of chronology and world history, it is not at all surprising that Spain—’the mother of races’, as Isidore had called it—should figure prominently in their own historical speculations.
Here’s a list of Spanish loan words from Celtic. Doesn’t look to be very impressive, certainly not compared to other languages (e.g., English) in contact with Celtic speakers.
I’ve seen a list of English words that ultimately derived from a Celtic language. More than half of them come directly from French which had taken them (during the time that the territory that’s presently part of France was a Roman colony) from the Celtic speakers who lived there before the Romans arrived. The list of words that English took from the Celtic speakers who lived the U.K. before the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes arrived there was actually rather small.
Most of the loan words on that list are via other languages, not directly from a Celtic language.
My recommendation, which I’ve posted since my first suggestion that there should be an online class in How to Speak Spanish Like a Texan, some 16 years ago, is to find someone who can speak any language in the flattest, most US TV accent, possible. Ignore localisms; the locals will find your accent charming, THE SAME WAY YOU FIND THE ACCENTS OF NON-NATIVE ENGLISH-SPEAKERS charming, and not the least bit incomprehensible. NOBODY expects you to speak that God-awful language just like their sainted mathers, because Mom only spoke it when she was mad at them, using what little she picked up from Gramma. It’s an English-speaking land, FFS, and they learned Irish from a book, same as you.
To paraphrase bienville:
Just thought I’d point out that the Persian language is called Persian (when speaking English), not Farsi.
Of course, the Persian language word for the Persian language is Farsi but since the rest of the post was written in English…
Italo-Celtic is a thing. Italic and Celtic formed a node together in the Indo-European family tree. Italic and Celtic split off from each other later than they split off from the rest of IE. Spanish is an Italic language, so that’d be the first angle I’d check in comparing Irish and Spanish. They are somewhat more closely related to each other than to other branches of IE.
There’s also the legend of the ancient Milesians, who lived in Spain before moving to Ireland, where they became the Goidelic Irish people. Which is borne out by Y-chromosome DNA haplotype studies, at least in the broad outlines.
Living in Ireland, that statistic seems an exaggerated exaggeration, since I saw my (native Irish) wife ticking that same box in the last census form 4 weeks ago and she wouldn’t be able to order a slice of bread in a shop in Gaelic - in Ireland. She might as well have ticked, that she can speak German, Chinese or Spanish for all the Gaelic she knows.
The language is refereed to as Gaelic to the Irish, but also Irish to the Irish. The term is interchangeable as water vs H2O.
There are areas which are called Gaeltacht, meaning they are pure Gaelic speakers.
As a German I can speak to the people living there in English and they respond to me in fluent English like anyone else in Ireland.
However, if my wife tries to speak to the same person in English, they pretend not to not understand English. It’s funny in a way.
It’s reasonably common to see the language called Farsi in English. I just Googled on both words. There are about a third as many hits for “Farsi” as there are for “Persian”, and many of the hits for “Persian” are for the word used as an adjective.
I guess it depends on whether you are a prescriptivist or descriptivist, no?
Is this the consensus view, or is there still controversy about it? I thought it was still debatable, but I’d defer to your expert understanding.
Ask people from Iran. They express a strong preference for the name of their language being Persian in English. It had been named Persian for centuries and didn’t need a new name.
I have not seen any evidence to cast doubt on Italo-Celtic, but the evidence for it is pretty convincing to me. My own Italo-Celtic ancestry doesn’t bias me a bit. 
The fact that they want the name for their language in English to be Persian doesn’t mean that it is the name. According to the Wikipedia entry, there are three varieties of the language - Farsi, Dari, and Tajiki. These are, respectively, the varieties spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, and (Tajikistan and Uzbekistan). No, I didn’t know that before just now either:
Well, that could be because they don’t sell bread by the slice. You have to buy the whole pan. 
But, yes, the census figures are self-reported, and they may be a bit rubbery.
I disagree. When speaking English, Irish people invariably name the language as “Irish”. “Gaelic” (pronounced “gallic”) is the name of a closely-related language spoken in Scotland. “Gaelic” (pronounced “gaylic”) is an adjective referring to indigenous Irish people or culture, mostly in a historical context to contrast, e.g. Gaelic society with Norman society or English society.
Anyone calling the Irish language “Gaelic” is likely to be not Irish themselves.
Only tangentially apropos, but interesting nonetheless: Up into the nineteenth century, Scottish Gaelic was spoken by a large community of Highland emigrants and their descendants living along the Cape Fear River valley in eastern North Carolina. They even had a Gaelic-language press, in what is now Fayetteville, NC. Most of them, being Loyalists, left after the Revolution; but the Toronto newspaper An Gaidheal maintained a subscription agency in Lumberton until 1871. I can tell you from personal experience that there are still a lot of Macleans, Macleods, Darrochs, Reids, and other Scots names to be found in that part of the state.
But Gallic is French. Are you suggesting my wife’s severally sainted ancestors are French, like common Englishmen? Because that would be GREAT!
Note to young marrieds: Study Game Theory because it applies to you.
No, it’s more confusing that that. The Gauls were the (Celtic) inhabitants of what is now France and they spoke a (Celtic) language which we call Gaulish. The Romans conquered and settled Gaul and the indigenous population largely adopted Latin or Latin-related languages which in time evolved into French, except in the extreme North West where the (Celtic) language of Breton survived. Although the bulk of the population now speaks a romance language, it’s likely that the bulk of their ancestry is Celtic rather than Roman.
Right. Then the Norsemen came along (from the North, naturally; they were from Scandinavia) and established themselves in the part of France which is named after them (Normandy). They adopted the French language and in due course conquered England and established a Norman monarchy, and introduced a Norman aristocracy which partly (but only partly) supplanted the native English aristocracy. They also introduced the French language at court, and for official purposes. But the population below the aristocracy was not much affected; there were no “common” Norman settlers to speak.
So, “common Englishmen” are not French at all. They may have a little amount of Norman ancestry, but that originates in Scandinavia; it just passed through France, picking up the language en route, on its way to England. The English language is somewhat influenced by the French language, but that’s about as far as it goes.
The primary meaning of “Gallic” is “pertaining to the Gauls”, and it usually refers to Gaulish culture, in distinction from the French culture which superseded it. But it is sometimes used as a rhetorical or jocose synonym for “French”.
Not quite. Breton is the language brought over from Britain during the Middle Ages-- not some remnant of Gaulish*. It’s not particularly close to Gaulish, although both are Celtic languages.
*Perhaps you didn’t mean that, but you post reads that way.