I confess, I did mean that. Thanks for fighting my ignorance.
So, do we know very much at all about Gaulish? Does it have any descendants that we can point to?
Consensus, though there is still a minority of linguists in the field who don’t accept it. It was not the consensus in the 20th century, but evidence had been pointing in that direction for a long time.
There are quite a lot of features that point to the connection, but most aren’t recognizable to the speakers of modern languages. Passive forms in -r, for example. The phonetic changes tend to make cognates difficult to spot, for example:
Irish íasc is cognate with Latin piscis. (Celtic languages lost Indo-European *p)
Welsh haul is cognate with Latin sol.
As for Gaulish, we know quite a lot. Other than perhaps influencing the form Breton took (and that is very much NOT a consensus point of view), it has not survived. French, especially French dialects, has quite a few Gaulish words, but most of the Gaulish survivals are place names.
Let’s use the term “English” as an analogy. English encompasses a variety of dialects at this point, and it’s correct to refer to any of them as “English”. However, it is also correct to refer to “British English”, “American English”, “Indian English”, “Australian English”, and so on.
Likewise, “Gaelic” refers to a group of related dialects/languages, and it’s correct to refer to any of them as “Gaelic”. It is also correct to refer to “Irish Gaelic” or “Scots Gaelic”. It correct to refer to Irish Gaelic as “Irish” just as you can refer to American English as “American”.
Exact customs in referring to the language are going to vary from place to place. In Ireland it makes sense you’d have people refer to “English” and “Irish”. In the US, however, saying someone speaks Irish might be confusing as Irish English might also be referred to as Irish. So, in some situations being more explicit about the language used (Irish Gaelic vs. Irish English) is needed to avoid confusion.
Not a linguist, and not a Spanish speaker, but both Irish and French have numbering conventions that are vigesimal, that is, base 20, as opposed to the more usual Indo-European base 10. The vigesimal thing seems to be a feature of Celtic languages.
Barry Cunliffe & other scholars have proposed a different story than the Celtic languages as the last gasp of the Indo-European expansion from the East. But your second paragraph illustrates one of the options now discussed. There’s a heinously expensive series called Celtic From The West.
From the Amazon page on the first volume:
Can you clarify? You say we know w a lot, but then the follow-on sentences seem to imply we don’t know very much. Was Gaulish ever written down, and if so any surviving passages?
Yes. It was certainly written down, and we do have inscriptions, mostly short ones. We don’t have any narratives. Most of the evidence is names: personal names, divine names, and place names, but we have enough to reconstruct the case system for nouns, a lot of the forms for verbs, the forms for demonstrative pronouns, and take a stab at word order (Gaulish wasn’t VSO as the modern Celtic languages are). It helps that Gaulish is still somewhat close to Insular Celtic (think German and Norwegian close), which allows analogies to fill out the patterns. I don’t know how many words we have, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear a thousand. I would be surprised to hear 2000. (Vocabulary is gleaned from inscriptions, Classical accounts, and survivals—probably the best-known is the English word “car.” Latin carrus, “four-wheeled carriage,” is a borrowing from Gaulish carros. Alouette, “lark,” is also from Gaulish. So even most English-speaking kids know at least two words from Gaulish.
I should add that Gaulish names are like Greek and Germanic ones, where they’re mostly compounds of two ordinary words, so a name like Vercingetorix brings you rix, “king” (cognate w/ Latin rēx), and vercingeto-. ver- is a prefix cognate with Latin super, and cingeto- is probably cingetos, which is usually translated as “warrior,” on analogy with the Irish cognate verb cingid “steps, paces.” (The logic is that that’s what infantry do.) I suppose it could mean “King Superhiker,” but in any case it brings us three words, two of which are common in other names and whose meaning is clear.
Very cool Thanks!
I have never once heard an Irish person speaking to another Irish person refer to the language as ‘Gaelic’. It just doesn’t happen.
I might possibly call it ‘Gaelic’ if I was speaking to a foreigner, just on the assumption that that might be clearer to them, so people may have called it ‘Gaelic’ in conversation with you. And Irish people do refer to the language as ‘Gaeilge’, the Irish for ‘Irish [language]’, even when we’re speaking English - ‘The kids’ Gaeilge is coming along grand,’ that kind of thing - so possibly you could have misheard that?
Same experience here.
On the “Gaelic” vs. “Irish” thing—Broomstick expressed it perfectly. In American English, “Gaelic” refers to the most widely-spoken of the Gaelic languages, Irish Gaelic. It’s not wrong. It’s also not the preferred use in Ireland or, usually, among Americans who learn Irish Gaelic, but that doesn’t make it incorrect.
It’s like pronouncing Celtic as “Seltic”—not preferred, not done by Celticists, but not wrong either.
Even Celticists agree that “Seltic” is correct when naming a sports team!
I’ll respectfully disagree. In Ireland the language is normally referred to as Irish.
I read somewhere that ancient inscriptions can be categorised as Celtic or Italic by the form of the word for “bull” - tavros indicates Italic; tarvos Celtic.
A striking commonality between Irish and Spanish is the use of two verbs for “to be”: es/is for essence and està/tá for condition. I remember some Spanish students at my school noticing that the phrase “Conas atá tú?” meaning “how are you” is similar in form to Spanish “¿Cómo estás tú?” (especially since these young malagueños didn’t pronounce their ss).
Correct (using <v> to represent /u/), though there are exceptions. Galatian Deiotaros is Celtic, “God’s bull,” but you can’t tell from the form -taros itself.
Yes; the tá / está forms are cognate with the verb that becomes stand / stood in English, which in Celtic and Italic developed into a specialized meaning of “be”. One of the terrors to English-speakers learning Celtic languages is getting the distinctions straight.
Thanks Broomstick. I just wanted to pick up on your point that: “English dominance is a custom, not a mandate.” Why then is English compulsory in virtually every of American life? How will the US maintain English if it’s not mandatory? English is the official language of the US.
sorry. I meant to write that English is compulsory in virtually all US institutions.
There is no official language of the United States, according to the U.S. government. While almost every language in the world is spoken in the United States, Spanish, Chinese, French and German are among the most frequently spoken non-English languages. Ninety percent of the U.S. population speaks and understands at least some English, and most official business is conducted in English.
Thank you all.
Custom and tradition.
Strictly speaking, the US is not required to maintain English as the default. English has an enormous advantage by being so dominant currently but there is no legal requirement to maintain it. If, for example, the majority of the US decides Spanish should be the default that could happen. It would take a generation or two, but it’s possible even if not probable.
Which, let’s be honest, does scare the crap out of some people.
Only in practice, not in law.
Does Canada have the same policy?
No.
and here
As I understand it, the gist is that Canada does have two official languages, English and French. The federal government is obligated to provide services in both languages. The provincial governments are largely monolingual, with exceptions. They are not obligated to provide services in both languages. Additionally, some parts of Canada recognize indigenous languages as official, which means that the languages receive support from the government, but the obligation to provide services in those languages is not as extensive.
Edit: And Canadians do just fine being monolingual—the government’s policy is to promote the two languages, not bilingualism, though the economic advantages of bilingualism mean that a large proportion of Canadians are comfortable in both official languages.