Celtic (redirected from Keltic)

Celtic, Keltic

a branch of the Indo-European family of languages that includes Gaelic, Welsh, and Breton, still spoken in parts of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Brittany. Modern Celtic is divided into the Brythonic (southern) and Goidelic (northern) groups

---

Celtic 

languages of the Indo-European family. They include Gaulish, Celtiberian, Irish, Manx, Gaelic (Scottish), Welsh (Cymric), Cornish, and Breton. The Gaulish languages were extinct by the fifth century A.D.; Celtiberian, spoken in the western and central Iberian Peninsula, died out somewhat earlier. Cornish was last spoken at the end of the 18th century. Manx is spoken by only a few people living on the Isle of Man (Great Britain).

The Celtic languages are usually divided into three groups— Continental (Gaulish and Celtiberian), Brythonic (Welsh, Cornish, and Breton), and Goidelic (Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx). The Continental and Brythonic branches are related to the P-Celts, and the Goidelic branch is related to the Qu-Celts, who preserved the consonant *q^u. The disintegration of the Brythonic branch into separate languages took place in the sixth through eighth centuries and of Goidelic, in the 12th and 13th centuries. Inscriptions in Gaulish and Celtiberian indicate their archaic character.

In the modern Celtic languages, as a result of accentual factors, the final syllables have been dropped. In Irish the case system has been partially preserved. Differences in the position of stress led to an opposition in the forms of the verb in Old Irish. In the modern Celtic languages, word order in a sentence is fixed as predicate—subject—object. But in the oldest examples of Irish the verb may also be in final position.

Studies, especially by the Irish scholar O. Bergin, the American scholar C. Watkins, and W. Meid of the Federal Republic of Germany, have shown that many characteristics of Celtic languages formerly considered to be the result of the influence of a substratum (for example, in the works of the German scholar J. Pokorny and H. Wagner of Switzerland) may be regarded as archaisms. Thus, the phenomenon of infixation and suffixation of pronouns has exact parallels in Hittite, Tocharian, Lithuanian, and other Indo-European langages. Numerous alternations of initial consonants in words in the Celtic languages originated in the course of what has been called the accentual revolution (changes in the stress system) during the fifth through seventh centuries A.D. and took on important syntactical functions.

REFERENCES

Lewis, H., and H. Pedersen. Kratkaia sravnitel’naia grammatika kel’tskikh iazykov. Moscow, 1954. (Translated from English.)
Pedersen, H. Vergleichende Grammatik der keltischen Sprachen, 2 vols. Göttingen, 1909–13.
Thurneysen, R. A Grammar of Old Irish. Dublin, 1946.

A. A. KOROLEV