McWhorter, if I recall correctly, also points to the grammatical structure of what we call present progressive verbs as influence from the Celtish languages. E.g., I am reading this book as opposed to I read this book, which McWhorter explains is how other Germanic languages phrase it. (In his book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue)
In this same thread, could the contemporary Scots Gaelic construction of "tha mi a' <verb>" be cognate with the slightly archaic "I am a-<verb>ing" in English?
A very similar form of the present progressive independently evolved in Spanish.
I have an alternative pet theory that languages that can form an adjective out of a verb based on what an agent is doing are likely to eventually use that adjective to form a present progressive.
The blue bird -> The bird is blue
The singing bird -> The bird is singing
I am using “singing” as an adjective above, but it is not a conceptual leap to go from using it as an adjective to using it as a verb to describe what the bird is doing.
I've also heard pro-verb in linguistics classes for things like "do." It's a great word, but it's awkward to write since everyone thinks you're talking about proverbs...
I often wonder this. I've tried to learn Welsh, and it's so different from English that it seems bizarre that the languages exist side by side (obviously not always comfortably, I should add).
I was talking to an academic about Y- and mitochondrial haplogroups (it was to do with the Mutiny on the Bounty!). I mentioned my partner's Y-haplogroup, and they were excited because it's very rare in Britain and is associated with the Roman occupation.
But! My partner's father was American, from a tri-racial Appalachian group called the Melungeons. They're thought to have Mediterranean and north African ancestry.
So - unless the Y DNA got to Britain via a different route - there are some people walking around Britain today whose patrilineal ancestry goes back to the Mediterranean, courtesy of the Romans. *Cue a Roman looking a bit shifty as Jerry Springer reads out the DNA results.* It's not surprising in some respects, seeing as the Romans were here for centuries, and yet at school, we tend to learn that the Romans left nothing behind but some ruins. Not so! There's a little bit of Roman still here!
The reason for mentioning that here is because I'd be interested to know where in Britain that Y haplogroup is found (going back a few generations). Is it in the "Celtic fringes", which would back up the idea that the Romano-Britons ran for the hills, or is it in the other areas that saw more invasion from the continent, which would back up the idea that the Germanic arrivals were more gentle than previously advertised?
"Cwm" appears in placenames in the south-west as "-combe". There's a cider you can buy in Somerset called "Buttcombe", which makes me chuckle. I'm sure you know about the River Avon? "Afon" is "river" in Welsh. So it just says "River River". It's used as an example of how English just doesn't have any Celtic, but... Couldn't it mean that it shows clearly that it does, because whoever called it the Avon was calling it a river, after all? See also River Stour - there's several of them in England, to the point that it might be another Celtic survival that has something to do with rivers or water.
Genetics is definitely playing a role in how the question of "just how gentle" is being re-evaluated. I only wish I were more adept at reading that literature so that I could weave it into the story without making too many mistakes. And, funnily enough, the "River Avon" thing is going to make an appearance in Saturday's post. Usually the way that fact (and similar ones like Penhill 'hill hill') is interpreted is that whichever group called it "River Avon" would not have known any Celtic because otherwise it would just be "Avon." River names in particular are very "sticky" though, and can often be traced back many thousands of years, so maybe the first generation understood what it meant but their descendants did not, hence "River Avon."
Possibly, part of the answer to the rarity of Roman DNA is that most of those who were called, or called themselves, Roman were not actually from Rome or even from Latium. In the West, most of the soldiers and officials especially in later times were probably Germanic. As early as AD 212, the Emperor Caracalla issued an edict which declared all free men within the empire to be Roman citizens.
I caught this reading Laura Spinney's Proto - she at least seems to think Old English acquired a Celtic lilt post-settlement, but she mentions it in a very brief, offhand way. I would be pretty interested in following this thread.
"Some British Celts fled north and west to escape them, implanting Welsh and Cornish where they found refuge, but the majority took up the immigrants’ language and, speaking German with a Celtic lilt, invented Old English."
- Laura Spinney, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, p175
Proto does often invoke substrate influence (i.e. Celtic in the case of Old English) as a major, if not the major, factor in the path that particular languages take in their differentiation. In the case of OE it's definitely a minority opinion. If you're interested to read more, check out the special journal issue I cite in the article "Re-evaluating the Celtic Hypothesis." It's got lots of perspectives on the question.
Thank you, Colin, for this fascinating piece. Regarding your comment in support of the Celtic Hypothesis, that texts “written in these early centuries . . . were produced by an educated class” that shunned Celtic influence: In doing some geneological research on my Welsh ancestors, I see marriage registers before 1850 generally signed with a mark, rather than a signature. If Celts were generally illiterate, that suggests that do-support entered English via speech rather than text, which may expain the absence of evidence.
Thanks, Bruce! And we know from how we write today that we don't always write exactly how we speak, especially in formal contexts. So things can bubble under the surface, so to speak, for a long time.
When I was young I had an interest in rock climbing. A relative gave me a copy of Alan Blackshaw’s “Mountaineering”, a mountaineering text from about 1965. As a source for climbing knowledge, it was quite obsolete (his “classic abseil” technique would give you classic rope burn, if it didn’t kill you). What delighted me about the book however, was he included in the appendix a glossary of Gaelic, Norse, and Welsh words in British place-names. It was a fascinating glimpse into another world.
That is a thing of beauty! I have fond memories of annoying friends on a trip through the Scottish highlands with my place name book. "Oh, look, this town's name comes from—"
I imagine there was some real violent displacement in some places and some amicable mixing in other places. I imagine England as a patchwork quilt in this respect. And then the north and east gets double dipped in Danelaw.
I thought I read there was a big dip in population drop after the Romans left and prior to the English. Disease and the like. I wonder whether many of the natives didn't just embrace the new way whilst other headed west. It is curious tho.
And it is cool if Cornish influenced English in that way but it does sound like a much later thing
I think also the degree of urbanization may have been a factor. Although it may interest you to know that there's also a cottage industry trying to find Celtic influence in French parallel to the one we have for English!
Yes. An interesting case seems to be 'ruche' (beehive) that come from Celtic (with maybe older roots) and 'miel' (honey) that comes from latin. Probably following the same kind of logic that gave 'pig' and 'pork' in English.
I think of that too. They're teaching it to us in grade school?! Even in the US. The translation was a little softened but my mother was fluent in (Parisian) French and broke it to me gently.
I know it's originally from Quebec, so that bit of Celtic went a long way.
(I am, however, much better at singing the same tune with the words of "Little Bunny Foo Foo".)
For the same process in a much more historically attested period, could look at Scotland from 1100: gaelic everywhere (just about) when David I invited (french speaking) Normans with their (largely northern Danelaw version) English speaking extended households to take up lands and establish Royal Burghs. The language of these incomers became the language of status, eventually going by the name Scots (rather than Inglis), and extending over most of the country. It incorporated almost no gaelic: status seems super important.
That transition between Gaelic-based language in the northern part of the island (Scotland) and the southern part of the island (England) seems important here: how far south did the Gaelic language go on the island? How was it replaced there? Were there multiple mutually-independent languages on the island? It's probably big enough that were separate influences on different parts.
Gaelic moved south only slowly. Unknown when it displaced Pictish north of the Forth-Clyde line: could have been happening anyway, but likely accelerated by the Vikings pushing the Gaels inland from Argyll and the Hebrides. In any case, by 900 or so we have the unified, Gaelic speaking, Kingdom of Alba north of the Forth-Clyde line. South of this in the west is the Brittonic/Cumbric speaking Kingdom of Strathclyde, and in the east, the northern parts of the English speaking Kingdom of Northumbria (though it's too been shattered by the Vikings). Alba advanced into Strathclyde and the Lothians over the next couple of centuries and it seems Gaelic replaced Cumbric pretty readily in the west. In the east too there was plenty of Gaelic (see placenames in and around Edinburgh for evidence) and there is even evidence of Gaelic making inroads into the Borders by 1100-ish. But this is the high water mark: Malcolm Canmore (King of Scots 1058-1093) married Margaret of Wessex (fleeing the Normans) who started Anglifying things, and their son David 1st (1124 to 1153) invited the Normans in. From then on Gaelic was in retreat
Is this theory original to John McWhorter? That’s where I first encountered it too, and it seems like his kind of thing (when you’re a creole specialist everything…looks like a nail?) but I wasn’t sure.
The basic idea of the Celtic Hypothesis is a relatively old one. McWhorter cites Keller (1925) as the first formulation, but my impression is that it was the kind of thing that was casually proposed here and there by Victorian and Edwardian scholars without being explicitly argued for until Keller.
Keller, Wolfgang (1925). Keltisches im Englischen Verbum. In Anglica: Untersuchungen zur englischen Philologie, vol. I: Sprache und Kulturgeschichte, 55–66. Leipzig: Mayer & Müller.
I'm in the hebribes. I always assumed we were speaking Gaelic when the Norse arrived. But then I read we were still building our houses etc in a Pictish style. Maybe we had a gaelo-pictish thing going on. Anyway Gaelic ultimately asserted/ reasserted itself albeit with a lot of Norse loanwords
My ancestors on one side came from the Hebrides, and the amount of Norse in their names (and the names of the places where they lived) shocked me, that is, until I learned the history!
Oh wow cool! 😀 Yes lots of Norse place names here. I'm in a 'Laxdale'. A salmon river runs by. Interestingly all the Norse place names crowd round the coast and sea-lochs. The interior, the mountains and lochs are mostly Gaelic
Skye is the only place I'm nostalgic for even though I was only there for a week or so. But I'd been on a bus tour of the whole country and was forever spotting Gaelic and Pictish place names.
Domhnall, say feasgar math to the Innse Gall for me.
"Wan" has a cognate in Frisian, so it probably dates back to the period when English (or rather its ancestor) was spoken on the continent, rather than being a loanword from an ancestor of Welsh. But, from my research, its etymology past that point is unclear. I've seen connections made with the verb "wane" but I think its ultimate origin is up for grabs. If it is connected to "wane" then there is likely a deep connection with Welsh "gwan" 'weak' and Latin "vanus" 'empty.'
I mentioned this in a comment on a previous post. John Lambshead wrote a book where he suggests that the Anglo Saxons took over land that was highly depopulated at least in the Romainzed South and East, which is why there are few connections between Celtic and Old English
McWhorter, if I recall correctly, also points to the grammatical structure of what we call present progressive verbs as influence from the Celtish languages. E.g., I am reading this book as opposed to I read this book, which McWhorter explains is how other Germanic languages phrase it. (In his book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue)
Right, that's another one!
In this same thread, could the contemporary Scots Gaelic construction of "tha mi a' <verb>" be cognate with the slightly archaic "I am a-<verb>ing" in English?
That's how I translate it in my own head.
A very similar form of the present progressive independently evolved in Spanish.
I have an alternative pet theory that languages that can form an adjective out of a verb based on what an agent is doing are likely to eventually use that adjective to form a present progressive.
The blue bird -> The bird is blue
The singing bird -> The bird is singing
I am using “singing” as an adjective above, but it is not a conceptual leap to go from using it as an adjective to using it as a verb to describe what the bird is doing.
Strangely, this did not happen in French.
Extremely interesting! I call 'do' a proverb by analogy with pronoun. It seems to be disfavored by the grammarrhoids.
Normal English: Do you have a car? No, I don't have a car.
Grammarrhoid: Have you a car? No, I haven't a car.
I wondered how English acquired this unusual feature. Now I know!
I've also heard pro-verb in linguistics classes for things like "do." It's a great word, but it's awkward to write since everyone thinks you're talking about proverbs...
Yup. Not a good word for communication, but good for internal thinking.
I often wonder this. I've tried to learn Welsh, and it's so different from English that it seems bizarre that the languages exist side by side (obviously not always comfortably, I should add).
I was talking to an academic about Y- and mitochondrial haplogroups (it was to do with the Mutiny on the Bounty!). I mentioned my partner's Y-haplogroup, and they were excited because it's very rare in Britain and is associated with the Roman occupation.
But! My partner's father was American, from a tri-racial Appalachian group called the Melungeons. They're thought to have Mediterranean and north African ancestry.
So - unless the Y DNA got to Britain via a different route - there are some people walking around Britain today whose patrilineal ancestry goes back to the Mediterranean, courtesy of the Romans. *Cue a Roman looking a bit shifty as Jerry Springer reads out the DNA results.* It's not surprising in some respects, seeing as the Romans were here for centuries, and yet at school, we tend to learn that the Romans left nothing behind but some ruins. Not so! There's a little bit of Roman still here!
The reason for mentioning that here is because I'd be interested to know where in Britain that Y haplogroup is found (going back a few generations). Is it in the "Celtic fringes", which would back up the idea that the Romano-Britons ran for the hills, or is it in the other areas that saw more invasion from the continent, which would back up the idea that the Germanic arrivals were more gentle than previously advertised?
"Cwm" appears in placenames in the south-west as "-combe". There's a cider you can buy in Somerset called "Buttcombe", which makes me chuckle. I'm sure you know about the River Avon? "Afon" is "river" in Welsh. So it just says "River River". It's used as an example of how English just doesn't have any Celtic, but... Couldn't it mean that it shows clearly that it does, because whoever called it the Avon was calling it a river, after all? See also River Stour - there's several of them in England, to the point that it might be another Celtic survival that has something to do with rivers or water.
Genetics is definitely playing a role in how the question of "just how gentle" is being re-evaluated. I only wish I were more adept at reading that literature so that I could weave it into the story without making too many mistakes. And, funnily enough, the "River Avon" thing is going to make an appearance in Saturday's post. Usually the way that fact (and similar ones like Penhill 'hill hill') is interpreted is that whichever group called it "River Avon" would not have known any Celtic because otherwise it would just be "Avon." River names in particular are very "sticky" though, and can often be traced back many thousands of years, so maybe the first generation understood what it meant but their descendants did not, hence "River Avon."
IIRC there's some place in England called "Hill Hill Hill" thanks to invasions.
Tor-pen-how (pronounced Trepenna) near Wigton in Cumberland. ‘Three Hills’ ice cream is made there.
Possibly, part of the answer to the rarity of Roman DNA is that most of those who were called, or called themselves, Roman were not actually from Rome or even from Latium. In the West, most of the soldiers and officials especially in later times were probably Germanic. As early as AD 212, the Emperor Caracalla issued an edict which declared all free men within the empire to be Roman citizens.
I caught this reading Laura Spinney's Proto - she at least seems to think Old English acquired a Celtic lilt post-settlement, but she mentions it in a very brief, offhand way. I would be pretty interested in following this thread.
"Some British Celts fled north and west to escape them, implanting Welsh and Cornish where they found refuge, but the majority took up the immigrants’ language and, speaking German with a Celtic lilt, invented Old English."
- Laura Spinney, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, p175
Proto does often invoke substrate influence (i.e. Celtic in the case of Old English) as a major, if not the major, factor in the path that particular languages take in their differentiation. In the case of OE it's definitely a minority opinion. If you're interested to read more, check out the special journal issue I cite in the article "Re-evaluating the Celtic Hypothesis." It's got lots of perspectives on the question.
Thank you, Colin, for this fascinating piece. Regarding your comment in support of the Celtic Hypothesis, that texts “written in these early centuries . . . were produced by an educated class” that shunned Celtic influence: In doing some geneological research on my Welsh ancestors, I see marriage registers before 1850 generally signed with a mark, rather than a signature. If Celts were generally illiterate, that suggests that do-support entered English via speech rather than text, which may expain the absence of evidence.
Thanks, Bruce! And we know from how we write today that we don't always write exactly how we speak, especially in formal contexts. So things can bubble under the surface, so to speak, for a long time.
When I was young I had an interest in rock climbing. A relative gave me a copy of Alan Blackshaw’s “Mountaineering”, a mountaineering text from about 1965. As a source for climbing knowledge, it was quite obsolete (his “classic abseil” technique would give you classic rope burn, if it didn’t kill you). What delighted me about the book however, was he included in the appendix a glossary of Gaelic, Norse, and Welsh words in British place-names. It was a fascinating glimpse into another world.
That is a thing of beauty! I have fond memories of annoying friends on a trip through the Scottish highlands with my place name book. "Oh, look, this town's name comes from—"
Same here! All that lovely Gaelic, and rogue bits of Pictish.
I imagine there was some real violent displacement in some places and some amicable mixing in other places. I imagine England as a patchwork quilt in this respect. And then the north and east gets double dipped in Danelaw.
I thought I read there was a big dip in population drop after the Romans left and prior to the English. Disease and the like. I wonder whether many of the natives didn't just embrace the new way whilst other headed west. It is curious tho.
And it is cool if Cornish influenced English in that way but it does sound like a much later thing
And still, Gallo-Romam which later gave French is mostly latin. There are not so many Celtic words in French.
But it seems that Romano-Briton stayed mostly Briton. The distance maybe...
I think also the degree of urbanization may have been a factor. Although it may interest you to know that there's also a cottage industry trying to find Celtic influence in French parallel to the one we have for English!
Yes. An interesting case seems to be 'ruche' (beehive) that come from Celtic (with maybe older roots) and 'miel' (honey) that comes from latin. Probably following the same kind of logic that gave 'pig' and 'pork' in English.
The one I always think of is "alouette" 'lark,' which is also a popular (and disturbing, if you look up the lyrics) folk song here in Canada.
I didn't know the song was from Canada. Everyone knows it in France.
Didn't know 'alouette' as Celtic origin either.
😊
I think of that too. They're teaching it to us in grade school?! Even in the US. The translation was a little softened but my mother was fluent in (Parisian) French and broke it to me gently.
I know it's originally from Quebec, so that bit of Celtic went a long way.
(I am, however, much better at singing the same tune with the words of "Little Bunny Foo Foo".)
For the same process in a much more historically attested period, could look at Scotland from 1100: gaelic everywhere (just about) when David I invited (french speaking) Normans with their (largely northern Danelaw version) English speaking extended households to take up lands and establish Royal Burghs. The language of these incomers became the language of status, eventually going by the name Scots (rather than Inglis), and extending over most of the country. It incorporated almost no gaelic: status seems super important.
I was thinking about the same thing. The evolution of Scots fascinates me.
That transition between Gaelic-based language in the northern part of the island (Scotland) and the southern part of the island (England) seems important here: how far south did the Gaelic language go on the island? How was it replaced there? Were there multiple mutually-independent languages on the island? It's probably big enough that were separate influences on different parts.
Gaelic moved south only slowly. Unknown when it displaced Pictish north of the Forth-Clyde line: could have been happening anyway, but likely accelerated by the Vikings pushing the Gaels inland from Argyll and the Hebrides. In any case, by 900 or so we have the unified, Gaelic speaking, Kingdom of Alba north of the Forth-Clyde line. South of this in the west is the Brittonic/Cumbric speaking Kingdom of Strathclyde, and in the east, the northern parts of the English speaking Kingdom of Northumbria (though it's too been shattered by the Vikings). Alba advanced into Strathclyde and the Lothians over the next couple of centuries and it seems Gaelic replaced Cumbric pretty readily in the west. In the east too there was plenty of Gaelic (see placenames in and around Edinburgh for evidence) and there is even evidence of Gaelic making inroads into the Borders by 1100-ish. But this is the high water mark: Malcolm Canmore (King of Scots 1058-1093) married Margaret of Wessex (fleeing the Normans) who started Anglifying things, and their son David 1st (1124 to 1153) invited the Normans in. From then on Gaelic was in retreat
That's a very apt parallel!
Is this theory original to John McWhorter? That’s where I first encountered it too, and it seems like his kind of thing (when you’re a creole specialist everything…looks like a nail?) but I wasn’t sure.
The basic idea of the Celtic Hypothesis is a relatively old one. McWhorter cites Keller (1925) as the first formulation, but my impression is that it was the kind of thing that was casually proposed here and there by Victorian and Edwardian scholars without being explicitly argued for until Keller.
Keller, Wolfgang (1925). Keltisches im Englischen Verbum. In Anglica: Untersuchungen zur englischen Philologie, vol. I: Sprache und Kulturgeschichte, 55–66. Leipzig: Mayer & Müller.
Thank you!
I'm in the hebribes. I always assumed we were speaking Gaelic when the Norse arrived. But then I read we were still building our houses etc in a Pictish style. Maybe we had a gaelo-pictish thing going on. Anyway Gaelic ultimately asserted/ reasserted itself albeit with a lot of Norse loanwords
My ancestors on one side came from the Hebrides, and the amount of Norse in their names (and the names of the places where they lived) shocked me, that is, until I learned the history!
Oh wow cool! 😀 Yes lots of Norse place names here. I'm in a 'Laxdale'. A salmon river runs by. Interestingly all the Norse place names crowd round the coast and sea-lochs. The interior, the mountains and lochs are mostly Gaelic
Of course Vikings are near the water!
Skye is the only place I'm nostalgic for even though I was only there for a week or so. But I'd been on a bus tour of the whole country and was forever spotting Gaelic and Pictish place names.
Domhnall, say feasgar math to the Innse Gall for me.
Does "wan" count as a loan word? English = 'pale', Welsh = 'weak'. It looks as if it should be one.
"Wan" has a cognate in Frisian, so it probably dates back to the period when English (or rather its ancestor) was spoken on the continent, rather than being a loanword from an ancestor of Welsh. But, from my research, its etymology past that point is unclear. I've seen connections made with the verb "wane" but I think its ultimate origin is up for grabs. If it is connected to "wane" then there is likely a deep connection with Welsh "gwan" 'weak' and Latin "vanus" 'empty.'
Very interesting & enjoyable, thank you.
I mentioned this in a comment on a previous post. John Lambshead wrote a book where he suggests that the Anglo Saxons took over land that was highly depopulated at least in the Romainzed South and East, which is why there are few connections between Celtic and Old English
https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Roman-Britain-Speak-English-ebook/dp/B0B3KWTSYG/
That's an interesting hypothesis! I'd be curious to look into it.
Know I now the origin of English do support?
I’d say so.
Know I now the origin of English do support?
I’d say so.