Questions tagged [celtic]
The Celtic branch of the Indo-European family which includes among its modern members Irish and Welsh.
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Does French retain more Celtic words than English does?
English has very few words left from the Ancient British. I am wondering if the language of the Gauls suffered much the same fate, or whether there are significantly more Celtic substrate words ...
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Lingustics Problem about Breton Number System
Historical Background on Breton
Breton is a language spoken in Brittany, France. It is related to both English and French. Here are some numbers and rules:
Some Background on Breton number system
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What are these "unexplained similarities" between Celtic languages and languages from North Africa?
In the section "The linguistic relationship of Welsh" from the book "Modern Welsh: a comprehensive grammar" by Gareth King we can find the following quote:
Celtic also shows
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Is Welsh an isolating, an inflectional or an agglutinative language?
I saw that it can be classified both as an analytic and a synthetic langauage, so which one is it?
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Merger of perfect and aorist in Italic and Celtic
One of the common features of the Italic and Celtic branches is the merger of perfect and aorist. So, in the surviving "perfect" forms we find a mixture of old aorist stems and old perfect ...
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Are Germanic languages closer to Italo-Celtic languages or Balto-Slavic languages?
I ask because in some recent classifications, Italo-Celtic languages (like French, Spanish, Italian, Irish, and Breton), Balto-Slavic languages (like Lithuanian, Russian, Polish, and Serbo-Croat), and ...
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Did Common Brittonic use /ṽ/?
I heard on the Wikipedia article for Sindarin (which I admit is far from being the best source) that Common Brittonic, like Old Irish, had a nasalized v sound ṽ. Is this true? If so, are there any ...
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Status of Nordwestblock / Ancient Belgian hypothesis
What is the status of the Nordwestblock or Ancient Belgian hypothesis right now?
This hypothesis was proposed independently by two authors in the 1960ies (Kuhn and Gysseling) and is about an ...
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How did this soft mutation happened?
The mutations in the Welsh language were originated from elements that came before words and affected them etc.
How does the fact that a certain noun is the direct object of a sentence trigger a soft ...
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How did these feminine mutations originate in Welsh?
It is known that the celtic languages have mutations, for instance:
Welsh:
*transcription depicts North Welsh dialects
• normal form: Cymru [ˈkəmrɨ̞] (Wales);
• soft mutation: Gymru [ˈɡəmrɨ̞] (ex.: ...
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Excepting Romanian, is "Wales" ever translated/transliterated in modern languages with the same term as that meaning "Gaul" or "Gauls"?
I have noticed that in Romanian the name of Wales is Ţara Galilor, which literally means Country of the Gauls or "Gauls-land". I consider this not just unusual, something that is not present ...
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Bugarth - Celtic, Old Norse, both or neither?
The placename 'bugarth' or 'bugardie' in Shetland has be confused.
Normally for Shetland placenames I turn to Jakobsen who gives: bu stock of cattle on a farm from [Old Norse] bú; and gart an ...
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Relation between keltoi and galatai?
The ancient Greeks used both words and appeared to have originated both. The first form appears first in 517BC by Hecateus of Milietus. The word is still known in the 12th century AD where it's used ...
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Where did Irish "-acht" come from?
Modern Irish has a suffix -acht (allomorphs -ocht, -eacht, -cht, probably others) that forms abstract nouns. For example, beo "alive" → beocht "life, vital spirit".
Since we also see Scottish Gaelic -...
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Which Romance Language retains the most words from Celtic?
It is known that they were once the same language, Proto Italo-Celtic, however with the descendants of Latin and the remaining Celtic languages, which Romance Language retains the most influence from ...
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How different were proto Italic and proto Celtic?
The idea of mutual intelligibility is interesting, yet due to how the Urnfield culture that spoke proto Celtic just north of the Italian peninsula (and inside modern Bologna, Venice, and Milan) how ...
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The Indogermanic r-mediopassive and the Latin ending -mini from a broader perspective
This question is a follow-up to this question Latin passive endings: Why is -mini sticking out. The Latin 2nd person plural passive ending mini has attracted the attention of scholars for centuries, ...
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What was the dían type of old Irish verses?
Composing this type of poetic meter was mentioned as a skill obtained through the first year of education of filídh (old Irish poets) at foclóc rank.
Are there any reliable online resourses ...
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When did the Celtic languages die out in Spain?
I'm writing something about the Celtic languages of northwestern Europe when the Saxons came to Britain, and described a "continuous but loose-knit group of peoples in France and the British isles". A ...
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Were there any Celtic Languages being spoken in the early years of Rome?
I do not mean in Rome, however. I am asking what Celtic Languages existed or were created during the early years of Rome, if any existed at the time. This is for story writing purposes, specifically ...
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c- in Irish clann "offspring"
Irish clann "plant; offspring; child" (the source of English clan) is borrowed from Welsh plant with the same meanings, which is itself a borrowing of Latin planta. Why did Irish change the initial p ...
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How did French lose the Latin -v-? [duplicate]
[Source:] Loss of Latin -v- is regular in French in some situations (compare alleger from alleviare; neige from nivea; jeune from juvenis. A different sound evolution from the Latin word yielded ...
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What is the origin of Russian барин ['bа:rʲin]?
The word (pl. баре, ['bа:rʲe]) is roughly rendered into English as 'gentry' meaning 'a noble person without a position at imperial court'. The boyar is possibly not a cognate.
What surprises me the ...
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What is necessary to decide if Lusitanian is a Celtic language?
The Lusitanian language was almost certainly an Indo-European language, but whether or not it was a Celtic language is still uncertain. Some features, as the presence of the initial p- (as in porcom '...
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Are consonant mutations in Indo-European languages specific of the Celtic group?
Consonant mutations are a strong characteristic of the Celtic languages. An example in Breton would be:
Khaz /kaz/: cat
Ar c'haz /aʁ.xaz/: the cat
The /k/ is altered to /x/ after ar.
According ...
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