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60-792: Insular Celtic languages are the group of Celtic languages spoken in Brittany , Great Britain , Ireland , and the Isle of Man . All surviving Celtic languages are in the Insular group, including Breton, which is spoken on continental Europe in Brittany, France . The Continental Celtic languages , although once widely spoken in mainland Europe and in Anatolia , are extinct. Six Insular Celtic languages are extant (in all cases written and spoken) in two distinct groups: The Insular Celtic hypothesis

120-465: A Wati language wherein the correlating verb classes are presented below also by their imperative verbal endings -la, -∅, -ra and -wa respectively Ngarla , a member of the Ngayarda sub-family of languages has a binary conjugation system labelled: In the case of Ngarla, there is a notably strong correlation between conjugation class and transitivity, with transitive/ditransitive verbs falling in

180-629: A branch of the Indo-European language family , descended from Proto-Celtic . The term "Celtic" was first used to describe this language group by Edward Lhuyd in 1707, following Paul-Yves Pezron , who made the explicit link between the Celts described by classical writers and the Welsh and Breton languages. During the first millennium BC, Celtic languages were spoken across much of Europe and central Anatolia . Today, they are restricted to

240-466: A common Italo-Celtic subfamily. This hypothesis fell somewhat out of favour after reexamination by American linguist Calvert Watkins in 1966. Irrespectively, some scholars such as Ringe, Warnow and Taylor and many others have argued in favour of an Italo-Celtic grouping in 21st century theses. Although there are many differences between the individual Celtic languages, they do show many family resemblances. Examples: The lexical similarity between

300-586: A few Uralic and Australian Aboriginal languages , predicative adjectives and copular complements take affixes that are identical to those used on predicative verbs, but their negation is different. For example, in Turkish : Under negation, that becomes (negative affixes in bold): Therefore, the person agreement affixes used with predicative adjectives and nominals in Turkic languages are considered to be nonverbal in character. In some analyses, they are viewed as

360-515: A form of person agreement that is distinct from that used on ordinary predicative verbs . Although that is a form of conjugation in that it refers back to the person of the subject, it is not "verbal" because it always derives from pronouns that have become clitic to the nouns to which they refer. An example of nonverbal person agreement, along with contrasting verbal conjugation, can be found from Beja (person agreement affixes in bold): Another example can be found from Ket : In Turkic , and

420-418: A form of verbal takeover by a copular strategy. These common grammatical categories affect how verbs can be conjugated: Here are other factors that may affect conjugation: Indo-European languages usually inflect verbs for several grammatical categories in complex paradigms , although some, like English, have simplified verb conjugation to a large extent. Below is the conjugation of the verb to be in

480-535: A genitive construction similar to construct state , prepositions with fused inflected pronouns ("conjugated prepositions" or "prepositional pronouns"), and oblique relatives with pronoun copies. Such resemblances were noted as early as 1621 with regard to Welsh and the Hebrew language . The hypothesis that the Insular Celtic languages had features from an Afro-Asiatic substratum (Iberian and Berber languages)

540-505: A list of changes which affected both branches of Insular Celtic but for which there is no evidence that they should be dated to a putative Proto-Insular Celtic period. These are: The Insular Celtic verb shows a peculiar feature unknown in any other attested Indo-European language : verbs have different conjugational forms depending on whether they appear in absolute initial position in the sentence (Insular Celtic having verb–subject–object or VSO word order) or whether they are preceded by

600-508: A now lost substrate. This was suggested by Jongeling (2000). Ranko Matasović (2012) likewise argued that the "Insular Celtic languages were subject to strong influences from an unknown, presumably non-Indo-European substratum" and found the syntactic parallelisms between Insular Celtic and Afro-Asiatic languages to be "probably not accidental". He argued that their similarities arose from "a large linguistic macro-area, encompassing parts of NW Africa, as well as large parts of Western Europe, before

660-672: A particle -d (from an older * -t ). Continental Celtic languages cannot be shown to have any absolute/conjunct distinction. However, they seem to show only SVO and SOV word orders, as in other Indo-European languages. The absolute/conjunct distinction may thus be an artifact of the VSO word order that arose in Insular Celtic. Insular Celtic, unlike Continental Celtic , shares some structural characteristics with various Afro-Asiatic languages which are rare in other Indo-European languages. These similarities include verb–subject–object word order , singular verbs with plural post-verbal subjects,

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720-616: A preverbal particle . The situation is most robustly attested in Old Irish , but it has remained to some extent in Scottish Gaelic and traces of it are present in Middle Welsh as well. Forms that appear in sentence-initial position are called absolute , those that appear after a particle are called conjunct (see Dependent and independent verb forms for details). The paradigm of the present active indicative of

780-485: A rich literary tradition . The earliest specimens of written Celtic are Lepontic inscriptions from the 6th century BC in the Alps. Early Continental inscriptions used Italic and Paleohispanic scripts. Between the 4th and 8th centuries, Irish and Pictish were occasionally written in an original script, Ogham , but Latin script came to be used for all Celtic languages. Welsh has had a continuous literary tradition from

840-464: A semantically degraded form of * esti "is", while Schrijver (1994) has argued it is derived from the particle * eti "and then", which is attested in Gaulish. Schrijver's argument is supported and expanded by Schumacher (2004), who points towards further evidence, viz., typological parallels in non-Celtic languages, and especially a large number of verb forms in all Brythonic languages that contain

900-525: A similar verbal paradigm. Some historic verb forms are used by Shakespeare as slightly archaic or more formal variants ( I do , thou dost , he doth ) of the modern forms. Some languages with verbal agreement can leave certain subjects implicit when the subject is fully determined by the verb form. In Spanish , for instance, subject pronouns do not need to be explicitly present, but in French, its close relative, they are obligatory. The Spanish equivalent to

960-545: A strong partition between the Brittonic languages with Gaulish ( P-Celtic ) on one side and the Goidelic languages with Celtiberian (Q-Celtic) on the other, may be superficial, owing to a language contact phenomenon. They add the identical sound shift ( /kʷ/ to /p/ ) could have occurred independently in the predecessors of Gaulish and Brittonic, or have spread through language contact between those two groups. Further,

1020-404: A variety of non-past times, and context indicates the time. The sense can be completely tenseless, for example when asserting that something is always true or always happens. This verb form has erroneously been termed 'future' in many pedagogical grammars. A correct, neutral term 'INDEF1' has been used in linguistics texts. In Middle Welsh, the distinction is seen most clearly in proverbs following

1080-530: Is almost certainly an independent branch on the Celtic genealogical tree, one that became separated from the others very early." The Breton language is Brittonic, not Gaulish, though there may be some input from the latter, having been introduced from Southwestern regions of Britain in the post-Roman era and having evolved into Breton. In the P/Q classification schema, the first language to split off from Proto-Celtic

1140-426: Is also the traditional term for a group of verbs that share a similar conjugation pattern in a particular language (a verb class ). For example, Latin is said to have four conjugations of verbs. This means that any regular Latin verb can be conjugated in any person, number, tense, mood, and voice by knowing which of the four conjugation groups it belongs to, and its principal parts. A verb that does not follow all of

1200-574: Is an official language of Ireland and of the European Union . Welsh is the only Celtic language not classified as endangered by UNESCO . The Cornish and Manx languages became extinct in modern times but have been revived. Each now has several hundred second-language speakers. Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic form the Goidelic languages , while Welsh, Cornish and Breton are Brittonic . All of these are Insular Celtic languages , since Breton,

1260-487: Is called a lemma . The term conjugation is applied only to the inflection of verbs, and not of other parts of speech (inflection of nouns and adjectives is known as declension ) . Also it is generally restricted to denoting the formation of finite forms of a verb – these may be referred to as conjugated forms , as opposed to non-finite forms , such as an infinitive , gerund , or participle which respectively comprise their own grammatical categories . Conjugation

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1320-610: Is still quite contested, and the main argument for Insular Celtic is connected with the development of verbal morphology and the syntax in Irish and British Celtic, which Schumacher regards as convincing, while he considers the P-Celtic/Q-Celtic division unimportant and treats Gallo-Brittonic as an outdated theory. Stifter affirms that the Gallo-Brittonic view is "out of favour" in the scholarly community as of 2008 and

1380-424: Is the notion of conjugation classes, which are a set of groups into which each lexical verb falls. They determine how a verb is conjugated for Tense–aspect–mood . The classes can but do not universally correspond to the transitivity or valency of the verb in question. Generally, of the two to six conjugation classes in a Pama-Nyungan language, two classes are open with a large membership and allow for new coinages, and

1440-693: Is the theory that these languages evolved together in those places, having a later common ancestor than any of the Continental Celtic languages such as Celtiberian , Gaulish , Galatian , and Lepontic , among others, all of which are long extinct. This linguistic division of Celtic languages into Insular and Continental contrasts with the P/Q Celtic hypothesis . The proponents of the Insular hypothesis (such as Cowgill 1975; McCone 1991, 1992; and Schrijver 1995) point to shared innovations among these – chiefly: The proponents assert that

1500-647: Is the transformation of * an , * am to a denasalised vowel with lengthening, é , before an originally voiceless stop or fricative, cf. Old Irish éc "death", écath "fish hook", dét "tooth", cét "hundred" vs. Welsh angau , angad , dant , and cant . Otherwise: In order to show that shared innovations are from a common descent it is necessary that they do not arise because of language contact after initial separation. A language area can result from widespread bilingualism , perhaps because of exogamy , and absence of sharp sociolinguistic division. Ranko Matasović has provided

1560-465: Is usually the most irregular verb. The similarities in corresponding verb forms may be noticed. Some of the conjugations may be disused, like the English thou -form, or have additional meanings, like the English you -form, which can also stand for second person singular or be impersonal . son One common feature of Pama–Nyungan languages , the largest family of Australian Aboriginal languages ,

1620-680: The Italic languages had a similar divergence between Latino-Faliscan , which kept /kʷ/ , and Osco-Umbrian , which changed it to /p/ . Some historians, such as George Buchanan in the 16th century, had suggested the Brythonic or P-Celtic language was a descendant of the Picts' language. Indeed, the tribe of the Pritani has Qritani (and, orthographically orthodox in modern form but counterintuitively written Cruthin) (Q-Celtic) cognate forms. Under

1680-537: The 2000s led to the reemergence of native speakers for both languages following their adoption by adults and children. By the 21st century, there were roughly one million total speakers of Celtic languages, increasing to 1.4 million speakers by 2010. Gaelainn / Gaeilig / Gaeilic Celtic is divided into various branches: Scholarly handling of Celtic languages has been contentious owing to scarceness of primary source data. Some scholars (such as Cowgill 1975; McCone 1991, 1992; and Schrijver 1995) posit that

1740-586: The 6th century AD. SIL Ethnologue lists six living Celtic languages, of which four have retained a substantial number of native speakers. These are: the Goidelic languages ( Irish and Scottish Gaelic , both descended from Middle Irish ) and the Brittonic languages ( Welsh and Breton , descended from Common Brittonic ). The other two, Cornish (Brittonic) and Manx (Goidelic), died out in modern times with their presumed last native speakers in 1777 and 1974 respectively. Revitalisation movements in

1800-594: The French je suis (I am) can be simply soy (lit. "am"). The pronoun yo (I) in the explicit form yo soy is used only for emphasis or to clear ambiguity in complex texts. Some languages have a richer agreement system in which verbs agree also with some or all of their objects. Ubykh exhibits verbal agreement for the subject, direct object, indirect object, benefaction and ablative objects ( a.w3.s.xe.n.t'u.n , you gave it to him for me ). Basque can show agreement not only for subject, direct object and indirect object but it also can exhibit agreement for

1860-503: The Gallic and Brittonic languages are P-Celtic, while the Goidelic and Hispano-Celtic (or Celtiberian) languages are Q-Celtic. The P-Celtic languages (also called Gallo-Brittonic ) are sometimes seen (for example by Koch 1992) as a central innovating area as opposed to the more conservative peripheral Q-Celtic languages. According to Ranko Matasovic in the introduction to his 2009 Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic : "Celtiberian ...

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1920-428: The Insular Celtic hypothesis "widely accepted". When referring only to the modern Celtic languages, since no Continental Celtic language has living descendants, "Q-Celtic" is equivalent to "Goidelic" and "P-Celtic" is equivalent to "Brittonic". How the family tree of the Celtic languages is ordered depends on which hypothesis is used: " Insular Celtic hypothesis " " P/Q-Celtic hypothesis " Eska evaluates

1980-413: The Insular Celtic languages were probably not in great enough contact for those innovations to spread as part of a sprachbund . However, if they have another explanation (such as an SOV substratum language), then it is possible that P-Celtic is a valid clade, and the top branching would be: Within the Indo-European family, the Celtic languages have sometimes been placed with the Italic languages in

2040-429: The Insular hypothesis, the family tree of the insular Celtic languages is thus as follows: Irish Scottish Gaelic Manx † Pictish † Cumbric Welsh Breton Cornish This table lists cognates showing the development of Proto-Celtic */kʷ/ to /p/ in Gaulish and the Brittonic languages but to /k/ in the Goidelic languages. A significant difference between Goidelic and Brittonic languages

2100-491: The Larzac piece of lead (1983), the analysis of which reveals another common phonetical innovation -nm- > -nu (Gaelic ainm / Gaulish anuana , Old Welsh enuein 'names'), that is less accidental than only one. The discovery of a third common innovation would allow the specialists to come to the conclusion of a Gallo-Brittonic dialect (Schmidt 1986; Fleuriot 1986). The interpretation of this and further evidence

2160-494: The Old Irish verb beirid "carry" is as follows; the conjunct forms are illustrated with the particle ní "not". In Scottish Gaelic this distinction is still found in certain verb-forms across almost all verbs (except for a very few). This is a VSO language. The example given in the first column below is the independent or absolute form, which must be used when the verb is in clause-initial position (or preceded in

2220-460: The P-/Q-Celtic hypothesis. Proponents of each schema dispute the accuracy and usefulness of the other's categories. However, since the 1970s the division into Insular and Continental Celtic has become the more widely held view (Cowgill 1975; McCone 1991, 1992; Schrijver 1995), but in the middle of the 1980s, the P-/Q-Celtic theory found new supporters (Lambert 1994), because of the inscription on

2280-410: The arrival of the speakers of Indo-European, including Celtic". The Afro-Asiatic substrate theory, according to Raymond Hickey , "has never found much favour with scholars of the Celtic languages". The theory was criticised by Kim McCone in 2006, Graham Isaac in 2007, and Steve Hewitt in 2009. Isaac argues that the 20 points identified by Gensler are trivial, dependencies, or vacuous. Thus, he considers

2340-540: The break-up much earlier at 3200 BC ± 1500 years. They support the Insular Celtic hypothesis. The early Celts were commonly associated with the archaeological Urnfield culture , the Hallstatt culture , and the La Tène culture , though the earlier assumption of association between language and culture is now considered to be less strong. There are legitimate scholarly arguments for both the Insular Celtic hypothesis and

2400-402: The clause by certain preverbal particles). Then following it is the dependent or conjunct form which is required when the verb is preceded in the clause by certain other preverbal particles, in particular interrogative or negative preverbal particles. In these examples, in the first column we have a verb in clause-initial position. In the second column a negative particle immediately precedes

2460-883: The different Celtic languages is apparent in their core vocabulary , especially in terms of actual pronunciation . Moreover, the phonetic differences between languages are often the product of regular sound change (i.e. lenition of /b/ into /v/ or Ø). Grammatical conjugation Verbs may inflect for grammatical categories such as person , number , gender , case , tense , aspect , mood , voice , possession , definiteness , politeness , causativity , clusivity , interrogatives , transitivity , valency , polarity , telicity , volition , mirativity , evidentiality , animacy , associativity, pluractionality , and reciprocity . Verbs may also be affected by agreement , polypersonal agreement , incorporation , noun class , noun classifiers , and verb classifiers . Agglutinative and polysynthetic languages tend to have

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2520-474: The evidence as supporting the following tree, based on shared innovations , though it is not always clear that the innovations are not areal features . It seems likely that Celtiberian split off before Cisalpine Celtic, but the evidence for this is not robust. On the other hand, the unity of Gaulish, Goidelic, and Brittonic is reasonably secure. Schumacher (2004, p. 86) had already cautiously considered this grouping to be likely genetic, based, among others, on

2580-401: The formula "X happens, Y does not happen" (Evans 1964: 119): The older analysis of the distinction, as reported by Thurneysen (1946, 360 ff.), held that the absolute endings derive from Proto-Indo-European "primary endings" (used in present and future tenses) while the conjunct endings derive from the "secondary endings" (used in past tenses). Thus Old Irish absolute beirid "s/he carries"

2640-622: The listener as the implicit benefactor: autoa ekarri digute means "they brought us the car" (neuter agreement for the listener), but autoa ekarri ziguten means "they brought us the car" (agreement for feminine singular listener). Languages with a rich agreement morphology facilitate relatively free word order without leading to increased ambiguity. The canonical word order in Basque is subject–object–verb , but all permutations of subject, verb and object are permitted. In some languages, predicative adjectives and copular complements receive

2700-402: The most complex conjugations, although some fusional languages such as Archi can also have extremely complex conjugation. Typically the principal parts are the root and/or several modifications of it ( stems ). All the different forms of the same verb constitute a lexeme , and the canonical form of the verb that is conventionally used to represent that lexeme (as seen in dictionary entries)

2760-459: The northwestern fringe of Europe and a few diaspora communities . There are six living languages: the four continuously living languages Breton , Irish , Scottish Gaelic and Welsh , and the two revived languages Cornish and Manx . All are minority languages in their respective countries, though there are continuing efforts at revitalisation . Welsh is an official language in Wales and Irish

2820-407: The only living Celtic language spoken in continental Europe, is descended from the language of settlers from Britain. There are a number of extinct but attested continental Celtic languages , such as Celtiberian , Galatian and Gaulish . Beyond that there is no agreement on the subdivisions of the Celtic language family. They may be divided into P-Celtic and Q-Celtic . The Celtic languages have

2880-675: The other hand I goes , you goes etc. are not grammatical in standard English. (Things are different in some English dialects that lack agreement.) A few English verbs have no special forms that indicate subject agreement ( I may , you may , he may ), and the verb to be has an additional form am that can only be used with the pronoun I as the subject. Verbs in written French exhibit more intensive agreement morphology than English verbs: je suis (I am), tu es ("you are", singular informal ), elle est (she is), nous sommes (we are), vous êtes ("you are", plural), ils sont (they are). Historically, English used to have

2940-501: The present tense (of the infinitive, if it exists, and indicative moods), in English , German , Yiddish , Dutch , Afrikaans , Icelandic , Faroese , Swedish , Norwegian , Latvian , Bulgarian , Serbo-Croatian , Polish , Slovenian , Macedonian , Urdu or Hindi , Persian , Latin , French , Italian , Spanish , Portuguese , Russian , Albanian , Armenian , Irish , Ukrainian , Ancient Attic Greek and Modern Greek . This

3000-469: The primary distinction is between Continental Celtic and Insular Celtic , arguing that the differences between the Goidelic and Brittonic languages arose after these split off from the Continental Celtic languages. Other scholars (such as Schmidt 1988) make the primary distinction between P-Celtic and Q-Celtic languages based on the replacement of initial Q by initial P in some words. Most of

3060-540: The remainder are closed and of limited membership. In Wati languages , verbs generally fall into four classes: They are labelled by using common morphological components of verb endings in each respective class in infinitival forms. In the Wanman language these each correspond to la , ya , rra , and wa verbs respectively. See also a similar table of verb classes and conjugations in Pitjantjatjara,

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3120-451: The sentence. If the first word in the sentence was another particle, * (e)s came after that and thus before the verb, but if the verb was the first word in the sentence, * (e)s was cliticized to it. Under this theory, then, Old Irish absolute beirid comes from Proto-Celtic * bereti-s , while conjunct ní beir comes from * nī-s bereti . The identity of the * (e)s particle remains uncertain. Cowgill suggests it might be

3180-492: The shared reformation of the sentence-initial, fully inflecting relative pronoun *i̯os, *i̯ā, *i̯od into an uninflected enclitic particle. Eska sees Cisalpine Gaulish as more akin to Lepontic than to Transalpine Gaulish. Eska considers a division of Transalpine–Goidelic–Brittonic into Transalpine and Insular Celtic to be most probable because of the greater number of innovations in Insular Celtic than in P-Celtic, and because

3240-405: The standard conjugation patterns of the language is said to be an irregular verb . The system of all conjugated variants of a particular verb or class of verbs is called a verb paradigm ; this may be presented in the form of a conjugation table . Verbal agreement , or concord , is a morpho - syntactic construct in which properties of the subject and/or objects of a verb are indicated by

3300-661: The theory to be not just unproven but also wrong. Instead, the similarities between Insular Celtic and Afro-Asiatic could have evolved independently. Celtic languages Pontic Steppe Caucasus East Asia Eastern Europe Northern Europe Pontic Steppe Northern/Eastern Steppe Europe South Asia Steppe Europe Caucasus India Indo-Aryans Iranians East Asia Europe East Asia Europe Indo-Aryan Iranian Indo-Aryan Iranian Others European The Celtic languages ( / ˈ k ɛ l t ɪ k / KEL -tik ) are

3360-417: The verb form. Verbs are then said to agree with their subjects (resp. objects). Many English verbs exhibit subject agreement of the following sort: whereas I go , you go , we go , they go are all grammatical in standard English, he go is not (except in the subjunctive , as "They requested that he go with them"). Instead, a special form of the verb to go has to be used to produce he goes . On

3420-418: The verb, which makes the verb use the verb form or verb forms of the dependent conjugation. The verb forms in the above examples happen to be the same with any subject personal pronouns, not just with the particular persons chosen in the example. Also, the combination of tense–aspect–mood properties inherent in these verb forms is non-past but otherwise indefinite with respect to time, being compatible with

3480-668: Was Gaelic. It has characteristics that some scholars see as archaic, but others see as also being in the Brittonic languages (see Schmidt). In the Insular/Continental classification schema, the split of the former into Gaelic and Brittonic is seen as being late. The distinction of Celtic into these four sub-families most likely occurred about 900 BC according to Gray & Atkinson but, because of estimation uncertainty, it could be any time between 1200 and 800 BC. However, they only considered Gaelic and Brythonic. A controversial paper by Forster & Toth included Gaulish and put

3540-515: Was first proposed by John Morris-Jones in 1899. The theory has been supported by several linguists since: Henry Jenner (1904); Julius Pokorny (1927); Heinrich Wagner (1959); Orin Gensler (1993); Theo Vennemann (1995); and Ariel Shisha-Halevy (2003). Others have suggested that rather than the Afro-Asiatic influencing Insular Celtic directly, both groups of languages were influenced by

3600-580: Was thought to be from * bʰereti (compare Sanskrit bharati "s/he carries"), while conjunct beir was thought to be from * bʰeret (compare Sanskrit a-bharat "s/he was carrying"). Today, however, most Celticists agree that Cowgill (1975), following an idea present already in Pedersen (1913, 340 ff.), found the correct solution to the origin of the absolute/conjunct distinction: an enclitic particle, reconstructed as * es after consonants and * s after vowels, came in second position in

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