h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What is the logical or historical reason for Celtic languages to have spread to Ireland and totally missed Britain? Doesn't it make more sense that they came to Britain first (across some 30 miles of sea) and then spread further West? Certainly it appears that there were strong links between the Celtic language spoken in SE Britain and what is now NE France/Belgium in later times.

Please consult an Atlas before responding!

The Celts came to Britain first, and then to Ireland. THere is no doubt about this. THey spoke Celtic, and since they had only just arrived, they spoke Continental Celtic. The question is, where did Continental Celtic evolve into a new language, Insular Celtic?

It certainly seems more likely to me that it happened in Britain, before the Celts moved from Britain to Ireland. But was there time? The Celts arrived in Ireland in 300 BC, as far as I remember. The cornish people colonised Brittany in 600 AD. According to this article, in those 900 years, Insular Celtic evolved in Ireland, spread to Britain and evolved into a new language, Brythonic. Is this possible?

I've done some research on this and can find no evidence that British (Brythonic) evolved from Irish (Goidelic). Certainly Manx and Scots Gaelic came from Irish and are almost identical to it. But British seems to have evolved separately.

I believe that both Manx and Scots Gaelic are essentially the result of Irish invasions. Some people reckon that a more Brythonic Celtic was spoken on the Isle of Man before the Irish 'influence' overtook it.

Gnomon, you are perfectly correct, unfortunately not many people appreciate when the Celts arrived.

By having a Irish mother and a Scotish father I am very comfortable with the fact that my DNA has been in these Islands for thousands of years. In fact to upset American Irish, I refer to myself as Native Irish, we are decendants of the Tuatha De Danann and the Milesians. The Celts only arrived here about 400 to 500 years ago at the most. They are newcomers. We were the Poets, artists, craftsmen and Bards who were conquered and subjected by the Celtic warlords much in the same way as we were conquered by the Vikings , Normans, and the English.

The world has a romantic view of the Celts, which is not born out by facts.

The relationship between the native Milesian Irish and the Celts was one of Master and Serf. Rarely did the Celtic masters mix with the natives. They did not inter marry or mix socially.

The description of the Celtic warlords given by Julius Ceasar in dispatches back to Rome were of "Tall fair haired men with blue eyes" which is definately not the description of the majority of Irish people

The experts of Genetics at Oxford have recently released their findings that the people of Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England have more in common with each other, than any of them have with the Celts

Although the present Irish may not have much Celtic blood in them, the Celts have certainly been around for longer than 300 - 500 years. It is at least 1700 years since the Celtic invasion. The locals adopted the Celtic language and it was still the normal language in most of Ireland up to about 200 years ago.

I am sorry to disagree with you Gnomom, but it has been proved that the Celts did not start invading Ireland until c 500 BC.

The respected Seamas Mac Annaidh, for one, in his Encyclopedia of Irish History says "The Milesians are the ancestors of the people now known as the Irish, and lived here up to the end of the Bronze Age when they were colonised by several separate waves of Celts which started about 500 BC and continued until c 500 AD".

The standing stones and tombs at Knowth are thousands of years old, as is the delicate 'Triskele' motifs carved in stone at Newgrange. The great Newgrange tomb (36ft high & 280 ft dia) reveals that the people who built it had an interest in, and a knowledge of astronomy.

This tomb was built 5000 years ago, 500 years before the pyramids, 1000 years before Stonehenge, and about 2500 years before the first Celts arrived.

Be proud of your heritage, but view with caution romantic views written in the last century. Accurate knowledge of our past is being revealed with the aid of modern science.

In the past, winners of conflicts wrote the history. They made the scribes and the bards tell the victors version of events.

Spud, you seem to be a bit confused about your dates. Maybe you are typing faster than you are thinking.

I said that the Celts came in around 300 BC. You agreed and said they arrived no more than 300 to 500 years ago, (which does not agree with what I had said).

I said that I wasn't sure but they came at least 1700 years ago.

You disagreed and said they arrived in 500 BC (which in fact agrees with what I had said).

Can we both agree that the Celts arrived in 500 - 300 BC?

I don't think anyone ever claimed that Newgrange was built by the Celts. And its construction date does put it about 500 years before the first pyramids, so the Irish of the time were reasonably advanced. But the construction of the Newgrange is not really comparable with that of the pyramids. The Great Pyramid is about a million times more impressive and is just as accurately aligned. It shows a far higher civilisation than existed in Ireland at the time.

Sorry Gnomon,I did make a mistake on your dates, the point is that we both appreciate that the Celts did not start to colonise Ireland until about 500 to 300 BC. A point which is missed by many people, some of them Irish.

No I dont compare Newgrange, or Stonehenge, with the Pyramids. I was pointing out that these Islands had a well organised civilisation before the Celts, and a lot of the legions and myths credited to the Celts were in fact about the native Irish or Milesans.

Good point, Spud. Unfortunately, since there is nothing left of Celtic tradition in Europe, the only examples of it we have are in Ireland and Great Britain. We therefore can't tell which of the Irish customs such as music, stories etc are Celtic and which were already here when the Celts arrived. So most people just bung them together and call them all Celtic.

The term Milesians comes from the Book of Invasions, does it not? That looks like extremely dubious history to me, and I wouldn't believe a word of it. I don't think we know much about the people who were here before the Celts, but there's no harm in calling them the Milesians for want of a better term. I think they were smaller than the Celts, who were known to be tall. I think the tales of the little people probably descend from the Celts talking about the Milesians, while the Tuatha de Danann, the tall warriors, were probably the Celts themselves as seen by the Milesians. It's impossible to know at this stage.

You have a good knowledge of the subject Gnomon, maybe you have heard of the work by Prof, Brian Sykes. He has made a study of the DNA from all parts of the British Isles and is the guy who claims that the English Irish, Welsh and Scots have more in common with each other than any of us have with the Celts.

Another researcher into DNA from Oxford, sadly I cannot remember her name at present, has made a study of Mitochrondria, the part of DNA that is passed down through the female line only. She has tested female remains preserved in a bog in Kerry. The remains were dated as being about 2000 years old.

When the Mitochrondria DNA was checked against the inhabitants of a nearby village, it was found that there were three women in the village who were direct decendents of the skeleton.

With the movement of people we experience nowdays, it is easy to forget that our forebearers would be born, live and die within a ten mile radius.

It is reckoned that if you know where your grandmother was born, and she was born before 1900, the chances are that your ancestors lived in the same area for the previous 1000 or more years. The more rural your background is, the more this guide is supported.

Which brings us back to the Native Irish. In the western counties one cannot but notice that the inhabitants are predominantly dark haired people with fair skin, and a lot of them are of shorter statue, not to be confused with the Mediterranean stock, which tends to be dark haired but with swarthy complexion.

In fact is there not a legend that the Milesions conquered a race called the Firbogs who fitted the description I have just given, and banished them to their own kingdom in the west.

I seem to remember a story about the Queen of the Firbogs, Queen Mauve, or something like that, Queen of Connaught who lead a cattle raid into the Kingdom of Ulster to seize the great bull of Ulster.

An absorbing subject, I could go on about it all night.

Atlases have nothing to do with it. It has to do with how cultural ties and developments played out. I don't think Celtic languages missed Britain at all. I don't think the article implies that either. I mentioned Brythonic, which arised in mainland Britain as an offshoot to the original Goedelic (the first to come to the British Isles). It seems that the Irish Gaelic was most closely related to that Goedelic, in that, well, maybe it didn't change very much.

-icarus

Aha! So what you're saying is that 'Celtic' came to all of the British Isles from the continent in the form of Goedelic but that the Goedelic in Britain then changed to become Brythonic whereas Goedelic in Ireland hardly changed at all and is thus closer to the original Continental Celtic. Am I right?

I wasn’t aware of this. I know that British Celtic changed a lot during the Roman period but didn’t realise it was called Goedelic before this point. I thought Goedelic was reserved for the Celtic language of the island of Ireland. What is your source for this?


(As a practical point, I think that the article could be worded a little better at this point – it is not too clear. E.g. “…settlers moved to what is today mainland Britain…” but it is unclear where they moved from. It seems to imply that Insular Celtic came to Britain from Europe but also could be read as meaning that Brythonic came to Britain as a result of settlers from Ireland.)

P.S. Congrats for the article!

Many modern thinkers are starting to theorise that the Celtic invasion was not entirely an invasion of people, but rather one of cultures, as had been going on since Neolithic times.

The recent DNA studies showing that the Irish/British people seem to have ancestry in common seem to present a good argument against deviding them into Celts and Non-Celts. The Milesian/Tuatha/Celt/Briton division doesn't really wash based on the genetic evidence, or on historical fact.

Perhaps the Celtic traditions came as cultural influence, where regional languages and dialects were dropped in favour of a more widely-spoken language, which came hand-in-hand with "fashionable" cultural traditions imported from mainland Europe, perhaps by immigrants and traders with "superior" goods.

The Brythonic/Gaelic traditions were perhaps the result of two waves of influence. The Isle of Man has sets of Brythonic inscriptions, but later a Gaelic flavour related to lowland scots gaelic and some dialects of Irish took over. Whether you can attribute this to a movement of people is arguable - it is equally arguable that this was a movement of culture.

The majority language of Ireland and Scotland is English, although this is not entirely due to English immigration. It's simply a movement of a culture that's become more prevalent.

Good point - the movement of genes and the movement of languages are not totally related to each other. You can't deduce one fact (that everybody in an area speaks the same language) from the other (that they all have related genes). Also, the importance of trade cannot be underestimated. It is far more boring than invasion, and therefore rarely gets much of a mention in the history books, but many people believe it to be vastly more significant in terms of language and genetic diffusion.

As for the languages Brythonic vs Goidelic, they are very different. It is not possible for a Welsh speaker to understand an Irish speaker*, or vice versa. There is a theory that Brythonic came from the continent into Britain through Gaul (France), and that Goidelic came directly to Ireland from Iberia (Spain & Portugal). It's just a theory but it does help to explain why the languages are different.

CR

While Kent may be closer to the supposed Celtic heartland, it seems to me that Western Britain (including Cornwall, Devon and South Wales) are just as close to Iberia as Ireland. I'm not sure that the point of origin of the language was as important as the local effects on it once it had been established.

A simple reason for the divergence is natural change. If English was almost identical to languages like Frisian or Danish some 1600 years ago then why couldn't Brythonic and Goedelic have been very close some 2000-2500 years ago? Natural divergence (aided perhaps by factors such as movement of people and elements of earlier local speech?) could easily have produced the difference we hear today. The languages may not be mutually intelligible but in basic structure they have many similarities.

Why do Brythonic and Goedelic need reasons for their differences beyond what applies to other historically-related languages?

This is an excellent point, and I'm sure there is some truth to it. Even in Ireland, depending on where you go in the country (Connemara, Waterford, Donegal, Kerry), there are differences in dialect, which can cause problems in inter-communication between people living in those regions, as well as causing difficulties for non-native speakers (who are "fluent" in school textbook Irish) when they meet a native speaker.

However, dialects aside, there is a much more distinct split between Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, and Manx on one side, and Welsh, Breton and Cornish on the other side. I would have thought that a natural diffusion such as indicated above might have produced a single core language with variations on the same theme throughout the islands, and not this clear split as is the case. Is it not more likely that two waves of speakers arriving at different times from different places within Continental Europe caused it, and that the root of both language groups is continental in origin and that it precedes the "Celticisation" of Ireland, Brittany and Britain?

CR

Scots Gaelic and Manx are, as I understand it, basically the result of cultural/physical invasion from Ireland. Welsh and Cornish are best thought of as what's left of a language that covered almost all of Britain, with Breton as a similar linguistic invasion (or to some, a reinforcement of extant Celtic).
Thus the real distinction is between the language of the big island and the language of the little one.
Languages moving in waves makes sense to me, but it also makes sense that after the influence of Continental Celtic reached the whole of the British Isles it then changed over centuries following patterns determined partly by geography, and that the differences we see today are primarily the result of local factors over time and not due to very different versions of Celtic happening to reach Ireland and Britain in isolation from one another.

Hey, what do I know?

What do any of us know? After all, the folk we are talking about were not exactly the best on the literary front... But it's great to speculate when nobody really knows the answer, and this discussion has been very enlightening for me!

CR

Granted, I've studied a good bit of all of it from the mythological standpoint - Tuatha De Danann, Milesians, Gauls, Vercingetorix... I must say that I don't think the Gaelics and Brythonics have much to do with one another. The word "Celts" tends to be used for a very wide range of people. The original inhabitants of Ireland were supposedly the Fir Bolg. The Tuatha De Danann came and conquered them, but they were not extinguished, only pressed under their rule. Then, the Milesians came up from Iberia. So the Iberian-Celtic (I use this term for lack of a better one...) language spawned what we know as Modern Irish Gaelic, and because of migration from Ireland, Scottish and Manx Gaelic. Gaul, the area between the areas inhabited by Germans, Romans, and Iberians, had its own language/dialect, similar to that spoken by the Ibericelts. They at one point or another migrated to Britian and Brittany, spawning Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. I've seen bits and pieces of each of these languages, and I notice the basic sounds of the words support this. The wicked Saxons (that's biased. I just didn't like the Saxons...) came in and took over England, shoving the Welsh into one corner, and speakers of Cornish were isolated somehow or another. No idea how Breton survived. I should brush up on that.

This is just a guess. As I've studied each of these languages, I notice very, very strong ties between the Gaelics that have nearly nothing to do with Welsh. Sentance structure is similar in some cases, and sometimes use of prepositions, of course, but that would be less likely to change than the words themselves - which differ greatly.

As for European isolates, I'd like to know where Basque (which is supposedly an isolate), Gallician, and all those other languages came from. They're really strange.

Love forever,
Sirona (incidentally the name of a Gaulish Goddess of springs/fertility/the Mosel Valley/astronomy and some other things.)