ENGLISH LANGUAGE ETHNICITY

English Language Ethnicity

English Language Ethnicity

The evidence provided by the classical authors is entirely external; scholars have long been dissatisfied with it and have sought more independent, internal evidence. The linguistic approach identifies as "Celtic" those who speak an identifiably "Celtic" language; closely related is the search for a geographic homeland for "Celtic" speakers.

Identification based on language requires written evidence; for the periods studied here, however, there is no preserved "Celtic" writing at all. The first "Celtic" writing, in Celtiberian or Gaulish, does not predate 300 BCE. -- Roman-period Gaulish is quite well documented by coins, inscriptions and in the Latin authors. Place-names and personal names, as recorded in later Greek and Latin sources, may well be holdovers from an earlier period, but there is no local literature at all from early Iron Age Europe. Continuity with insular "Celtic" is certain only in the case of first century BCE Gaulish.

The situation is therefore less than ideal for a paleolinguistic study, most of the evidence being both external and late. However, scholars have not hesitated to declare the existence of "Proto-Celtic," which they reconstruct backward in time from more recent and well-attested Celtic languages, including Old Irish, Gaelic and Welsh, having observed both etymological developments and phonological changes, such as the famous Q-to-P consonant shift that is the basis of the traditional Q- and P-Celtic language division. When the ancient Celtic languages first appear in the literary record, however, they are apparently already quite distinct from another. There is no reason to believe that all the different groups spoke the same single "Proto-Celtic" language, any more than that they considered themselves to belong to the same cultural group because of linguistic ties.

The quest for "Proto-Celtic" is one part of the story of the search for "Proto-Indo-European," a conjectural language thought to have been common to very early northern Eurasian peoples and to have fathered the historical Indo-European languages via the intermediary of such reconstructed branches as Proto-Celtic, Proto-Germanic, etc. Whether the Indo-Europeans originally entered their historical loci from a homeland in the Black Sea steppes, or whether they in fact spread out from Anatolia, seems to have little relevance to European conditions in the second half of the first millennium BCE. We may simply wish to disregard the arguments surrounding language developments from the end of the fifth millennium BCE down to the historical period; however, "Celtic" studies have long been inextricably bound up with Indo-European studies. The use of the horse and the wagon or war chariot, for example, are seen as typical manifestations both of "Celtic" culture and of Indo-Europeanism, evinced by the ubiquity of related vocabulary in the recorded languages.

He proves that they and we have the honour to have preserv'd the language of Jupiter and Sadurn, whom he shows to have been Princes of the Titans, the Progenitors of the Gauls, and to have an Empire from the Euphrates to Cape Finistre in ye time of ...