Talk:Insular Celtic languages

message: :the section "Language contact vs. common origin (cleanup request)" below supersedes the comments i've made here earlier --Green ink 11:22, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: copied from User talk:Angr:
on the article's talk page, you say that the article wasn't about the sprachbund situation of that same set of languages.  i disagree.
#you're right, the article primarily is about the genetic unit, not about the sprachbund.
#but yes, the sprachbund needs to be mentioned.  after all, what proponents of the i.c. hypothesis say is that of the innovations shared between goidelic and brythonic languages, not all can be attributed to the sprachbund situation.
#for practical purposes, such as organizing the celtic studies department of a university, both the sprachbund and the genetic unit contribute to making it useful to treat these languages together as a topic of study.
i don't think the sprachbund issue warrants a page of its own.  i do think it should be separated out from discussion in the present state of the article; but after that, it should be merged into the insular celtic languages article.  put more simply, the article needs to be clarified.
all i've been planning to do was express my (i think: relevant) confusion, and not to do anything else about it after that.  i don't do flame wars, and with very few exceptions, i only read wikipedia.  no hard feelings.  --Green ink 17:36, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

text: I'm sorry if I gave the impression I was being defensive or offended by your comment! If there's anything verifiable by means of reliable sources on Insular Celtic as a Sprachbund, by all means put it in! All I'm saying is that when I read the article in its current state, it seems to me to be only about IC as a genetic unit. I don't see anything in the current text that suggests otherwise. But the current article certainly needs sources for the information about the genetic unit IC too! User:Angr 17:48, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: partial and abridged copy from User talk:Green ink:
User:Angr [has been] right, "sprachbund" was off the mark. [...] at the same time, i would maintain most of what i've said, after, of course, substituting my erroneous uses of the term "sprachbund" simply by "mutual language contact".  [...]  --Green ink 10:47, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Sprachbund vs. genetic unit (cleanup request)

message: The article appears to confound two issues: Insular Celtic language contact and an Insular Celtic common origin.  For that reason, I've requested a cleanup.  However, it does make sense to have them together in the same article, only they should be explained separately before discussing how these issues come together.  I'd suggest having a separate section for each in the introduction of this article.  In detail:
;Insular Celtic language contact :Due to language contact, these languages have shared innovations after they were or became separate languages.  This could be an outright sprachbund (emergence of traits originating from neither parent language).  More plausibly, this could be heavy adstratal influence of Brythonic on Goidelic.  Example: absence of a third (=neuter) gender, which Old Irish still had but modern Irish, like the Brythonic languages, doesn't.
;Insular Celtic genetic unit :These languages share a common ancestral language (=I.C. proto-language) that is not an ancestor of any other known language.  Therefore, they may also share innovations because those occurred before they split up into separate languages.
Importantly, these two issues are not mutually exclusive.  The relevance of language contact has never been disputed, as its effects have continued into historic times, see above.  The Insular Celtic Hypothesis, however, turns on evidence that some shared innovations cannot as plausibly be explained as the result of language contact and therefore must have occurred before the languages even separated.  Demonstrating this would presumably take too much space for an encyclopedic article.  Nevertheless, the general line of argument should be summarized and suitable references cited (also) for further reading.  --green ink (t) 08:32, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: My answers are mostly at User talk:Green ink. User:Angr 11:26, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Language contact vs. common origin (cleanup request)

message: Did Wagner the chess player also support the substratum theory?  Just curious, as he is not introduced in any way as a linguist.  Please check that link.  Thx.  66.30.4.97 (talk) 04:33, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: A different Heinrich Wagner (1923–88), for whom no Wikipedia article yet exists, was meant. I changed the link to the red link Heinrich Wagner (linguist) so an article can be written at that name whenever someone gets around to it. Googling Heinrich Wagner Celtic gets some info about him. Thanks for pointing out the error! +Angr 07:12, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Wagner...?

message: At http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_invasion_of_Britain#Linguistic_evidence , we find:
Celtic is claimed as a cause in the change from a synthetic language [in Anglo-Saxon] to an analytic language [in Middle English] (expressing meaning through word endings to expressing meaning through word order), and the use of the progressive (e.g. I am reading). Celtic influence is also used to explain puzzling elements in English, for instance, dependence on the semantically neutral DO ('I don't know' rather than 'I know not') and the lack of an external possessor in English, a construct which is present in all major European languages except Celtic. (English uses 'then someone gouged out his eyes' but never 'then someone gouged him the eyes out' which is the Germanic structure.)
The above quote implies that scholars have inferred more details about the grammar of at least one insular Celtic language than is detailed here.  It would be interesting to be able to come here (or to the article on the British language) and see something about the grammatical features that may have influenced the evolution of English.
Jack Waugh (talk) 02:40, 2 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Uhm, no. The proposed (Insular) Celtic substratum in Middle (and Early Modern) English is tied to British Celtic specifically, especially the long extinct Cumbrian, but also to now-extinct dialects of Cornish and Welsh in southwestern England, not completely different Insular Celtic languages. If at all, Goidelic and Pictish have influenced Middle (and Early Modern) English only marginally. Check Brittonicisms in English. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 18:31, 29 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Level of Detail on Grammar 

message: Per WP:Content fork, we should not be duplicating our classifications across articles.  That inevitably causes problems with maintenance and will end up with us contradicting ourselves.  The Brittonic tree is at Brittonic, and the Goidelic tree is at Goidelic; they shouldn't be here as well unless they're relevant to this article, which they're not. (Primitive Irish being the ancestor of Old Irish is off-topic.)  Cf. our thousand other language-family articles.  — kwami (talk) 19:23, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: That isn't a content fork in the usually accepted sense. A family tree of what is comprised in insular celtic seems totally suitable for an article on insular celtic. Most articles on a language family has something like that. Why is this different? DeCausa (talk) 19:49, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure they do.  But they tend to stop where the child articles split off.  If we didn't have the articles Goidelic and Brittonic, then of course we'd list all the details here.  But because we do have those articles, it's best to leave the details there, with just a basic summary here so readers can follow this article.  Otherwise we end up with duplicate trees, and when editors modify one but not the other, we end up contradicting ourselves.  That is a content fork, and to be avoided.  — kwami (talk) 22:41, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  Calling it a content fork is an exaggeration, but it probably is sufficient for this article to say that Insular Celtic consists of Brittonic and Goidelic, and allow the articles Brittonic languages and Goidelic languages expand on that. Angr (talk) 19:16, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

text: Kwami has been defacing all of the Celtic language articles and pushing his own uninformed POV. Something has to be done about this.Cagwinn (talk) 21:34, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, it's called "discussion".  That's what these pages are for.  — kwami (talk) 22:41, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Content fork 

message: Any academic theories on the cause of the P Celtic Q Celtic split in Insular Celtic? Assuming they did descend from a Proto-Insular Celtic. I mean Ireland is not particularly isolated from Great Britain, it's merely 19km across the sea at its closest point and we know the inhabitants of the British Isles were highly marine mobile from prehistoric times.
It's surely not coincidence that the areas Rome occupied are the only areas that ended up P Celtic right? I mean the map of Roman occupation effectively matches the map of Insular Celtic language dispersal perfectly (it's even Brythonic between Hadrian and Antonine which Rome briefly occupied, and even when it did not the tribes between Hadrian and Antonine most assuredly would have interacted heavily and been influenced deeply by Romanized Insular Celts living south of Hadrian's). Pictish zones then form a sort of quasi hybrid language somewhere between Q and P Celtic, or perhaps more aptly contained large numbers of both Q and P Celtic speaking peoples depending on isolation/rurality.
Is there literally any evidence the that Q Celtic/P Celtic split occurred before Roman contact?
Did the Romans just view Brythonic speaking peoples as less worthy or more worthy of conquering? Seems bizarre for them to stop at some arbitrary borders which just happen to contain all P Celtic speaking inhabitants. And would this also perhaps explain why Goidelic and ogham is found in the far western extremities of Great Britain (such as Scotland, Wales and Cornwall). It's traditionally assumed to have been the result of Irish invasions or colonizations of western Great Britain but there's no actual archaeological or contemporary historical evidence for this happening. 
Generally speaking it seeems to be the general pattern with invasions of the British Isles pushing the dominant cultures of the time to the western extremities, this even has occurred today with the surviving P and Q Celtic languages of the British Isles. So is it possible all the British Isles were Q Insular Celtic speaking before Rome invades and has a drastic effect on the Insular Celts living there, perhaps pushing the pre Roman Q Celtic speakers into small, rural isolated pockets as they try to resist Roman influence.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.4.16.225 (talk) 08:29, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I think it's a coincidence, yes. Your theory makes perfect sense from the standpoint of history, but linguistic evidence is easier to explain if the /kʷ/ > /p/  shift happened long before the Roman invasion.  We could get more information by looking at loandwords between the two proto-languages, which I assume has already been done by at least some scholars. —Soap— 13:52, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cause of Split 

message: The infobox lists this linguistic hypothesis as "generally accepted". There seems to be few items within the body of text to give sustenance to this categorization, and published works by linguists of Celtic do not favour this. A major RS on the subject, "Celtic Culture - A Historical Encyclopedia" by John T Koch (2006) stresses that there is "no general consensus" as to whether "Insular vs Continental" or "P- vs Q-Celtic" should be favored when drawing the lineage of Celtic languages. 
I am willing to engage in discussion with other editors as to whether is is necessary to change this. --JoeyofScotia (talk) 20:09, 18 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: There is no consensus. The insular Celtic hypothesis is certainly not "generally accepted". This should be changed to disputed or controversial. Tewdar (talk) 18:53, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

text: "But it's in Glottolog so..." Tewdar (talk) 19:00, 6 June 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  This hypothesis is not generally accepted.