Celtic and the History of the English Language

December 1, 2014

Celtic and the History of the English Language

A little while ago a link to this list of 23 maps and charts on language went around on Twitter. It’s full of interesting stuff on linguistic diversity and the genetic relationships among languages, but there was one chart that bothered me: this one on the history of the English language by Sabio Lantz.

The Origins of English

The first and largest problem is that the timeline makes it look as though English began with the Celts and then received later contributions from the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and so on. While this is a decent account of the migrations and conquests that have occurred in the last two thousand years, it’s not an accurate account of the history of the English language. (To be fair, the bar on the bottom gets it right, but it leaves out all the contributions from other languages.)

English began with the Anglo-Saxons. They were a group of Germanic tribes originating in the area of the Netherlands, northern Germany, and Denmark, and they spoke dialects of what might be called common West Germanic. There was no distinct English language at the time, just a group of dialects that would later evolve into English, Dutch, German, Low German, and Frisian. (Frisian, for the record, is English’s closest relative on the continent, and it’s close enough that you can buy a cow in Friesland by speaking Old English.)

The inhabitants of Great Britain when the Anglo-Saxons arrived were mostly romanized Celts who spoke Latin and a Celtic language that was the ancestor of modern-day Welsh and Cornish. (In what is now Scotland, the inhabitants spoke a different Celtic language, Gaelic, and perhaps also Pictish, but not much is known about Pictish.) But while there were Latin- and Celtic-speaking people in Great Britain before the Anglo-Saxons arrived, those languages probably had very little influence on Old English and should not be considered ancestors of English. English began as a distinct language when the Anglo-Saxons split off from their Germanic cousins and left mainland Europe beginning around 450 AD.

For years it was assumed that the Anglo-Saxons wiped out most of the Celts and forced the survivors to the edges of the island—Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland. But archaeological and genetic evidence has shown that this isn’t exactly the case. The Anglo-Saxons more likely conquered the Celts and intermarried with them. Old English became the language of government and education, but Celtic languages may have survived in Anglo-Saxon–occupied areas for quite some time.

From Old to Middle English

Old English continues until about 1066, when the Normans invaded and conquered England. At that point, the language of government became Old French—or at least the version of it spoken by the Normans—or Medieval Latin. Though peasants still spoke English, nobody was writing much in the language anymore. And when English made a comeback in the 1300s, it had changed quite radically. The complex system of declensions and other inflections from Old English were gone, and the language had borrowed considerably from French and Latin. Though there isn’t a firm line, by the end of the eleventh century Old English is considered to have ended and Middle English to have begun.

The differences between Old English and Middle English are quite stark. Just compare the Lord’s Prayer in each language:

Old English:

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum;
Si þin nama gehalgod
to becume þin rice
gewurþe ðin willa
on eorðan swa swa on heofonum.
urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg
and forgyf us ure gyltas
swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum
and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge
ac alys us of yfele soþlice
(source)

(The character that looks like a p with an ascender is called a thorn, and it is pronounced like the modern th. It could be either voiceless or voiced depending on its position in a word. The character that looks like an uncial d with a stroke through it is also pronounced just like a thorn, and the two symbols were used interchangeably. Don’t ask me why.)

Middle English:

Oure fadir that art in heuenes,
halewid be thi name;
thi kyngdoom come to;
be thi wille don,
in erthe as in heuene.
Yyue to vs this dai oure breed ouer othir substaunce,
and foryyue to vs oure dettis,
as we foryyuen to oure dettouris;
and lede vs not in to temptacioun,
but delyuere vs fro yuel. Amen.
(source)

(Note that u and v could both represent either /u/ or /v/. V was used at the beginnings of words and u in the middle. Thus vs is “us” and yuel is “evil”.)

While you can probably muddle your way through some of the Lord’s Prayer in Old English, there are a lot of words that are unfamiliar, such as gewurþe and soþlice. And this is probably one of the easiest short passages to read in Old English. Not only is it a familiar text, but it dates to the late Old English period. Older Old English text can be much more difficult. The Middle English, on the other hand, is quite readable if you know a little bit about Middle English spelling conventions.

And even where the Old English is readable, it shows grammatical inflections that are stripped away in Middle English. For example, ure, urne, and urum are all forms of “our” based on their grammatical case. In Middle English, though, they’re all oure, much like Modern English. As I said above, the change from Old English to Middle English was quite radical, and it was also quite sudden. My professor of Old English and Middle English said that there are cases where town chronicles essentially change from Old to Middle English in a generation.

But here’s where things get a little murky. Some have argued that the vernacular language didn’t really change that quickly—it was only the codified written form that did. That is, people were taught to write a sort of standard Old English that didn’t match what they spoke, just as people continued to write Latin even as they were speaking the evolving Romance dialects such as Old French and Old Spanish.

So perhaps the complex inflectional system of Old English didn’t disappear suddenly when the Normans invaded; perhaps it was disappearing gradually throughout the Old English period, but those few who were literate learned the old forms and retained them in writing. Then, when the Normans invaded and people mostly stopped writing in English, they also stopped learning how to write standard Old English. When they started writing English again a couple of centuries later, they simply wrote the language as it was spoken, free of the grammatical forms that had been artificially retained in Old English for so long. This also explains why there was so much dialectal variation in Middle English; because there was no standard form, people wrote their own local variety. It wasn’t until the end of the Middle English period that a new standard started to coalesce and Early Modern English was born.

Supposed Celtic Syntax in English

And with that history established, I can finally get to my second problem with that graphic above: the supposed Celtic remnants in English. English may be a Germanic language, but it differs from its Germanic cousins in several notable ways. In addition to the glut of French, Latin, Greek, and other borrowings that occurred in the Middle and Early Modern English periods, English has some striking syntactic differences from other Germanic languages.

English has what is known as the continuous or progressive aspect, which is formed with a form of be and a present participle. So we usually say I’m going to the store rather than just I go to the store. It’s rather unusual to use a periphrastic—that is, wordy—construction as the default when there’s a shorter option available. Many languages do not have progressive forms at all, and if they do, they’re used to specifically emphasize that an action is happening right now or is ongoing. English, on the other hand, uses it as the default form for many types of verbs. But in German, for example, you simply say Ich gehe in den Laden (“I go to the store”), not Ich bin gehende in den Laden (“I am going to the store”).

English also makes extensive use of a feature known as do support, wherein we insert do into certain kinds of constructions, mostly questions and negatives. So while German would have Magst du Eis? (“Like you ice cream?”), English inserts a dummy do: Do you like ice cream? These constructions are rare cross-linguistically and are very un-Germanic.

And some people have come up with a very interesting explanation for this unusual syntax: it comes from a Celtic substrate. That is, they believe that the Celtic population of Britain adopted Old English from their Anglo-Saxon conquerors but remained bilingual for some time. As they learned Old English, they carried over some of their native syntax. The Celtic languages have some rather unusual syntax themselves, highly favoring periphrastic constructions over inflected ones. Some of these constructions are roughly analogous to the English use of do support and progressive forms. For instance, in Welsh you might say Dwi yn mynd i’r siop (“I am in going to the shop”). (Disclaimer: I took all of one semester in Welsh, so I’m relying on what little I remember plus some help from various websites on Welsh grammar and a smattering of Google Translate.)

While this isn’t exactly like the English equivalent, it looks close. Welsh doesn’t have present participial forms but instead uses something called a verbal noun, which is a sort of cross between an infinitive and gerund. Welsh also uses the particle yn (“in”) to connect the verbal noun to the rest of the sentence, which is actually quite similar to constructions from late Middle and Early Modern English such as He was a-going to the store, where a- is just a worn-down version of the preposition on.

But Welsh uses this construction in all kinds of places where English doesn’t. To say I speak Welsh, for example, you say Dw’i’n siarad Cymraeg, which literally translated means I am in speaking Welsh. In English the progressive stresses that you are doing something right now, while the simple present is used for things that are done habitually or that are generally true. In Welsh, though, it’s unmarked—it’s simply a wordier way of stating something without any special progressive meaning. Despite its superficial similarities to the English progressive, it’s quite far from English in both use and meaning. Additionally, the English construction may have much more mundane origins in the conflation of gerunds and present participles in late Middle English, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Welsh’s use of do support—or, I should say, gwneud support—even less closely parallels that of English. In English, do is used in interrogatives (Do you like ice cream?), negatives (I don’t like ice cream), and emphatic statements (I do like ice cream), and it also appears as a stand-in for whole verb phrases (He thinks I don’t like ice cream, but I do). In Welsh, however, gwneud is not obligatory, and it can be used in simple affirmative statements without any emphasis.

Nor is it always used where it would be in English. Many questions and negatives are formed with a form of the be verb, bod, rather than gwneud. For example, Do you speak Welsh? is Wyt ti’n siarad Cymraeg? (“Are you in speaking Welsh?”), and I don’t understand is Dw i ddim yn deall (“I am not in understanding”). (This is probably simply because Welsh uses the pseudo-progressive in the affirmative form, so it uses the same construction in interrogatives and negatives, much like how English would turn “He is going to the store” into “Is he going to the store?” or “He isn’t going to the store.” Do is only used when there isn’t another auxiliary verb that could be used.)

But there’s perhaps an even bigger problem with the theory that English borrowed these constructions from Celtic: time. Both the progressive and do support start to appear in late Middle English (the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), but they don’t really take off until the sixteenth century and beyond, over a thousand years after the Anglo-Saxons began colonizing Great Britain. So if the Celtic inhabitants of Britain adopted English but carried over some Celtic syntax, and if the reason why that Celtic syntax never appeared in Old English is that the written language was a standardized form that didn’t match the vernacular, and if the reason why Middle English looks so different from Old English is that people were now writing the way they spoke, then why don’t we see these Celticisms until the end of the Middle English period, and then only rarely?

Proponents of the Celtic substrate theory argue that these features are so unusual that they could only have been borrowed into English from Celtic languages. They ask why English is the only Germanic language to develop them, but it’s easy to flip this sort of question around. Why did English wait for more than a thousand years to borrow these constructions? Why didn’t English borrow the verb-subject-object sentence order from the Celtic languages? Why didn’t it borrow the after-perfect, which uses after plus a gerund instead of have plus a past participle (She is after coming rather than She has come), or any other number of Celtic constructions? And maybe most importantly, why are there almost no lexical borrowings from Celtic languages into English? Words are the first things to be borrowed, while more structural grammatical features like syntax and morphology are among the last. And just to beat a dead horse, just because something developed in English doesn’t mean you should expect to see the same thing develop in related languages.

The best thing that the Celtic substrate theory has going for it, I think, is that it’s appealing. It neatly explains something that makes English unique and celebrates the Celtic heritage of the island. But there’s a danger whenever a theory is too attractive on an emotional level. You tend to overlook its weaknesses and play up its strengths, as John McWhorter does when he breathlessly explains the theory in Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue. He stresses again and again how unique English is, how odd these constructions are, and how therefore they must have come from the Celtic languages.

I’m not a historical linguist and certainly not an expert in Celtic languages, but alarm bells started going off in my head when I read McWhorter’s book. There were just too many things that didn’t add up, too many pieces that didn’t quite fit. I wanted to believe it because it sounded so cool, but wanting to believe something doesn’t make it so. Of course, none of this is to say that it isn’t so. Maybe it’s all true but there just isn’t enough evidence to prove it yet. Maybe I’m being overly skeptical for nothing.

But in linguistics, as in other sciences, a good dose of skepticism is healthy. A crazy theory requires some crazy-good proof, and right now, all I see is a theory with enough holes in it to sink a fleet of Viking longboats.

Grammar, Historical linguistics 41 Replies to “Celtic and the History of the English Language”

Jonathon Owen

COMMENTS

41 thoughts on “Celtic and the History of the English Language”

Is there any explanation around that tries to tie what’s called the Rheinische Verlaufsform in German (“Ich bin am Laufen”—lit. “I am at running”—instead of “Ich laufe,” if the action is perceived as ongoing) to non-Germanic roots?

Hmmm. I don’t know if you’ll be likely to see this reply so long afterwards, but: the suggestion of a Celtic (more specifically Gaulish) influence on ‘sein-am-machen’ has several factors in its favour, but also one quite strongly against. Since the former are more ‘fun’, I’ll start with those. The fact that it is especially typical of Rhineland German means that Gaulish was indeed spoken nearby for many centuries, and furthermore there were mixed Celtic and Germanic populations there well into the early Middle Ages (perhaps 500/600 A.D. or later). The underlying meaning ‘I am *at* doing X’ also agrees quite well with that of Welsh, deriving from Brythonic (Gallo-Brythonic). ‘Rwyf i yn gwneud X’. ‘I am (at) doing X’. Incidentally, I’d argue that modern Welsh ‘yn’ derives separately from the prepositional form – also it ‘mutates’ completely differently, or rather only the prepositional form mutates. If we compare Cornish or Breton, the equivalent form is ‘ow’ and ‘o/oc’h’. ‘Esof vy ow tysky X’. (‘I’m learning X’ – Cornish). ‘Me zo o zeskin~ X’ (Breton).

I mentioned a problem, however. Whilst attempts to reconstruct Gaulish (of which Brythonic was really a dialect, at least in my opinion) are incomplete, it is widely argued that the progressive forms – similar to English ‘doing X’, German ‘am machen X’ – never occurred in Gaulish. That is debatable, but it *is* clear that they were not used frequently in the written language. (This also appears to be true for Brythonic, however: the few examples of short but ‘bona fide Brythonic’ texts we are aware of do not use the form either). This complicates matters, since it might suggest that progressive forms are in fact wholly irrelevant to the development of Welsh/Cornish/Breton, being a late (i.e. well post-Roman) grammatical feature, arising after they had already largely ‘split’ in three. (That would even raise the possibility that the progressive forms derive from Irish, i.e. from the Church, and *so* do the English forms – but I’ll leave that aside just now). The crux of the matter would be whether we can identify similar forms in Gaulish. The periphrastic form is debatable, but there are instances of what are effectively verbal nouns in Gaulish, e.g. ‘u-getiae segusion’, ‘throwings of [their] spears’, from an inscription at Anduze.

In addition to the Rheinische Verlaufsform in German, there is also a continuous form in Spanish verbs: e.g. estoy cantando meaning roughly “I’m always singing” (and probably driving my neighbours mad) as does Italian (io sot leggendo = I stand reading).
George Lamont says:
“The progressive verb, not just the participle, has roots in Old English (OE), but the application only became frequent regionally in Northern England, Kent and Worcestershire in early Middle English (ME), then spread throughout Britain by the end of ME. It did not become grammaticalized (a required practice) until as late as the eighteenth century, and did not assume a consistent passive form until the nineteenth century. In the later twentieth century, regionally divergent uses of the progressive became well-documented, while the progressive itself has became a fully grammaticalized part of the verbal system in standard English. Its vivacity as a grammatical requirement in English and concurrent relative uniqueness testify to the productivity of English as a language that is evolving not only lexically, but syntactically as well.” (http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/6362-lamont.htm)
We’ve seen MacDonalds popularise the phrase “I’m loving it!” in the last twenty years or so.

“Both the progressive and do support start to appear in late Middle English (the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), but they don’t really take off until the sixteenth century and beyond, ”

I’ve sometimes seen this linked with the ascendancy of the Welsh-origin Tudor dynasty (Henry VII was Welsh-born; he came to the throne in 1485). It’s a suggestive coincidence, although it seems an unlikely explanation.

Thomas: Not that I know of, but all I know about the Rheinische Verlaufsform is that it exists.

Catherine: And from what I understand, this construction also appeared in Latin and occasionally appeared in Old English, but mostly in translations of Latin texts. But perhaps this construction influenced the development of the progressive in English, especially as forms like be + present participle and be + on + gerund collapsed together.

dw: It is interesting, but I agree that it’s unlikely. I suppose it’s possible that a new Welsh-born nobility could influence the language, just as the Normans obviously shaped Middle English. But if that’s the case, then there should be good evidence for it, and I haven’t heard of any.

Spanish has a progressive form made with estar and the gerundio — estoy yendo = I am going. I think other Romance languages (Italian perhaps) have something similar.

This caught me:
“Why didn’t English borrow the verb-subject-object sentence order from the Celtic languages? Why didn’t it borrow the after-perfect, which uses after plus a gerund instead of have plus a past participle (She is after coming rather than She has come), or any other number of Celtic constructions? And maybe most importantly, why are there almost no lexical borrowings from Celtic languages into English?”

Many times people entering a shop would tell the shop assistant “I’m after a pound of butter”, and more elderly shoppers would use “I’m after buying a pound of butter.” This, in (not ireland) a New Zealand corner shop, back in the 60s & 70s. In current use in motor parts and accessories, or hardware & tools.

Eudora Welty used this “after-perfect” construction in the dialog of a number of her short stories set in rural Mississippi.

[…] a concise explanation of the development of modern English, click here or use the link […]

Lynne and Everett: Fair point. I should have specified that I meant Standard English and not regional dialects. But that just underscores the original question: we definitely see more Celticisms in regions with greater Celtic populations, but if most of England had a bilingual Celtic population at one point, then why don’t see them all over?

Very fun read, thank you. What I want to know is, was that last line written just for fun, or is it a teaser?

Joffre The Giant: Just for fun. 🙂

She’s after coming is a common turn of phrase in Ireland. After is used often in the country.
Things like “I do be going ” etc…not considered educated but valid in the spoken language. …new Zealand is full of Scots.
I think it proves your point nicely. It’s definitely not ever heard in England.
There are also much more direct routine sentence constructions (in Ireland ) definitely not used in England such as
“She’s after asking will you go to the party” “i wouldn’t know what to do only for his help ”
Things like that

[…] like the fact that the English Language has so many different influences, so I like this diagram. The article is interesting as […]

[…] Celtic and the history of the English language. Jonathon Owen on Arrant Pedantry points out that the origins of the English language are not […]

[…] Original article reblogged from Arrant Pedantry […]

[…] Celtic languages influence English […]

My favorite extreme-Hibernian syntax: “‘Tis an ease to the gate they to be married”, meaning the couple will stop leaning on the gate in the fence between their lands and talking together, now that they are living in the same house.

“(The character that looks like a p with an ascender is called a thorn, and it is pronounced like the modern th. It could be either voiceless or voiced depending on its position in a word. The character that looks like an uncial d with a stroke through it is also pronounced just like a thorn, and the two symbols were used interchangeably. Don’t ask me why.)”

Thorn þ was a holdover from the runes and lasted until the coming of the printing press which didn’t hav the letter! Often y with a superscript e was noted and thus the befuddling “ye olde … ” where ye=þe (the).

Eth ð was brought by the Irish monks to try to split the voic’d and voiceless ‘th’ sound. It didn’t work. Scribes swappt them at will. It was an unneeded attempt at spelling reform! lol

Interesting! I knew that thorn was runic and eth was brought by Irish monks, but I didn’t know it had anything to do with spelling reform.

It makes sense that scribes would use them interchangeably, though, because there wasn’t a phonemic difference between voiced and voiceless fricatives at that point.

Thanks for the excellent article.
Just wanted to mention that in German, “tun” (“do”) is also used as auxiliary verb, in particular in some dialects, and by speakers of standard German under the influenced of these dialects.
“Ich tu bloß noch schnell die Blumen gießen.”
“Für das Geld tät ich nach Amerika schwimmen.”
“Was tust du da essen?”
I’m not suggesting that this explains the phenomenon in English, but there may already have been a fertile ground for the development of the modern use of “do” in the Western Germanic languages.

Thanks for that. I think I’ve heard that there are a few similar constructions in dialects of other languages, but I didn’t know enough to comment on them.

I would like to respond to the commentator who noted that, in New Zealand, where there are many Scots, “Many times people entering a shop would tell the shop assistant “I’m after a pound of butter”, and more elderly shoppers would use “I’m after buying a pound of butter.”

However, this is to confuse an *actual* instance of the preposition ‘after’ with an -ing verbal noun (as in I’m after buying a pound of butter) with a grammatical usage where the preposition ‘after’ *replaces* the auxiliary ‘have’ in the perfect (as in ‘I have bought a pound of butter’). If we accept that one of the uses of the present perfect is to indicate the *recent* past, then it can readily be seen that the verb phrase ‘she has come’ is equivalent to ‘she is after coming’. In other words, the preposition ‘after’ in the Celtic construction ‘she is after coming’ is used in a *literal* sense of ‘she is after (the act of) coming’ or, in Modern English, ‘she has (just) come’. This usage is different from ‘I’m after buying a pound of butter’, which could be restated as ‘I am after (an act of) buying a pound of butter’ In this restated phrase, it can be seen that the preposition ‘after’ is used in its actual prepositional sense, and not as a replacement for the perfect auxiliary ‘have’ (as in the Celtic construction ‘she is after coming’ or in Modern English, ‘she has come)’. In other words, ‘I’m after buying a pound of butter’ is not the same as in ‘She is after coming’. In the first verb phrase (‘I’m after buying’) the preposition ‘after’ signifies a sense of ‘seeking’, but in the latter phrase (‘She is after coming’), the preposition ‘after’ is being used as an auxiliary, to signify that ‘she is here,* having* just come’.

This is my reading of the Celtic syntax, in any case. Constructions such as ‘She is after coming’ in Scots Gaelic do provide some evidence of the Celtic substrate theory, in my humble opinion.

Very interesting article. I’m learning Welsh at the moment, and was quite intrigued when I found out about the Celtic substrate theory, but I do admit that you raise some serious objections. However, it seems that the substrate theory goes beyond the linguistic features you’ve mentioned. There’s a useful summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittonicisms_in_English

You’re right that there are a lot of possible other features that I didn’t consider. But I think McWhorter’s version of the theory, which is that most of the inhabitants of Great Britain were speaking a Brittonicized English that didn’t appear in writing until Middle English, has some major problems. If do support and the progressive tenses are evidence of Celtic influence, and if that Celtic influence wasn’t evident in writing in Old English because scribes were using a learned form of the language that didn’t match the vernacular, then we would have expected do support and the progressive tenses to appear in writing shortly after the Norman invasion and not a few centuries later.

To be fair, the default argument must logically be that there is a degree of Celtic influence and Germanic influence that combined to become Old English. Obviously Germanic influence was greater. Considering the differences between Old English and Germanic dialects of the time there must have been some influence to account for the changes. Celtic is the most logical reason. Therefore any investigation of this must start from a point of disproving such influence, if its influence is to be disputed. The burden must be on those who claim less likely influences or causes as agents of change.

“The default argument must logically be that there is a degree of Celtic influence and Germanic influence that combined to become Old English.”

This isn’t actually a logical argument at all, and it’s not at all clear why you think it should be the default. For one thing, Old English is not very different from other Germanic dialects of the time. Around the time the Anglo-Saxons started settling in Great Britain, their language was really part of a dialect continuum that included the ancestors of modern-day Dutch, High German, Low German, and Frisian. Furthermore, this isn’t how historical linguistics works. You don’t assume a connection between two otherwise unrelated languages and then force everyone else to disprove it. The null hypothesis is that there’s no relation unless you can demonstrate otherwise.

What you’ve really done is made an observation (“Old English is different”—though it really isn’t that different) and stated a hypothesis (“it’s different because of Celtic influence”). How are you going to know whether your hypothesis is true or not unless you prove it?

Glad to see Mirko (June 23 2017) pointed this out:
here in Bavaria the use of “tun” (German cognate of “to do”), as in his examples, is widespread.

There’s now a whole wiki-page on the general subject of the OP:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittonicisms_in_English

A complete outsider here. But what about the influence of Latin and English (previous dialects, Old, Middle and so on) in Celtic languages? I say this because it seems you are reifying Celtic languages as if coming from a pristine unpolluted age without the same historicity you seem to allow to the “evolution” of English…

I’m really not sure where you’re getting that from. I certainly don’t think I’ve said that Celtic languages come from a pristine, unpolluted age without any historicity. Could you show me the passages where you think I make that argument?

Hi. You do not say it and I wrote “it seems”. Perhaps I should have written “it seems to me”. I wrote it because without being a specialist I sense a lack of a parallel analysis for the Celtic languages that surely influenced English. Basically, it is dangerous to extrapolate current forms of Celtic languages to their previous stages that surely influenced English, since these previous stages were at the same time being influenced by Saxon and so on and therefore their current form has also changed. I am only speculating but it kind of makes sense.

“It is dangerous to extrapolate current forms of Celtic languages to their previous stages that surely influenced English, since these previous stages were at the same time being influenced by Saxon and so on and therefore their current form has also changed.”

It’s a fair point that I should be basing the analysis on historical forms of Celtic languages and not their modern forms. But I’m not sure it’s safe to assume that Celtic languages and Anglo-Saxon influenced each other. There needs to be evidence of such influence before we start basing arguments on the idea, and that’s where I’m skeptical. Based on my (admittedly very limited) knowledge of modern Celtic languages and my knowledge of Old English and Middle English, I don’t see a lot of support for the idea that the ancient inhabitants of England spoke a version of Anglo-Saxon that was heavily influenced by Celtic languages even while they were writing a form of Anglo-Saxon that showed no such influence and that the influence suddenly became visible during the Middle English period. The timeline just doesn’t match up.

That’s not to say that the Celtic languages had no influence on English. In fact, after I wrote this post, I came across some research that does show that there was some possible Celtic influence. At some point I’d like to dig into that more and revisit this topic, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

But as for the fact that I don’t talk about possible Anglo-Saxon influence on Celtic languages, well, that’s not what this post is about. Also, I’m not aware of any notable influence beyond word borrowings, but I’m also a lot less familiar with the history of the Celtic languages.

“In fact, after I wrote this post, I came across some research that does show that there was some possible Celtic influence. At some point I’d like to dig into that more and revisit this topic, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.”
I look forward to hearing about this research and your thoughts on it in due course!

Interesting article. I’m watching McWhorter’s Great Courses lectures and heard his Do Support theory. As a native Welsh speaker it sounds appealing! If I may point out one thing in your analysus, you always translate Welsh “yn” as “in” whereas it actually has several uses, 9 according to a Welsh dictionary,. In the examples you use its meaning is indeed “do” or “doing” e.g. “Dwi yn [Dwi’n] siarad’ is ‘I do speaking” etc. Is this the Do Support he speaks of?

Sorry, to clarify, “Dwi” is “I am” so it’s “I am doing speaking”

I’d have to read McWhorter’s book again to see if he specified which word he was translating as ‘do’. And it’s true that even though I translated yn as ‘in’, that’s not really the best translation in a construction like this. But my understanding is that it doesn’t really mean ‘doing’ here either and that it’s more accurately regarded as a simple grammatical particle connecting the complement to the verb. That is, it doesn’t really have any distinct meaning but just serves as a grammatical link.

“Yn” in this context functions like an article:

Dw i yn siarad – be (do) I the/a talking -> I am talking/I speak