Brittonic languages

The names "Brittonic" and "Brythonic" are scholarly conventions referring to the Celtic languages of Britain and to the ancestral language they originated from, designated Common Brittonic, in contrast to the Goidelic languages originating in Ireland. Both were created in the 19th century to avoid the ambiguity of earlier terms such as "British" and "Cymric".[2] "Brythonic" was coined in 1879 by the Celticist John Rhys from the Welsh word Brython.[2][3] "Brittonic", derived from "Briton" and also earlier spelled "Britonic" and "Britonnic", emerged later in the 19th century.[4] It became more prominent through the 20th century, and was used in Kenneth H. Jackson's highly influential 1953 work on the topic, Language and History in Early Britain. Jackson noted that by that time "Brythonic" had become a dated term, and that "of late there has been an increasing tendency to use Brittonic instead."[3] Today, "Brittonic" often replaces "Brythonic" in the literature.[4] Rudolf Thurneysen used "Britannic" in his influential A Grammar of Old Irish, although this never became popular among subsequent scholars.[5]

Comparable historical terms include the Medieval Latin lingua Britannica and sermo Britannicus[6] and the Welsh Brythoneg.[2] Some writers use "British" for the language and its descendants, although, due to the risk of confusion, others avoid it or use it only in a restricted sense. Jackson, and later John T. Koch, use "British" only for the early phase of the Common Brittonic language.[5]

Before Jackson's work, "Brittonic" and "Brythonic" were often used for all the P-Celtic languages, including not just the varieties in Britain but those Continental Celtic languages that similarly experienced the evolution of the Proto-Celtic language element /kʷ/ to /p/. However, subsequent writers have tended to follow Jackson's scheme, rendering this use obsolete.[5]

The name "Britain" itself comes from Latin: Britannia~Brittania, via Old French Bretaigne and Middle English Breteyne, possibly influenced by Old English Bryten(lond), probably also from Latin Brittania, ultimately an adaptation of the native word for the island, *Pritanī.[7][8]

An early written reference to the British Isles may derive from the works of the Greek explorer Pytheas of Massalia; later Greek writers such as Diodorus of Sicily and Strabo who quote Pytheas' use of variants such as πρεττανική (Prettanikē), "The Britannic [land, island]", and νησοι βρεττανιαι (nēsoi brettaniai), "Britannic islands", with *Pretani being a Celtic word that might mean "the painted ones" or "the tattooed folk", referring to body decoration (see below).[9]

Knowledge of the Brittonic languages comes from a variety of sources. The early language's information is obtained from coins, inscriptions, and comments by classical writers as well as place names and personal names recorded by them. For later languages, there is information from medieval writers and modern native speakers, together with place names. The names recorded in the Roman period are given in Rivet and Smith.[10]

The Brittonic branch is also referred to as P-Celtic because linguistic reconstruction of the Brittonic reflex of the Proto-Indo-European phoneme *kʷ is p as opposed to Goidelic c. Such nomenclature usually implies acceptance of the P-Celtic and Q-Celtic hypothesis rather than the Insular Celtic hypothesis because the term includes certain Continental Celtic languages as well. (For a discussion, see Celtic languages.)

Other major characteristics include:

• The retention of the Proto-Celtic sequences am and an, which mostly result from the Proto-Indo-European syllabic nasals.
• Celtic /w/ (written u in Latin texts and ou in Greek) became gw- in initial position, -w- internally, whereas in Gaelic it is f- in initial position and disappears internally:
  • Proto-Celtic *windos 'white, fair' became Welsh gwyn (masculine), gwen (feminine), Cornish gwynn, Breton gwenn. Contrast Irish fionn 'fair'.
  • Proto-Celtic *wassos 'servant, young man' became Welsh, Cornish and Breton gwas. Contrast Middle Irish foss.

Initial s-:

• Initial s- followed by a vowel was changed to h-:
  • Welsh hen 'old', hir 'long', hafal 'similar'
  • Breton hen 'ancient', hir 'long', hañval 'similar'
  • Cornish hen 'ancient', hir 'long', haval 'similar'
  • Contrast Irish sean 'old', síor 'long', samhail 'similarity'
• Initial s- was lost before /l/, /m/ and /n/:
  • *slemon became Welsh llyfn, Cornish leven and Breton levn 'smooth'. Contrast Irish sleamhain 'smooth, slimy'
  • *smeru became Welsh mêr, Cornish mer, and Breton mel 'marrow'. Contrast Irish sméar
• The initial clusters sp-, sr-, sw- became f-, fr-, chw-:
  • *sɸera became Welsh ffêr 'ankle', Cornish fer 'shank, lower leg' and Breton fer 'ankle'. Contrast Old Irish seir 'heel, ankle'
  • *srogna 'nostril' became Welsh ffroen, Cornish frig and Breton froen. Contrast Irish srón
  • *swīs 'you' (plural) became Welsh chwi, Cornish hwy and Breton c'hwi. Contrast Old Irish síi

Lenition:

• Voiceless plosives become voiced plosives in intervocalic position.
  • d [d], g [ɡ], b [b]
• Voiced plosives /d/, /ɡ/ (later /ɣ/ or /j/, then lost in Welsh and Cornish; remained as /ɣ/ in Breton), /b/, and /m/ became soft spirants in an intervocalic position and before liquids:
  • Welsh dd [ð], f [v]
  • Cornish dh [ð], v [v]
  • Breton z [z], c'h [ɣ], v [v]

Voiceless spirants:

• Geminated voiceless plosives transformed into spirants; /pp/ (pp), /kk/ (cc), /tt/ (tt) became /ɸ/ (later /f/), /x/ (ch/c'h), /θ/ (th/zh) before a vowel or liquid:
  • *cippus > Breton kef, Cornish kyf, Welsh cyff, 'tree trunk'
  • *cattos > Breton kazh, Cornish kath, Welsh cath, 'cat' vs. Irish cat
  • *bucca > Breton boc'h, Cornish bogh, Welsh boch, 'cheek'
• Voiceless stops become spirants after liquids:
  • *artos 'bear' > Welsh/Cornish arth, Breton arzh, compare Old Irish art

Nasal assimilation:

• Voiced stops were assimilated to a preceding nasal:
• Brittonic retains original nasals before -t and -k, whereas Goidelic alters -nt to -d, and -nk to -g:
  • Breton kant 'hundred' vs. Irish céad, Breton Ankou (personification of) Death, Irish éag 'die'

The family tree of the Brittonic languages is as follows:

• Common Brittonic ancestral to:
  • Western Brittonic languages ancestral to:
    • Cumbric[11]
    • Welsh
  • Southwestern Brittonic languages ancestral to:
    • Cornish
    • Breton

Brittonic languages in use today are Welsh, Cornish and Breton. Welsh and Breton have been spoken continuously since they formed. For all practical purposes Cornish died out during the 18th or 19th century, but a revival movement has more recently created small numbers of new speakers. Also notable are the extinct language Cumbric, and possibly the extinct Pictish. One view, advanced in the 1950s and based on apparently unintelligible ogham inscriptions, was that the Picts may have also used a non-Indo-European language.[12] This view, while attracting broad popular appeal, has virtually no following in contemporary linguistic scholarship.[13]

Britain & Ireland in the early–mid 1st millennium, before the founding of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

  Mainly Brittonic areas.

  Mainly Pictish areas.

  Mainly Goidelic areas.

The modern Brittonic languages are generally considered to all derive from a common ancestral language termed Brittonic, British, Common Brittonic, Old Brittonic or Proto-Brittonic, which is thought to have developed from Proto-Celtic or early Insular Celtic by the 6th century BC.[14]

A major archaeogenetics study uncovered a migration into southern Britain in the middle to late Bronze Age, during the 500-year period 1,300–800 BC.[15] The newcomers were genetically most similar to ancient individuals from Gaul.[15] During 1,000–875 BC, their genetic markers swiftly spread through southern Britain,[16] but not northern Britain.[15] The authors describe this as a "plausible vector for the spread of early Celtic languages into Britain".[15] There was much less inward migration during the Iron Age, so it is likely that Celtic reached Britain before then.[15] Barry Cunliffe suggests that a Goidelic branch of Celtic may already have been spoken in Britain, but that this middle Bronze Age migration would have introduced the Brittonic branch.[17]

Brittonic languages were probably spoken before the Roman invasion throughout most of Great Britain, though the Isle of Man later had a Goidelic language, Manx. During the period of the Roman occupation of what is now England and Wales (AD 43 to c. 410), Common Brittonic borrowed a large stock of Latin words, both for concepts unfamiliar in the pre-urban society of Celtic Britain such as urbanization and new tactics of warfare as well as for rather more mundane words which displaced native terms (most notably, the word for "fish" in all the Brittonic languages derives from the Latin piscis rather than the native *ēskos - which may survive, however, in the Welsh name of the River Usk, Wysg). Approximately 800 of these Latin loan-words have survived in the three modern Brittonic languages. Pictish may have resisted Latin influence to a greater extent than the other Brittonic languages.[18]

It is probable that at the start of the Post-Roman period Common Brittonic was differentiated into at least two major dialect groups – Southwestern and Western (also we may posit additional dialects, such as Eastern Brittonic, spoken in what is now the East of England, which have left little or no evidence). Between the end of the Roman occupation and the mid 6th century the two dialects began to diverge into recognizably separate varieties, the Western into Cumbric and Welsh and the Southwestern into Cornish and its closely related sister language Breton, which was carried to continental Armorica. Jackson showed that a few of the dialect distinctions between West and Southwest Brittonic go back a long way. New divergencies began around AD 500 but other changes that were shared occurred in the 6th century. Other common changes occurred in the 7th century onward and are possibly due to inherent tendencies. Thus the concept of a Common Brittonic language ends by AD 600. Substantial numbers of Britons certainly remained in the expanding area controlled by Anglo-Saxons, but over the fifth and sixth centuries they mostly adopted the English language.[19][20][21]

Wikiversity has learning resources about Brythonic Celtic Languages Division

• Coates, Richard (2007) Invisible Britons: the view from linguistics. (archived)