Hello, everyone! Welcome to the Langfocus Channel and my name is Paul.
People who are interested in the history of English
know that english is a Germanic language that developed from
Old English,
the language of the Anglo-Saxons
who began invadind and settling
in Britain in the 5th century.
It's also widely known that the development of English
was heavily impacted by two periods of
contact with other groups of people:
the influence of old norse, during the period of Scandinavian settlement,
and the influence of french, after the Norman Conquest.
But there was also another period of intense contact.
When the Anglo-Saxons began invading Britain in the year 449,
they encountered the Celts
who spoke Celtic languages
and, unlike today, lived throughout the island of Great Britain.
Didn't this major contact also have an impact on English?
Well, it's typically thought that it didn't.
That's why so few people talk about it
The traditionally held view is that the Anglo-Saxons massacred the Celts,
leaving them in only a couple of pockets on the western side of the island.
That would be Wales or Cornwall
But genetic research, archeological evidence, and some historical records
indicate that the Anglo-Saxons ruled over the Celts,
intermarried with them, and enslaved some of them,
and ultimately absorved them into the population
rather than just killing them all or driving them all out.
(But, of course, lots of that happened too.)
In a situation like that, it's hard to imagine that English
was not influenced by Celtic,
especially since Celts must have formed the majority of the population.
When large numbers of people adopt the language of their rulers,
their native language normally functions as a substrate,
meaning that it leaves its mark on the new language they adopt.
They learn the new language imperfectly,
with interference from their native language.
So, are there any features of English that likely come from a Celtic language substrate?
If we focus on vocabulary
than no, not really.
There are only a handful of Celtic words in English from that period,
and honestly, I've never heard anyone use any those words,
except for "binn".
There are, however, a couple of curious grammatical features in English
that seem uncannily similar to features in two Celtic languages:
Welsh and Cornish.
The first one is: "DO SUPPORT",
the use of what John McWhorter call "the meaningless do".
In English, the word "do" is inserted into many yes-or-no questions
and negative statements,
like: "Do you drink coffee?"
Have you ever thought about why "do" appears in that sentence?
In many languages of the world, you form yes-or-no questions
by simply saying a statement with raised intonation.
Something like: "You drink coffee?"
in English.
Of course, in English, "You drink coffee?"
is something people say,
but for a specific purpose:
to check that they've understood correctly when they hear something surprising.
But in other languages, that's the regular way to ask a question
with no such special purpose.
For example, in Italian:
"Bevi il caffè?"
This is the same
as the statement
"Bevi il caffè"
but with raised intonation
In some languages, there is a question marker that goes before or after the sentence.
For example,
in Standard Arabic
you might add
"hal", before the sentence.
"Hal tashrubu al-qahwa"
Or, you can say it without the question marker
so it's the same as the statement,
but with rising intonation:
"Tashrubu al-qahwa?"
And there are other question-forming constructions like:
"Est-ce que ~"
in French. Litteraly: "Is it that"
"Est-ce que tu bois du café?"
Or more formally, you might use inversion instead:
"Bois-tu du café?"
But none of them use the equivalent of the verb "do",
except for two languages:
Welsh and Cornish.
Welsh doesn't use the "meaningless do" in the present tense, but it does in the past tense.
For example: "Nest ti yfed coffi bore yma?"
Word for word it's:
Did - you - drink - coffee - the - morning - this
Notice that this word: "Nest"
is the past tense of the verb meaning "do".
It's also used in negatives in English.
For example:
"I don't drink coffee".
In many other languages, a simple negation word would be added,
something like: "I not drink coffee".
For example, in Hebrew:
"Ani lo shoteh qafeh"
Again, no other languages in the world use the equivalent of the verb "do"
as an auxiliary in a negative sentence
except fooor
Welsh and Cornish!
Here's an example in Welsh
"Nes i ddim yfed coffi bore yma"
This means "I didn't drink coffee this morning"
Word for word it's:
Did - I - not - drink - coffee - the - morning - this
As we saw before, this word, "Nes"
is the past tense of the verb meaning "do".
But again, in Welsh, the verb "do" is only used as an auxiliary in the past tense.
In English we also sometimes use the verb "do" as an auxiliary in affirmative sentences
in order to show emphasis,
like: "I did wash the dishes!"
something you might say if your spouse asks:
"Why didn't you wash the dishes?"
In Welsh and Cornish, the equivalent of "do" is used generally,
not only to show emphasis.
For example, in Welsh:
"Nes i olchi'r llestri"
Word for word it's:
Did - I - wash - the - dishes
This could mean "I DID wash the dishes!", with emphasis,
or simply "I washed the dishes", without emphasis.
So that might seem like a weak link between English and Celtic
because in English, it's only used for emphasis,
but it used to be used in the regular affirmative in English too.
That means it was used without adding emphasis.
it was just a normal way to express the present tense.
Like these examples, written in Early Modern English (EME):
"Doubt that the sun 'doth' move"
and
"The serpent that 'did' sting thy father's life"
These are lines from Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Neither of them are emphatic.
By the year 1700,
this usage had fallen out of use in English.
But until then, English resembled Celtic a little more than it does now.
Could these similarities be mere coincidence?
Well, that'd be a reasonable assumption if "do support" occured in various languages
throughout the world.
But as far as we know, it only occurs in Welsh, Cornish and English.
And since English was superimposed onto a Celtic speaking land,
the same land where Cornish and Welsh developed,
then it makes sense that Celtic is the source of that feature in English.
Another odd feature of English is the exclusive use of the ~ing form,
the present continuous form,
to refer to an action in the present moment.
If we think about what the present continuous really expresses in English,
it is, in a sense, the only true present tense.
To talk what about what you're doing in this moment right now,
you say something like:
"I am working out at the gym"
"I work out at the gym"
is not something a native speaker would ever say to talk about the present moment.
That refers to general times,
to something you do on your regular basis.
So, how is English special in this reguard?
After all, lots of languages have a present continuous form, don't they?
The difference is that in other languages
the present continuous form is used to emphasize
that the action is ongoing in the present moment.
But you can still use the simple present, and it's correct,
tt just lacks emphasis.
For example, in Spanish:
"Yo estoy comiendo"
meaning "I am eating".
This form emphasizes that the action is happening right now.
But it's also fine to say: "Yo como", which is the simple present form
How about in Welsh and Cornish?
They're similar to English, in that they use the equivalent of the English progressive form
to indicate an action in the present moment.
One difference is that they include a preposition.
For example, in Welsh:
"Mae o yn rhedeg"
which means "He is running".
Word for word it's:
Is - he - in - running
So, literally, it's more like "He is in running"
In English, there used to be a preposition like this too,
like "I am on running",
which gradually morphed into "I am a running",
and then the preposition was lost entirely:
"I am running"
If we compare the older English structure to the current one in Welsh and Cornish,
it's more similar than the current form.
In Old English we can say this:
"Ic eom on huntunʒe"
That's like saying "I am on hunting"
rather than "I'm hunting", in Modern English.
There is more to it than that.
The Celtic progressive is formed with the equivalent of the verb "to be"
followed by a preposition and a verbal noun, rather than a participle.
In English there were originally two ways to form the progressive:
a participle ending with ~ende
For example:
"Ic eom huntiende"
like "I am hunting";
and a verbal noun structure
"Ic eom on huntunge"
Other Germanic languages have retained their equivalents of the ~ende participle,
but in English it came to be replaced by the verbal nounwith ~ing
which now functions as both the verbal noun and the participle.
So English lost the form that resembled Celtic less
and replaced it with the form that closely
resembled Celtic.
That much is clear.
The question is: did this happen due to Celtic influence, or some other cause?
The case for Celtic influence seems quite convincing.
People who question the Celtic influence hypothesis
usely point out that the contact between Anglo-Saxons and the Celts
took place hundreds of years before those features started to appear in written English.
For the most part it wasn't until the Middle English period that these Celticisms started to appear,
and for hundreds of years, Old English was written without any real indication of a Celtic substrate.
If the Celts had influenced English, then why didn't it affect Old English?
Well, that could be because of the difference between the spoken language and the written language.
Old English as we know it, is the written literary language of those days,
and was certainly much more conservative than the spoken language.
Celticisms may have been in common use amongst the common people
while elite scribes saw those innovations
as vulgar
and continued to write Old English
pretty much the same way it had been always been written.
Most people were illiterate, so it was highly unlikely that they felt the need to speak like books
or could have, even if they had wanted to.
But after the Norman Conquest, French became the language of the elite for hundreds of years
and written English lost its prestige
It's likely that when English later regained its status, it was free to be written as it was really spoken
because literary Old English had been left unused for a long time.
So, the Celtic elements
that had been part of spoken English all along
were now suddenly part of the written language too.
So, what do I think?
Well, I'm quite convinced that Celtic must've had some influence on English,
and these celticisms that we looked at are quite compelling.
I do have a couple of reservations though.
First: while Welsh uses "do support" in the past tense
it does not use it in the present tense
which makes its link to English seem weaker.
English doesn't have just "did support", it has "do support".
Also, there are other ways to express the past tense in Welsh.
Sentences with "do support" can be used for both emphatic and non-emphatic sentences,
but they don't have to be used for either.
In English, "do" is required in many contexts.
Another reservation I have
is that while English has both the present progressive and the simple present tense
that is used for statements about general time
as well as for stative verbs,
Welsh doesn't use different forms to distinguish between general time
and an action in the present moment.
So, this makes me wonder:
is it really a progressive form, or is it simply the all purpose present tense,
and just structurally resembles the English present progressive?
Of course nobody is saying that Modern Welsh influenced English
but rather that an early form of Welsh and other Celtic languages influenced English.
So I guess it's normal that the links would have some weaknesses.
Some people are bound to ask why this video focuses on Welsh as a point of comparison
What about Irish and Scottish Gaelic?
Well, Gaelic developed in Ireland, so it wasn't Gaelic that the Anglo-Saxons had the most contact with,
but rather Brythonic languages
the precursors of Welsh and Cornish.
And Welsh and Cornish existed alongside English as they developed.
So, what about Cornish?
Well, Cornish isn't widely spoken anymore
and, in fact
it's not spoken as a native language at all anymore.
So it's difficult to find information on it
and it's difficult to find Cornish speakers who can help with the sentences in a video like this.
The Question of the Day:
What do you think of the similarities between Celtic and English?
Did they convince you that Celtic languages have influenced English?
Leave your reactions in the comments down below.
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