Mid-Argyll Theme
- 1
P-Celt and Q-Celt
People often speak of the 'Celtic' peoples of
Ireland and Scotland. What do they mean? What is it
that these 'Celts' have in common with each
other?
People even speak of 'Celtic Europe' - a great
exhibition of Celtic art and other archaeological
evidence made a magnificent spectacle in Venice's
Palazzo Grassi in 1991. Are we to suggest that
there was once a great civilisation stretching
across Europe, self-consciously Celtic, sharing
great swathes of cultural life and social
organisation which they held in common with each
other, and which made them different from other
cultures? If this is the question, the answer must
be a resounding 'no'. For most of their history,
for example, the Welsh and the Gaels, neighbours as
they are, have had no idea that they were both
'Celtic'. It was only with the rise of comparative
linguistics in the early modern period that anyone
realised that these two cultures had a certain
common element.
As Gearóid Mac Eoin pointed out in the
concluding pages of the vast and splendid tome that
accompanied the exhibition, The Celts:
That which all the Celtic countries
have in common and which distinguishes them from
other countries of western Europe is that they
have all in recent centuries had a Celtic
language as their vernacular. The Celtic
languages, though today mutually unintelligible,
are closely related to one another and belong to
a group which was once spoken throughout all of
western and much of central Europe.
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It is language which is the defining
characteristic of the 'Celtic'. Not
politics, as Celtic peoples have lived as
part of many different political
scenarios, in alliance with all kinds of
non-Celtic groups, colonised and
colonising, rural and more or less
urban.
It is not art or technique that makes
Celts 'Celtic' - though it is clear that
among people who spoke Celtic languages
there were at some times and in some
places shared artistic traditions. But to
listen to the way some people extol the
art of 'Celtic knotwork' as a great symbol
of Celtic identity and even of Celtic
spirituality - complex, interwoven,
mysterious - you would think that it
wasn't a widespread phenomenon in
non-Celtic Europe and beyond. But it is,
and it is therefore not particularly
Celtic.
Language remains the only ultimately
useful criterion for talk of Celtic
identity, then.
The surviving Insular Celtic languages
fall into two groups. One group, the
P-Celtic, includes modern Welsh and
Cornish, both more or less close to the
Breton spoken in northern France. These
are sometimes called what are called
British or Britonnic dialects, and are
akin to the now defunct language, Pictish.
The other group, 'Q-Celtic' includes the
daughter languages of Old Gaelic - Irish,
Scottish and Manx.
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The insular distribution
of Gaelic and British
speech circa 500 AD [note there
were
some local variations in this
pattern]
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The terms 'P' and 'Q' in this context refer to
peculiarities of the sounds made by the two
different groups. In Indo-European words which
contained an original /kw/ sound, the P-Celts
developed in one direction, dropping the /k/ and
hardening the labial /w/ to a /p/ sound. The
Q-Celts developed in the other direction, dropping
the /w/ sound and remaining with the velar /k/.
This can be shown on a table, where Middle Welsh
and Old Gaelic words are compared with each
other.
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P-Celtic/Welsh
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Q-Celtic/Gaelic
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English
meaning
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pedwar
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ceithir
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'four'
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pimp
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cóic
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'five'
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map
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mac
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'son'
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plant
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cland > clann
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'children'
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pryd
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cruth
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'shape'
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Gaelic's dislike of the p sound is also
reflected in the way that it borrowed words from
Latin in the earliest period of Christian
conversion. So Latin vesper, 'evening',
becomes Old Gaelic fescor. Latin
apostolus, 'apostle', became Gaelic
Axal in a poem written around 600 AD.
(Clancy and Márkus 1995, 106)
Such alternations of p and q sounds are not
peculiar to Celtic languages. It is a pattern among
other Indo-European languages, a wider family of
which Celtic is one branch. For example, the Latin
word equus, 'a horse', is equivalent to the
Greek hippos.
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This
project has been supported by the EU as part of the Culture
2000 programme.