celtic_outline

The Celtic languages are divided into Insular and Continental, and two phonetic varieties known as P-Celtic and Q-Celtic.

Continental Celtic languages included Celtiberian (Iberian peninsula), and Gaulish (with a variant known as Lepontic spoken around boundary between Switzerland and Northern Italy). An Eastern Celtic has been postulated to account for the dense network of Celtic place-names in eastern and central Europe and the known historical presence of Celtic speakers in this region. Galatian, probably derived from this Eastern Celtic, is intrusive in Anatolia and was used until about the 5th century CE.

The most ancient remnants of a Celtic dialect in written form have been found in northern Italy (Sesto Calende, ~600 B.C.E., Castelletto Ticino, ~575-550 B.C.E.). Only recently have these (Lepontic) inscription been recognised as being written in a Celtic dialect (Lejeune, "Lepontica", 1971). None of the Continental Celtic languages have survived.

Insular Celtic languages have survived to a certain extent and consequently they are the main source of information about the Celtic languages in general. The Insular Celtic languages were Brythonic or British and Goidelic.

British has differentiated into Welsh, Cumbric, Cornish and, after the transplantation of Cornish to Aremorica by migration, Breton. Cornish and Cumbric are extinct.

Goidelic has differentiated into the Irish, Scots and Manx forms of Gaelic. Manx is extinct.

Gaulish, Lepontic (as a variant of Gaulish), and British belong to the P-Celtic as does Galatian and so presumably, Eastern Celtic. Celtiberian and Goidelic belong to the Q-Celtic. The earliest date for the Sesto Calende inscriptions written in P-Celtic Lepontic puts the separation of P-Celtic prior to the 7th century B.C.E. This makes the Q-Celtic languages the older form and has led to the supposition that Celtic languages were introduced to the British isles by two invasions. The first (before 600 B.C.E) brought a Q-Celtic ancestor of Goidelic to Ireland and the second (after 600 B.C.E) brought the P-Celtic Brythonic to Great Britain. Recent work on genetics challenges this view by putting the differentiation of Common Celtic from the Indo-European between 8000 and 10000 B.C.E.

The lack of evidence for Q-Celtic in Continental Europe (outside Iberia) and Great Britain supports the view that the differentiation of P-Celtic from a common Celtic base occurred in the regions where it is found historically. This would explain the absence of a Q-Celtic substratum in the P-Celtic regions. The remoteness of the Q-Celtic speakers in Ireland and Iberia may have precluded the mutation of the Common Celtic to P-Celtic thus permitting its orderly development into the Q-Celtic forms known to us.