Thread by @DannyBate4

An Introduction to the Celtic Language Family:

some more info, for the perplexed:

Celtic is a family of languages that were once spoken from Ireland to Anatolia (see: Galatians, St Paul's letter to the ~)

today the family survives in Irish, S. Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish and Breton

these languages are, well, odd. 1/4

I mean no disrespect (I adore them), but all six display unusual behaviour for Indo-European languages, in two specific ways:

1) obligatory Verb Subject Object (VSO) word order - verbs come first

2) Consonant Mutation - nouns' initial consonants change according to grammar. 2/4

now here comes Gaulish - ah, lovely Gaulish

Gaulish is an extinct Celtic language, once spoken in France (and beyond), including a village of indomitable Gauls. It died out in the late imperial period, replaced by Latin - although it did leave a mark on French vocabulary. 3/4

Gaulish is, well, normal - a well-behaved ancient IE language

it has:
- fairly free SVO word order
- seven cases (with endings a lot like Greek or Latin)
- a relativizer/complementizer derived from a PIE pronoun (see: Bate 2019)
- no mutation

Gaulish is, in a word, safe. 4/4

what's my favourite fact about the Gaulish language?

Proto-Celtic, the ancestor of the Celtic languages, had a noun *karro-, meaning 'wagon'

the word passed from Proto-Celtic into Gaulish, and from Gaulish into Latin, Old French and finally English, giving us the word 'car'