Chapter 38 EARLY ENGLISH AND THE CELTIC HYPOTHESIS (original) (raw)

An Evaluation of the Celtic Hypothesis for Brythonic Celtic influence on Early English

2018

The Celtic Hypothesis attributes some of the major linguistic changes in Old and Middle English to influence from the Brythonic languages that were spoken in Britain at the time of the Anglo-Saxon immigrations beginning in the fifth century. The hypothesis focuses on features of English that do not exist, or are not common, in the other Germanic languages but resemble features in the Celtic languages. From the evidence we have of the socio-political relationships between the Britons and the Anglo-Saxons, the likely language contact situations are compatible with Thomason and Kaufman's (1988) 'substratum interference' and van Coetsem's (1988) 'imposition', by which morpho-syntactic features are transferred from one language (L1) to another (L2) through imperfect second-language acquisition. The fact that the social situation was compatible with Brythonic influence on English does not mean, however, that the linguistic features in early English claimed by the proponents of the Celtic Hypothesis as showing Brythonic influence were actually influenced in this way. My purpose is to evaluate the Celtic Hypothesis in the light of the evidence and modern theories of language change due to contact. This thesis focuses on three features that have played a prominent role in the Celtic Hypothesis: (1) the dual paradigm of be (bēon and wesan) in Old English, (2) the periphrastic construction do + infinitive and (3) the periphrastic progressive construction be +-ing, the last two of which began to be grammaticalised in Middle English. I collect independent evidence from a selection of Middle Welsh texts of the parallel constructions: (1) the dual paradigm of bot 'be', (2) the periphrastic construction gwneuthur 'do' + verbal noun and (3) the periphrastic construction bot 'be' + particle + verbal noun. While the proponents of the Celtic Hypothesis provide examples of these constructions from several Brythonic languages including Middle Welsh, they give few examples and do not discuss the variability of the evidence according to date, region or genre. My own research confirms that the dual paradigms of be and bot do form a close parallel, but it also shows that the Old English dual paradigm is unlikely to have arisen due to Brythonic influence. My findings also show that evidence for the construction of gwneuthur 'do' + verbal noun is problematic: while it is very common in Middle Welsh prose narratives, it is very rare in the early prose annals and the earliest poems. Evidence for the progressive construction in early Welsh is similarly problematic: while it is regularly used in Colloquial Modern Welsh as bod 'be' + particle + verbal noun, it is by no means common in Middle Welsh. By looking at a wider range of Middle Welsh evidence, I demonstrate the limitations of the evidence relied on by proponents of the Celtic Hypothesis. This may lead to better substantiated arguments for the hypothesis in the future. Contents Chapter 1 Introduction 8 Significance of the research 8 The Brythonic languages Methodology Chapter 2 The rise of the Celtic Hypothesis Introduction: Why now? Language contact theories Early language contact theories Recent language contact theories Language contact theories and the Celtic Hypothesis Diglossia Conclusion Periphrasis with ober in Modern Breton Periphrasis with ober in Middle Breton Periphrasis with gruthyl in Middle Cornish Periphrasis with gwneuthur in Middle Welsh Section 5: Middle Welsh evidence and the Celtic Hypothesis Periphrasis with gwneuthur in Middle Welsh: date, region, genre Region Word order in Middle Welsh periphrasis with gwneuthur Genre Section 6: Conclusion Chapter 5 Part 2: The evaluation Section 4: The Brythonic periphrastic construction with 'be' Modern Welsh bod 'be' + yn + VN Modern Breton bezañ 'be' + PT + VN Middle Cornish bos 'be' + PT + VN The Middle Welsh constructions: yn + VN with or without bot Section 5: The issues The atypicality of the Progressive in English The prepositional construction Section 6: Conclusion Chapter 6 Conclusion Appendix 1 on Brythonic texts and manuscripts Early Welsh texts The manuscripts Early Cornish and Breton texts Appendix 2 on the contact situation in Britain from the mid-fifth century Bibliography 1485 and then by the Acts of Union of 1536 and 1542 (A. R. Thomas 1992b: 252). Chapter 2: The rise of the Celtic Hypothesis Introduction: Why now? In this chapter I outline theories of language change in contact situations that form the background to the Celtic Hypothesis. The important point to establish is whether, as the Brythonic Celtic speakers acquired the target language of early English, there was any opportunity for large-scale influence on the English language. Until recently, the idea that early English might have been influenced by Brythonic to any significant degree would not have seemed plausible for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was believed that the Britons living in the south and east of Britain had been killed or had fled to the West. In his De excidio et conquestu Britanniae written in the sixth century, Gildas provides literary evidence of the wholesale slaughter of the Britons in the English-held areas. Other early texts such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (beginning in the ninth century) and Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (written around 731) appear to support Gildas. Bede, for instance, describes a 'great slaughter' of the Britons at the Battle of Chester (2.2). The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recounts the slaughter of 4000 Britons and the flight of the rest from Kent in 457 CE, the slaughter of twelve British leaders in 465, the flight of Britons from another battle in 473, and further slaughter and flight in 477. These early works were unanimous in indicating that the British Celts were killed by or fled from the invading Germanic tribes. Furthermore, on the linguistic side, the lack of Brythonic loan words in English in contrast with those of Scandinavian and Norman French languages seemed to confirm the written accounts. What little borrowing from Brythonic into English there was tended to be words connected to geographical features such as Modern English coombe, glen, Avon, Dover and other river and place names; such restricted lexical borrowing is familiar to us in Australia with words such as billabong taken from an Aboriginal language. As Hickey (2010: 8) notes, until the mechanisms of language contact had been more fully explored, there was a general assumption that the more prestigious language could influence the less prestigious, but not vice versa. Even where some similarities in morphology and syntax were noted, the late appearance of such similarities appeared to rule out the possibility of any significant Brythonic influence on English. Chapter 3: The dual paradigm of be If thou beest not immortal, look about you.

Language contact in English. The Scandinavian versus the Celtic hypotheses.pdf

This undergraduate dissertation studies the impact of language contact of Norse and Brittonic on the evolution of English through the study and review of the work of Kroch et al. (2000), Trudgill (2011) and McWhorter (2011). The hypotheses analysed provide different approaches to the evolution of English within the framework of two linguistic schools, which are mainstream in the study of the history of English, Generative linguistics and Sociolinguistics. McWhorter suggests that English inherited fewer features from Proto-Germanic than other languages and lost some of them due to contact with Celtic, which is seemingly responsible for the emergence of features such as the do auxiliary. In the same way, Trudgill, who was formerly in favour of the Scandinavian hypothesis, now claims that the simplification of English is the result of Celtic influence (2011). On the other hand, Kroch et al. are in favour of the Scandinavian hypothesis which, according to them, accounts for the loss of the verb-second syntactic pattern as a result of an incomplete acquisition of English by the Scandinavians in the Danelaw. They approach this issue from the perspective of Generative grammar, while both Trudgill and McWhorter do it from a Sociolinguistic perspective. The aim of this paper is to study and critically evaluate both accounts in order to assess to what extent they provide convincing accounts of the role language contact in the evolution of English. Keywords: Old English, Middle English, Scandinavian influence, Celtic hypothesis, Sociolinguistics, Generative linguistics, simplification, complexification, verb-second.

Gallo-Brittonic vs. Insular Celtic: The Inter-rela¬tion¬ships of the Celtic Languages Recon¬sidered

of the development of early Celtic word order patterns out of Indo-European has progressed in an exciting and promising way on the Irish side ; two of the more influential writers in this area (namely Kim McCone and the late Warren Cowgill) have assumed a genetic Insular Celtic and have presented their hypotheses in this light 5 . (iii) The known archaeological and proto-historical inter-relationships of the iron-age Celts do not imply a genetic GaUo-Brittonic as a distinct proto-language isolated from other emerging Celtic dialects at a specific horizon within a geographical homeland. Rather, Britain was rendered 'Gallo-Brittonic' by being irradiated by successive waves of Gallicising influences from the central La Tene and HaUstatt wnes through the course of the last millennium BC (a process congruent with the archaeological framework of 'Cumulative Celticity'6). In Ireland and the Iberian Peninsula, these influences were, especiaUy in the later centuries BC, weaker and less continuous. Therefore, a model of dialects in degrees of contact is more suitable than the traditional family-tree model, which im plies an early mutual isolation.

Middle English: Language contact

In: Bergs, Alex and Laurel Brinton (eds.) 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1). Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 505-519

The complex linguistic situation in the ME period, with widespread multilingualism and initial diglossia, has led to frequent contact-induced changes on all linguistic levels of English. The present chapter starts with a brief discussion of the relation between language contact and change and of the changing nature of ME multilingualism; then some specific research questions are introduced, such as the controversial issue of ME creolization, the frequent use of code-switching in medieval texts, and the possible Celtic influence on English. The remaining sections deal in some detail with contact-induced change on the various linguistic levels: while foreign lexical influence is well established, contactinduced structural changes are more controversial, since here a native origin is often equally possible. In many cases, especially of syntactic change, a polygenetic origin seems more plausible than a monocausal explanation. In any case, the extensive restructuring of Middle English cannot be explained without close linguistic contact.