Welsh Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Mac, mac, mac, mab, mab, mab- all mean ‘son’, inis, innis, hinjey, enez, ynys, enys - all mean ‘island.’ Anyone can see the similarities within these two cognate sets from orthographic similarity alone. This is because Irish, Scottish, Manx, Breton, Welsh, and Cornish are related. As the six remaining Celtic languages, they unsurprisingly share similarities in their phonetics, phonology, semantics, morphology, and syntax. However, the exact relationship between these languages and their predecessors has long been disputed in Celtic linguistics. Even today, the battle continues between two firmly-entrenched camps of scholars- those who favor the traditional P-Celtic and Q-Celtic divisions of the Celtic family tree, and those who support the unification of the Brythonic and Goidelic branches of the tree under Insular Celtic, with this latter idea being the Insular Celtic hypothesis. While much reconstructive work has been done, and much evidence has been brought forth, both for and against the existence of Insular Celtic, no one scholar has attempted a phonetic reconstruction of this hypothesized proto-language from its six modern descendents. In the pages that follow, I will introduce you to the Celtic languages; explore the controversy surrounding the structure of the Celtic family tree; and present a partial phonetic reconstruction of Insular Celtic through the application of the comparative method as outlined by Lyle Campbell (2006) to self-collected data from the summers of 2009 and 2010 in my efforts to offer you a novel perspective on an on-going debate in the field of historical Celtic linguistics.