What no one tells you about Celtic Languages!

Celtic languages have a long and complex history. This language family is not like Romance or Slavic Languages, where if you know one, you can jump to another language relatively easily. There are two branches of Celtic, and the history of this is fascinating. In this video, we look at some of the major Indo-European Language families to compare their formation with Celtic, to show you why Celtic is more than it first appears to be. Check this out.

00:00 Beginning
01:43 Slavic
03:18 Iranian
04:41 Romance
07:08 Germanic
09:08 Celtic
14:19 Summing up

Pexels, Pixabay

[frankboulton]

This video explained very clearly why there is such a huge difference between P-Celtic and Q-Celtic. It also makes Celtic languages all the more interesting.

[marclepihiff]

I'm Breton, I speak Breton and a little bit Cornish. Your video is very interesting, thank you !

[willhovell]

Very interesting explanations. The development of English with the influence of the Norse and Norman French is equally complex and fascinating. Dioch

[soccerchamp]

Wow, this is the best explanation I've seen of the history/divergence of the Celtic languages. I've been studying Celtic, and specifically British/Irish history, for a long time and have never heard anything about how long ago the language split happened until now. Thank you!

[lionkaliban]

The information was surprising for me as for a person who has never tried to learn any Celtic languages. It seems that pop culture tends to generalise all Celts a lot. Thank you for educating

[xenocrates]

Very informative and clearly presented. Thanks.

[nnate]

Fantastic video Ben. I've learnt a lot from this. 👍🏽👍🏽

[jongellert]

Thank you very much for this. It's incredibly fascinating.

[Norvaal]

Thank you for explaining that. I chose to study Welsh because it has a relatively large number of speakers, a lot of resources for learning it, and a fascinating history in its own right. Knowing Spanish already, I am amazed at just how many Latin cognates there are.

[greenburst]

Ben I really enjoyed this video for the depth of understanding you have for the indo European diversity. the breaking of tribes and kingdoms can be understood and you are doing a great job of preserving that knowledge.

[acanpc]

Very interesting. That’s good to know. I didn’t realize how long ago that they had split apart, but obviously long enough ago because Welsh and Irish do not even really seem that similar. I wish there was more evidence to the Celtic languages of Iberia! Because I’m Portuguese and it would be cool to know about that. There’s a couple words that we might have inherited from our ancient Celtic ancestors but it’s pretty remote since they got Romanized around 140 BC starting.

[leviathan]

Awesome video! As an Irish speaker who's dabbled in a bit of Welsh, the langauges definitely still bear a stronger resemblance to one another than to other IE languages. It's possible to form sentences that are almost completely made up of cognates, though admittedly with a lot of cherry picking involved.

Ex.
CY: Collodd y ceffyl y ras a glanheuaist ei goes.
GA: Chaill an capall an rása agus ghlanais a chos.
EN: The horse lost the race and you cleaned his leg.
Note the type of consonant mutation for leg are different in each langauge. 'Ghlanais' is a more archaic/dialectal form. Most speakers not from the south of Ireland would probably say 'ghlán tú.' The words for race are borrowed from English.

CY: Bydd fy nheulu yma ddydd Llun.
GA: Beidh mo theaghlach anseo Dé Luain.
EN: My family will be here on Monday.
Anseo and yma are not cognate to my knowledge but they do sound similar. The words for Monday are also Latin borrowings.

Of course, most sentences don't bear much lexical resemblance with each other.
CY: Wnaethon nhw weld faint o forfilod oedd yn y môr?
GA: An bhfaca siad cé mhéad míolta móra a bhí san fharraige/sa mhuir?
EN: Did they see how many whales were in the ocean?
The only cognates in this sentence are morfil/míol mór, yn y/san, and môr/muir. The changes between the two languages do make them seem to have about 15% lexical similarity like you suggest. However, their word orders are still almost the same!

I'm still learning Welsh so apologies if I made any mistakes! Diolch yn fawr am y fideo 'ma! Go raibh mìle as an físeán seo!

[servantofChristMichael]

I just wanted to say, a native English speaker who has managed to reach a B2-C1 level in "Serbo-Croatian", who is also of a mix of Celtic, Slavic and Sephardi Spanish ancestry, I really appreciate your videos, Ben. I particularly find what you said about the Slavic languages to be accurate and something I have personally experienced, for example, despite only having learned a few phrases in Polish, I am often surprised by how much I can understand of the written language and am pretty sure that if I spoke with a Native Polish speaker, as long as they spoke very slowly and clearly with hand gesticulations, we could probably establish a fair degree of mutual intelligibility between one another. I was also amazed at the universal intelligibility of "inter-Slavic" / "Međuslovenski".

[TheLibraryChamber]

Cannot tell you just how awesome this was to listen too. Thanks for the wisdom!

[ALEIJADINHOPATRIOTA]

Ben is very good informated and I wonder how celtic languages have developed their different grammars. So a great video! THANK YOU MR.

[squeezyjohn]

Yes ... this is an excellent video ... very clearly explained. Thank you.

[douglas_gemini]

One of your best. I very much admire what you do.

[yuribliman]

Thank you Ben for another fascinating episode. Before I watched your previous video I was sure Irish was pretty similar to Welsh. I'd like to share my experience with Slavic languages. I've been exposed to most Slavic languages, Russian and Ukrainian are my native languages. The only language that is 99% intelligible to me is Belarusian. Unfortunately not many Belarusians speak Belarasin in their day-to-day life. Almost all Berussians are native Russian speakers. Ukrainian and Belarusian are probably 90-95% mutually intelligible. I read Polish quite well but I have some difficulties with spoken Polish. Poles usually understand Ukrainian better than Ukrainians understand Polish because of the specific Polish pronunciation. Ukrainian and Polish are very close languages, closer than Russian and Ukrainian. Slavic languages share a lot of common vocabulary. Also, some words that sound similar and come from the same old Slavic words have different meanings, which could cause a bit of confusion. If one's mother tongue is one of the Slavic languages he/she probably will easily pick up another Slavic language, that won't happen overnight and pronunciation could be the biggest problem.

[RoboticsDIY]

Thank you, it was a wery valuable and insightful video.
In spare time i like to follow history of writing systems and languages. This helped to align sime missing pueces.

[scottcjmckelviephotography]

You are absolutely right. I am studying Scots Gàidhlig, a language that was once spoken throughout most of my country and doing my part to keeping it alive, but do have a desire to learn Welsh. The branches break off from Proto Celtic to the 2 distinct groups; Continental Celtic and Insular Celtic. It was Continental Celtic where Gaulish would branch off from, whereas, Insular Goidelic and British break off into different branches.

For reasons you rightly touched upon, and it is very likely the Picts probably spoke a _'conservative'_ form of Brythonic, it sadly no longer exists. The Brythonic as you rightly addressed was then heavily influenced by Latin, thus, the closest we have of it today is Welsh, partly why I have a strong desire to learn the language, and it's beautiful. Scots Gaelic breaking off from Old Irish is very different, and from the little of looking at Welsh on Duolingo I could definitely see this.

I would even go as far as to state that whilst there is a crossover and same usage of words, Scots Gàidhlig that I am learning is very different from Irish Gaelic i've looked at briefly.