Like other Celtic languages, Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic can all be described as belonging to the Indo-European language group. This is a label that describes a huge group of languages that all share a common origin, which were first spoken across various parts of Europe, and into parts of Asia. The Indo-European languages can be divided into different sub-groups – one of which is the Celtic language family, while we can also point to the Germanic language group, the Italic languages, Hellenic languages, Indo-Aryan languages, or Balto-Slavic language group, for example. These language groups all share a common ancestor – a single, solitary language that may be called Proto-Indo-European.
We don’t have any written records of this Proto-Indo-European language, so it’s purely theoretical. Based on our knowledge and understanding of how its descendants have evolved, however, we know enough about them – the similarities and the differences – to reconstruct what this Proto-Indo-European language may have looked like, and how it worked. Even so, we don’t know exactly where it came from – where it was first spoken, or when – but there are a number of different theories that have attempted to address these questions. The most commonly accepted of these suggests that Proto-Indo-European was probably first spoken in the Neolithic period (c. 4,500 BCE), possibly originating in the Pontic-Caspian steppes (spanning parts of modern day Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Ukraine).
Other theories might suggest a much earlier date for Proto-Indo-European’s first appearance (up to 8,000 BCE), along with other areas of origin, and the exact nature of this language’s spread beyond its birthplace is debated as well. The traditional view would suggest the language and culture spread through invasion and colonisation (people upping sticks, en masse, and then moving somewhere else and taking over the place completely), or else there’s the diffusion hypothesis (which suggests that only a small number of people needed to move somewhere in order for new technologies or languages to be established, because if anything, ideas can spread much faster than people can).
Either way, this Proto-Indo-European language started somewhere, and it then spread across a huge part of the world (although this is hardly something that happened over night). After some time – into the Bronze Age – Proto-Indo-European began to branch off in different directions, in different places, and then those languages evolved and may have branched off even further. They also spread, bringing Indo-European languages and associated cultures to new places.
So Proto-Indo-European spread, and then as it became established in various different places it began to evolve, branching off into different languages, which then also spread and evolved across an even larger part of the world, as those languages then began to evolve and branch off even further. Some of the oldest known descendants of Proto-Indo-European are Sanskrit, which emerged in south Asia some time around 2,000 BCE; Hittite, which emerged c. 1,700 BCE in the Levant and Upper Mesopotamia (encompassing modern-day Syria, the eastern Mediterranean, Israel, Palestine, and parts of Turkey, etc.); and then the oldest form of ancient Greek (Mycenaean Greek) emerged just a short time later, c. 1,500 BCE. We have written evidence for each of these languages, which means we have at least some understanding of what they looked like.
It wasn’t until the seventh century BCE, perhaps, that we start to see the first Italic languages (the group that includes Latin and Italian) emerging, with the Celtic languages possibly emerging sometime in the sixth century BCE. Again, though, these dates can be fairly malleable, and there isn’t necessarily any sort of universal agreement on them. They often represent a ‘best guess,’ and so some academics might argue for a date as early as the eighth century BCE or even 1,000 BCE for the first emergence of a Celtic language. An earlier date would perhaps make more sense if we’re also arguing a sixth century date for the presence of a Celtic language in Ireland, too – otherwise the language emerged and spread very far, very fast – but pushing it as far back as 1,000 BCE raises some very necessary questions about the usual assumptions that Celticness is synonymous with the Iron Age. Whichever timeframe we might prefer, though, we still have a span of at least 700 years before the first evidence of a definitively Irish form of language can be found (from the earliest ogam inscriptions, that is).
Just as all of the Indo-European languages can be traced back to a common, theoretical ancestor – Proto-Indo-European – each of the different language groups evolved via their own common ancestor (essentially an equivalent to Proto-Indo-European), which then evolved over time and might eventually branch off in different directions in different places, resulting in further linguistic sub-groups and sub-divisions. For the Celtic languages, the common (and again, theoretical) ancestor may be referred to as Proto-Celtic or Common Celtic, which we briefly touched on in the last page, and as with Proto-Indo-European, linguists have been working on ‘reconstructing’ the language so we can get a better idea of how things may have evolved and changed over time.1
As Proto-Celtic language spread and evolved, a number of new (but related) languages emerged, and this is how we end up with a whole family of Celtic languages. The Goidelic languages represent just one branch within the Celtic family tree as a whole, and although there are a number of different ways we might express the linguistic relationships here, one way of describing the Celtic languages looks like this:
All of this might not seem like it has anything to do with… well, anything… right now, but the Indo-European origins of the Celtic languages – the Gaelic (or ‘Goidelic’) languages included – is important. It’s important because as Proto-Indo-European spread, so did the cultural and religious ideas that were underpinned by that language.
For any culture, language is a fundamental, essential part of how they might express or articulate an understanding of the world around them. This means that many of the cultural or religious ideals that are expressed in the pre-Christian religion of the Gaels, and in the Goidelic languages, could be identified as ultimately deriving from those first Proto-Indo-Europeans, although of course we have to bear in mind the fact that there are inevitably going to be differences as well; without those differences, we wouldn’t have all of these unique cultures and languages in the first place – even if they do all share a common heritage.
In essence, then, it would be fair to say that the Indo-European languages are all founded on a common understanding and outlook, which means that throughout the different Indo-European languages we see not only similar sorts of words cropping up, expressing the same sorts of basic concepts, but also the same sorts of ideas – even the same kinds of stories – cropping up. These stories may be given their own unique twist within each culture, as they’re filtered through a new language, and a new outlook (as things evolve and change over time), but they still ultimately share a recognisable core. The differences cannot – must not – be ignored, however, because the changes, the new ideas, perhaps even the old ideas from the non-Indo-European predecessors that have survived, are just as important as any common core of Indo-Europeanness, as it were. We have to be careful not to get carried away, because then we risk ignoring all the unique elements and ideas that make the Gaels so uniquely them.
References
1 See J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams’s The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (2006); J. P. Mallory, The Origins of the Irish (2015), 243-286; Clint Twist, Atlas of the Celts (2001), 12.
The University of Wales has published an English–Proto-Celtic word list on their website.
Eòlas 