Language is a defining feature of a people and a culture, so it’s an important – a vital – consideration in anything we do. Understanding the kind of language (and terminology) that’s used in a religious or sacred setting can help us understand what the pre-Christian Gaels believed on a deeper level, and it may also help us express ourselves more effectively. Learning about the language can tell us about their attitudes towards certain things, and if we look at the underlying meaning of the names of our deities, or the names of our festivals (for example), that sort of thing can help us understand some fundamental aspect of their nature.
There’s a strong overlap between linguistics and history in some respects, mainly because if we want to study a language we really need to look at the historical sources that are written in that language. There’s also a strong overlap between linguistics and comparative studies, because the study of a language also has a heavily theoretical side to it – tracing the evolution and origins of words back to an ‘original’ Celtic or (going further back) Indo-European root. Languages don’t just exist in a vacuum or pop up out of nowhere, but talking about origins, and a shared Indo-European heritage, takes us into a more speculative, theoretical side of things, which are best dealt with on the next page. Here, then, we’ll start off with the basics.
The Goidelic Languages
We’ve already touched on all of this back on the ‘Basics’ page, right at the beginning, but it’s worth repeating a few points here and expanding on them a bit. First of all, the labels ‘Goidelic languages’ and ‘Gaelic languages’ can mean the same thing – where both of them refer to all of the languages that can be traced back to a common ancestor that originated in Ireland. Sometimes, though, there’s slight difference in meaning, where the label of ‘Goidelic languages’ can be used describe the whole continuum of languages within this group – from the very oldest version, right through to the modern versions that are still spoken today – while the Gaelic languages might only describe the modern forms of the language (Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx) that are still spoken.
The origins and evolution of the Goidelic languages looks a little bit like this:
As we can see here, the modern Gaelic languages – Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx – are all descendants of an earlier form of Irish (Middle Irish), and so they ultimately all derive from a single common source: Proto-Celtic. This is a theoretical, ‘original’ Celtic language – the ultimate ancestor of all Celtic languages.
How we got from this Proto-Celtic ‘original’ to an identifiably Irish form of language – distinguishing itself from whatever its closest ancestor actually was – isn’t clear. We just don’t have enough information that could allow us to come up with any firm ideas, but there are plenty of theories (some more convincing than others, perhaps). The best we can say here is that the Classical sources suggest that a Celtic language was probably or possibly being spoken in Ireland from the sixth century BCE, at the very least, though again we can’t really say for sure which Celtic language that was, at this point.1 We can’t really say for sure that only one Celtic language was introduced, or had a part to play in the process, to be fair, but this is such speculative territory it’s not really helpful.
To keep things very simple, then, let’s say that a Celtic language was introduced to Ireland at some point – by the sixth century BCE at the very earliest, like we just suggested. As the Irish people began to adopt this language, and it spread across the country, it inevitably began to evolve – just like any language does. At some point, this Celtic language had eventually evolved to such an extent that it became a language that was separate and distinct from its original ancestor. Once the language in Ireland had begun to evolve and differentiate itself from closest ancestor, it’s at this point that we might assume a definitively Irish form of the language would have begun to emerge.
We only have a few hints of what was going on in the very early part of the emergence of Irish as a Celtic language in its own right, and none of these hints come from contemporary Irish sources of that day and age. We have a good idea that some form of a Celtic, if not Irish, language was being spoken in the second century CE, for example (which we’ll come back to when we get on to talking about Ptolemy’s map a little later on), but it’s only from the fourth century CE, with the very first ogam inscriptions, that we can finally point to firm evidence of definitively early form of Irish. This is typically called Primitive Irish, but it’s important to remember that these inscriptions only give us a terminus ante quem (Latin for ‘time before which’) – the very latest date at which the language was first spoken. In other words, the inscriptions show us that Primitive Irish was definitely being spoken in the fourth century CE, but that doesn’t tell us much else. When those first inscriptions were carved Primitive Irish could have only just come about, or it could have been kicking around for a century or two already – maybe even longer. Again, it’s difficult to say much more than that.2
The ogam inscriptions continued to be produced until the eighth century or so, which means the tradition spans at least some of the Primitive Irish period, through to the emergence of Old Irish (in the seventh century) and overlapping with the very beginnings of the manuscript tradition in Ireland. If we refer back to the Goidelic family tree that’s outlined in the diagram above, Archaic Irish is listed in between Primitive Irish and Old Irish as a separate language, but it may actually only be an ‘early variant’ of Old Irish, rather than a language in its own right. A distinction is only ever really made between the two amongst linguists (and even then not every linguist might see Archaic Irish as a useful label), so you won’t always see Archaic Irish being talked about – it doesn’t have a hugely broad usage, and it only refers to a very brief period of time (a span of about 50 years or so).3
With that said, I’m including Archaic Irish here because it’s sometimes mentioned elsewhere online, but those pages or articles don’t always explain what it really means, or they tend to give conflicting definitions – sometimes conflating it with Primitive Irish. It seems like a good idea to clarify this particular point, then.
Although Primitive Irish is a definitively Goidelic language, it’s very different from Old Irish or any of its more recent descendants; in essence, Primitive Irish has more in common with Latin, Greek, Gaulish, and even Sanskrit than it does with Old Irish,4 which may seem quite surprising when we first think about it, but it is an Indo-European language. If anything it’s weirder that Old Irish is so different to its closest ancestor than it might be odd that Primitive Irish looks almost identical to Latin. Well. Sort of.
To explain what happened here we’re going to have to delve into a bit of jargon (sorry).
To start, then, the very earliest ogam inscriptions – written in Primitive Irish – give us names like LUGUDECCAS, BIVAIDONAS, or COLOMAGNI. If we compare those Primitive Irish names with Gaulish examples, like Adbugios, Labrios, or Magupennos; with Greek names like Ephorus; or with Latin names like Lucius, Gnaeus, or Caecilius, we can see the obvious similarities Primitive Irish has with them.5 If we compare the Primitive Irish names with Old Irish examples, however, like Cathbad, Lugaid, or Cormac, they look very different. As a more direct comparison, the Primitive Irish COLOMAGNI is Colmán in Old Irish, which is obviously a lot shorter – going from four to just two syllables.
This apparent loss of syllables basically defines the evolution of Primitive Irish into Old Irish, but it’s something that happened gradually, in stages, and – for once! – we see it actually being documented (on the ogam inscriptions). First of all, then, as Primitive Irish started its shift towards Old Irish, we can see the first major linguistic change happening – something called apocope.
Apocope is a term that describes the loss of the final syllable in a word. This means a Primitive Irish name like COLOMAGNI ended up dropping the final -AGNI, shortening it to become COLOMANN. The advent of this apocope marks the emergence of Archaic Irish, or the earliest form of Old Irish if you want to keep things simple, but either way the inscriptions that show evidence of apocope can be said to represent the first shift away from Primitive Irish.
Soon after this apocope happened, however – perhaps not much more than fifty years or so later, as far as we can tell – another linguistic change can be seen on some of the inscriptions. This is syncope. Where apocope sees the final syllable, or case-ending, being dropped, syncope is when the middle syllable – in a three-syllable (or greater) word – is lost. While apocope can be seen on its own, syncope always goes hand in hand with apocope. With apocope and now syncope going on at the same time, we now have the full transition into Old Irish in evidence.
Sticking with the name we’ve been using so far, then, the Archaic Irish form of COLOMANN becomes Old Irish COLMAN in our ogam inscriptions, and because we’ve now reached the same timeframe as the very beginning of the manuscript tradition in Ireland, we can find it being written as Colmán in the Old Irish manuscripts, too.6
So our Primitive Irish COLOMAGNI reflects a ‘pre-apocope’ form of the language.
Our Archaic Irish COLOMANN reflects a ‘post-apocope’ form of the language.
While our Old Irish COLMAN reflects a ‘post-syncope’ form of the language (which also assumes apocope has already happened).
Archaic and Old Irish are therefore labels that describe the two major changes that occurred in the Irish language during the sixth or seventh century or so (depending on who you ask, really). Obviously there were other changes that happened alongside all of this, and as an example here we can see that certain sounds that had been used in Primitive Irish either changed, or fell out of use entirely. Perhaps the most obvious change here is the way in which the Primitive Irish ‘V’ in the ogam alphabet became an ‘F’ in Old Irish.7
Old Irish was spoken in Ireland (and in the colonies that had been established in the Isle of Man and Scotland, amongst other places) from around 600 CE, up until 900 CE. During this period, the people of Ireland called their language Goídelc, which was derived from the word Goídel, meaning ‘Irishman.’8 The term Goídel, in turn, had actually been adopted by the Irish from a Brythonic word (which later became Gwyddel, ‘Irishman,’ in Welsh). This is believed to derive from the Proto-Celtic *wēdus (‘wild’), which can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European *weydʰ- (“wood, wilderness”).9 As far as Goídelc goes, this is where we get the modern term ‘Goidelic’ from.
Around the tenth century, further changes in the language had occurred that were significant enough for us to label the emergence of yet another new form of Irish: Middle Irish. This form of the language – usually dated from around 900 CE to 1200 CE – coincided with the height of Ireland’s manuscript tradition, and the impetus for this more concentrated push to produce these writings may well have been influenced first by the increasing pressures from Viking raiders and the Norse settlers who followed – establishing settlements along various parts of the coast by the early tenth century in Dublin, Waterford, Limerick, Cork, and Wexford, for example – and then (by the end of the Middle Irish period) the conquest of Ireland by the Anglo-Normans, under the auspices of the English king, Henry II. The inevitable changes these events wrought seem to have led to a renewed interest in preserving (and developing) native traditions, hence the more concentrated production of new manuscripts in this period.10
Up until this point, the changes in the Irish language had been happening in tandem across the board – not just in Ireland, but in the Isle of Man and Scotland as well. Even though these places were no longer quite as closely (or directly) allied with Ireland as they had once been (both places were also subjected to Norse settlements and run-ins with the English as well, at various points in time), they had still been close enough that these linguistic changes had kept pace with one another in each country. Towards the end of the Middle Irish period, though, this began to change. As Middle Irish evolved and Early Modern Irish began to emerge in Ireland in the thirteenth century, the language was no longer evolving in quite the same way in Scotland or the Isle of Man. What was once a single language was now starting to branch off into three distinct, localised forms, and by the thirteenth century, the changes were significant enough that they were no longer mere differences in local dialect – they were enough to qualify as languages in their own right. As such, the thirteenth century also marks the emergence of Gaelic and Manx, alongside Early Modern Irish.
At the same time, however, Ireland and Scotland did retain a more universal form of the language, which was known as Gaoidhealg, or (as we call it today) Classical Gaelic (or Classical Common Gaelic). This Classical Gaelic was in use from around the thirteenth century up until the eighteenth century, and it was largely a literary language – one that was especially associated with the professional poets of Ireland and Scotland.11 A large part of why they shared this language was because the professional poets of Scotland and Ireland were all trained in the same poetic tradition, and given the conservative nature of their profession, it’s understandable that things didn’t change quite as fast as the vernacular language did.
The Classical Gaelic era came to an end mainly due to the political upheavals that marked so much of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. This was a time when Ireland and Scotland were both under English (or British) rule, which was met with strong resistance from certain quarters. The English government made a concerted effort to undermine and dismantle the traditional political and social institutions of the Gaelic world, in an effort to hobble any attempts at a co-ordinated resistance or rebellion. When the clan system did eventually collapse, then, there were no longer any clan chiefs for the poets to elegise or eulogise – at a handsome price for the poet’s trouble, of course – and so the poets found themselves out of a job, too. The schools that trained poets in their craft collapsed as well, and without a need for their poetry, the Classical Gaelic the poets used for their compositions was no longer needed either.12
As a result, people began to write in their own vernacular language – in Gaelic or Irish or Manx rather than Classical Gaelic – and with this we see emergence of the modern forms of these languages in the eighteenth century, which are still spoken today. Initially, neither Gaelic nor Manx had an especially standardised approach to orthography (conventional rules the are meant to define how a language is supposed to be written, how words are spelled, etc.) and they often wrote Gaelic using English orthography – writing the words out phonetically (according to English spelling conventions) instead of using the sort of orthography that had already been established in Irish (and, indeed, Classical Gaelic). Where the Gaelic word for ‘peace,’ or ‘fairy,’ would now be spelled sìth, for example, in the eighteenth century you might see it spelled shee, as we see in a protective charm that was discovered in North Carolina.13 Eventually, Gaelic adopted its own orthography, modelled along Irish lines, but Manx still uses an anglicised, phoneticised orthography, which is why it looks a lot different in writing than Irish or Gaelic does.
References
1 John T. Koch (Ed.), Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia (2004), 714.
2 See: John T. Koch, ‘The Conversion of Ireland and the Emergence of the Old Irish Language, AD 367-637,’ in Emania 13 (1995).
2 See: ‘Ireland in the Iron Age: Map of Ireland by Claudius Ptolemaeus c. AD 150,’ in Archaeology Ireland (2003); Patrizia de Bernardo Stempel, ‘Pre-Celtic, Old Celtic layers, Brittonic and Goidelic in ancient Ireland,’ in Language contact in the place-names of Britain and Ireland (2007).
3 David Stifter, ‘Early Irish’ in The Celtic Languages (Second Edition; 2009); David Greene, ‘The Diphthongs of Old Irish,’ in Ériu 27 (1976).
4 John T. Koch, ‘The Conversion of Ireland and the Emergence of the Old Irish Language, AD 367-637,’ in Emania 13 (1995), 39.
5 For more on Gaulish names, see: Eugenio R. Luján, ‘Gaulish personal names : An update,’ in Études Celtiques 35 (2003), 181-247.
6 Catherine Swift, ‘Irish Monumental Sculpture: The Dating Evidence Provided by Linguistic Forms,’ in Redknap et al (Eds.), Pattern and Purpose in Insular Art (2002), 53; Damian McManus, A Guide to Ogam (1991), 107; Damian McManus, Ogam Stones at University College Cork (2004), 7-8; Edel Bhreathnach, Ireland in the Medieval World AD 400-1000: Landscape, Kingship and Religion (2014), 43.
7 David Stifter, ‘Early Irish’ in The Celtic Languages (Second Edition; 2009); Damian McManus, Ogam Stones at University College Cork (2004), 7-8; Edel Bhreathnach, Ireland in the Medieval World AD 400-1000: Landscape, Kingship and Religion (2014), 43.
8 David Stifter, ‘Early Irish’ in The Celtic Languages (Second Edition; 2009), 55; John T. Koch, Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia (2006), 775.
9 See: Wiktionary.
10 See: Muireann Ni Bhrolchain, Introduction to Early Irish Literature (2009).
11 John T. Koch, Celtic Culture: A Historical Encycloaedia (2006), 1477.
12 John T. Koch, Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia (2006), 1003-1005.
13 An excerpt from the charm as it was written out:
niue bann is are niue
gline niue connea Shenge
Shee heag S[h]ich un [bm]alle
us hall gaud tog .e. yeatsa I D
gach Sule s gach tnue s gach
farmid is S Lea Dia s Coach[C]ola.
Rendered in modern Gaelic and organised into proper sentences:
Naoi beanna is air naoi glinn,
Naoi cona seanga sìthe th’ aig sithiche
Thun a’ bhaile ud thall.
Gun tog a dhiotsa, I. D.,
Gach sùil ’s gach tnù ’s gach farmad
Le Dia as cumhachdaile.
Translated into English:
Nine mountains and upon nine glens,
May nine slender fairy hounds that a fairy possesses
Go to yonder township.
May he protect you, I.D.,
From each eye and each jealousy and each envy
Along with God the most powerful.
See: Ronald Black’s ‘”The Nine”: A Scottish Gaelic Charm in the North Carolina State Archives,’ in The North Carolina Historical Review Vol. 84, No. 1 (2007), 49-51.
Eòlas 