In this comment, Lameen linked to “The Conversion of Ireland and the Emergence of the Old Irish Language, AD 367–637” (Emania XIII [1995]: 39–50; Google cache) by John Koch, saying it argues
that the incredible apparent rapidity of change from Primitive to Old Irish is actually an illusion: the conservatism of Primitive Irish, he claims, is because it was “a far more conservative and less localised learned language, which stood closer from the point of view of linguistic evolution to the fragmentarily attested Old Celtic of Iron Age and Roman mainland Europe and Britain than to Old Irish” – a sort of Druid Sanskrit to the Prakrit of the wider population, basically.
I thought that was an exciting idea and decided to give it its own post. After describing the striking gap between the Primitive Irish of the ogam inscriptions and “the manuscript Old Irish known from texts of the seventh to ninth centuries,” Koch says:
The thesis of this paper is that the conversion and the transformation of Irish speech during the period c. AD 367-637 are causally linked as follows. In the final centuries of the pre-Christian Iron Age, Ireland possessed a Q-Celtic language with two markedly different registers. […] In late ancient Ireland, the more basic register was the universal colloquial language, a fairly evolved and dialectal form of Celtic speech, out of which Old Irish (the literate vernacular of the seventh to ninth centuries) was subsequently to arise. The second was a far more conservative and less localised learned language, which stood closer from the point of view of linguistic evolution to the fragmentarily attested Old Celtic of Iron Age and Roman mainland Europe and Britain than to Old Irish. This higher register was originally, like the lower, a purely oral medium, but by some point in the fifth century (or perhaps earlier) it had come to be used as the basis for inscriptions in both the ogam and Roman scripts. This educated language was mastered by only a relatively small minority of the Irish population, including prominently the pagan priesthood called in Old Celtic dru(u)ides, in Old Irish druïd, and the allied professions in the native verbal tradition. In the fifth and sixth centuries, a second religion spread vigorously in Ireland, bringing with it a second learned tradition and a second learned language, namely Latin. At a pivotal early stage in the conversion, many of the leaders of the missionary church were foreigners, mostly British, and would not have been competent in all levels of the native language and learning. For a time (the fifth century and probably well into the sixth), the two religions, educational establishments, and learned classes co-existed, perhaps competing in some situations and finding accommodation at others. During the course of the sixth century, Christianity at last effectively overwhelmed any organised native religion, and with that, Latin Christian learning and the Latin language replaced the native educated standard within its social domain, that is, it superseded the variety of Old Celtic which is called by linguists ‘Primitive Irish’. At this point, there was no longer a Celtic learned register to act as a check on popular speech, and a number of heretofore substandard tendencies were able to bubble up to surface rapidly. Then, in the mid sixth to mid seventh century, when for its own purposes the unchallenged church chose to cultivate a vernacular literary language alongside Latin, it had only the more evolved register of the illiterate monoglot masses upon which to base the new medium. The system of pagan linguistic learning, like organised pagan Celtic learning in general, had faltered during the conversion. The result was the written Old Irish well known to us from texts of the Early Middle Ages.
He goes on to problems of dating and a discussion of Christian Latin Loan-words in Irish:
If we still seek to use the Latin loan-words to say something about the Irish language during the time of the conversion, we cannot assume that all the loans, and especially not all the early loans, date from the Christian period. Instead, we must concern ourselves with the smaller subgroup which surely or probably concerns Christianity. The most archaic of these should be able to tell us at what phonological stage of Irish the conversion began.
After sections on “Ogam and Old Irish Orthographic Systems” and “The Neo-Celtic Phenomenon” (“whatever explanation we adopt for the transformation of Old Celtic in Ireland it will hardly do to invoke a different explanation (effectively a coincidence) for the more-or-less contemporary and strikingly parallel transformation of the Old Celtic in Britain”), he provides this summary of his theory, with a delightful hypothetical parallel:
What I am proposing therefore is that until the mid sixth century (or later) both Britain and Ireland retained a learned elite possessing closely related varieties of Old Celtic within their respective educational establishments. In Britain, pagan Celtic tradition had reached a modus vivendi with pagan Rome and Classical Latin as early as the first or second century. But even for Ireland, the current scholarly consensus holds that ogams are an offshoot of later Latin grammatical learning and more specifically of the Roman alphabet. However and whenever ogam was invented, one must see the coming of literacy to Britain and Ireland occurring in two stages: first, a pre-Christian or secular wave, compatible with, and duly grafted onto native learning, and second, the less compromising bible-centred literacy of the conversion itself accompanied by the church’s monopoly on learning. I am not saying that druidism was necessarily still going strong in Britain, as in Ireland, at c. AD 500; in fact, there is more evidence against such a proposition than there is to favour it. Rather, Late Roman Britain had a mixed tradition — pagan/secular and Christian, Celtic and Roman — and a Romano-British landed aristocracy to support this hybrid. But as part of the transition from Roman Britain to Dark Age Wales, education retreated into the church.
Non-linguists may not immediately grasp the implications of a faltering standard language. The key points may be illustrated well enough with reference to English. Modern English today shares some broadly similar features with the Old Celtic of ancient Europe as portrayed here. Both languages spread rapidly from a compact homeland over a wide geographic area. And over this wide area, most teaching and official communication in English is through the medium of an archaising educated standard which conceals the degree of divergence and evolution of the local colloquial forms. As a written language, English possesses a conventionalised and old-fashioned spelling system. The retention of such features as the silent e, so-called ‘long vowels’ (which in most dialects became diphthongs centuries ago), long-since vocalised gh’s, and so on, could easily give the impression to a historical linguist of some future millennium that the phonology of our speech differed little from that of Chaucer’s. Let us then suppose that today’s English were completely replaced by another language as a medium of writing and education, though surviving as the everyday spoken language of the people. Something like this did in fact happen during the period of the apparent rapid evolution of English between 1066 and c. 1200. For the sake of our futuristic example, let us say that the language which replaces it this time is not Norman French, but Irish. (I shall leave it to aspiring science fiction writers to invent a plausible scenario for this outcome.) Native English speakers are no longer taught to read and write English; all books and book learning is in Irish. The older learned tradition whose medium was English is, for whatever reason, no longer regarded as legitimate and is therefore abandoned and wholly or largely forgotten. Let us say, then, that at some subsequent generation the intellectual climate changes, and an English literary language is now once more regarded as permissible and desirable to be promoted alongside the formerly monopolistic Irish. Because the tradition of writing English according to the old rules had died (or at least lapsed into serious confusion), a new writing system would have to be created, and this could have no model to base itself upon other than the conventional spelling of Irish (as I am saying that Irish is the only literary language that had been lately known and cultivated). We may obtain a sample of how the ‘Neo-English’ implied by this hypothetical fantasy might appear by excerpting an anthologised column by Brian O’Nolan (a.k.a. Flann O’Brien, a.k.a. Myles na gGopaleen).
(The excerpt begins “Aigh nó a mean thú ios só léasaí …”)
Now, if we recall our imaginary historical linguist of the distant future and suppose that he had at hand English documents datable to the 1990s alongside O’Nolan-style ‘Neo-English’ documents datable to c. 2150 and assume that that linguist understood the conventions of Irish spelling better than he did those of English, then he might conclude that such Middle English to Modern English changes as the Great Vowel Shift had occurred in rapid succession between 1990 and 2150, when in fact they had occurred gradually at a much earlier date. We would also seem to be seeing a very rapid separation of dialects; for a reinvention of written English according to new principles would for the first time reveal the h-less-ness and r-less-ness of the English of England, the advanced diphthongisation of Australia, Southern England, and the American South, and so on.
He ends with this:
Irish scholars are used to taking ogamic Primitive Irish as a beginning, but I am proposing here that it is more meaningfully understood as the end, the final remnants of the sacred learned language of the pagan Celts long after this prestige speech had been replaced by Latin and Germanic at the epicentre of Celtic expansion on the Continent. Over the millennium and a half which preceded Ireland’s conversion, local and imperfect adaptations of this Celtic koine had gradually replaced Ireland’s older language(s) at the least evident and least valued levels of society. At that popular register, standard Old Celtic had never obliterated substrate phonetic and syntactic habits. When Christianity and literate Latin finally broke the limits of the Empire to replace the older prestige language on Europe’s north-western fringe, this cleared the way for Ireland’s previously invisible ‘indigenous realisation of Celtic’ to become Europe’s first great literary vernacular.
I’ve given you the basic idea, but if you’re at all interested you’ll want to read the whole paper, which is full of good stuff. It’s almost thirty years old, so I presume other scholars have discussed it; if anyone knows of such responses, do share.
Thanks, that’s a cool paper!
“It is surely impossible for a language to have evolved as quickly as the evidence seems to imply.”
Why? Kusaal has lost its final short vowels (like Brythonic) over a short enough period that it still shares over 95% of core vocabulary with Mampruli, which preserves them all. There are plenty of examples of rapid language change, and it is just untrue that this can only happen in times of great social disruption (though the question is more, when haven’t there been times of great social disruption in Europe over that past two millennia?)
Among other things, Koch makes a big deal of what he regards as a great similarity between the Brythonic and Goidelic sound changes in the relevant period, but they really aren’t all that alike at all: Brythonic basically dropped final syllables in polysyllabic words (hardly a rare historical change), has nothing like the Goidelic consonant palatalisation, and preserved most word-internal vowels.
Old Welsh orthography does not mark consonant lenition either word-initially or word-internally. There can be no doubt that this was already a phonemically contrastive feature of the language: but the orthography worked fine ignoring it for at least five centuries. In many ways the change from “Old Welsh” to “Middle Welsh” is not so much a change of language as a change of orthography. It is quite certain that there was a period when scribes knew both systems: this in no way implies that people were still speaking seventh-century Welsh as a literary register in the eleventh century. Even coexistence of Ogham and Latin-alphabet Irish would similarly not demonstrate that there was an actual situation of diglossia.
Moreover, the cruel and unusual irregularity which torments or delights students of Old Irish is surely powerful evidence of a change which was remarkably and unusually rapid, to the extent that there has been surprisingly little regularisation by analogy of the resulting chaos in the Old Irish period.
It seems to me that this is an (almost wholly speculative) solution looking for a problem.
And any theory invoking “druids” is already ringing alarm bells for me. The fact is, we actually know damn-all about the historical druids, as opposed to their later romanticised and sometimes outright mythological namesakes (certainly as far a Britain is concerned; maybe Ireland is different …)
It’s also worth remembering that the Ogham inscriptions consist overwhelmingly of personal names. Archaism in writing personal names in such a setting is pretty weak evidence for a whole high register language. If eighth-century Ogham had verb forms without the Old-Irish ultrascrunching, that would certainly call for explanation in terms of an orally preserved archaic register. But it doesn’t.
Moreover, the cruel and unusual irregularity which torments or delights students of Old Irish is surely powerful evidence of a change which was remarkably and unusually rapid
I don’t see the connection. How can you be so sure of the rapidity of that change? Would it have to be 200 years rapid? 800 years? 100 years?
Wouldn’t you expect a gradual change to have had a less transmogrifying effect on the verb system? Surely the simplest explanation for the epic Old Irish irregularity induced by missing out every other vowel is that analogy has not had a long enough time to reimpose some basic order on the situation.
And it’s not as if phonologically-driven language change and analogical levelling happen in different epochs: both are going on all the time. It’s all practically Hegelian …
Kusaal has already had time to do some analogical remodelling of noun flexion: the Kusaal final vowel loss is conditioned, not exceptionless, even though it affects the great majority of contexts in which a word can appear. In contexts where the final vowel is not deleted, what normally turns up is the etymologically expected “original” final vowel (itself evidence that the change cannot be all that old, given that by far the most instances of a word, and all citation forms, have lost this “correct” vowel); but already this is not always the case.
Obviously my argument in re Irish can’t produce any absolute timings, but the uncontroversially high degree of irregularity in Old Irish morphology induced by historical phonological changes seems to me to be good enough evidence that it is, at least, unwise to declare that it is “impossible” for the language to have evolved so quickly. Old Irish is an outlier on this front already. “Impossible” is a word which is just asking for trouble.
Incidentally, Welsh, which Koch reckons to have undergone similarly rapid phonological changes, had already ended up with a vastly simpler and more regular verbal system than Irish even in the Old Welsh period. (I think this partly reflects the fact that Koch is wrong in saying that the Goidelic and Brythonic changes were all that similar, but also that the evidence is pretty fragmentary for Welsh conjugation until a much later date than in Irish. Many more centuries for analogy to do its healing work …)
>And any theory invoking “druids” is already ringing alarm bells for me. The fact is, we actually know damn-all about the historical druids, as opposed to their later romanticised and sometimes outright mythological namesakes (certainly as far a Britain is concerned; maybe Ireland is different …)
Sure. But Koch was writing decades ago. The question is really how and why Celtic sustains this conservatism and coherence for a millennium or more across vast areas. Koch points out it also disappears quite quickly, and offers insights that suggests for him. He’s not really relying on druids, but just the existence of a conservative dialect, whether written or oral, that may differ from local vernacular. (Or maybe he is relying on that? Sometimes I just remember what I think the argument should have been…)
The rapid disappearance may not “demand explanation.” As you point out, things can change very quickly. But it does offer an interesting bit of evidence. Now we have several other lines of evidence. I had posted a paper in the Son of Yamnaya thread. I think that’s what prompted Lameen to think of the Koch piece.
That article shows through archaeogentics, bone strontium and other methods that there were closely interrelated elites at different continental Celtic centers, with evidence that their ceremonial burial was often quite far from the area where they were raised.
So we have the possibility that the coherence of ancient Celtic as we know it across large areas of space and time was sustained by elite movement, that it may have been a conservative elite dialect, perhaps also maintained in its more archaic state by religious leaders, of whom we know less, but who may also have had regional significance and substantial mobility across the Celtic-speaking area. Meanwhile, spoken Celtic in many of these regions may have been quite different for centuries, perhaps particularly so in areas where the elites imposed themselves on a non-Celtic (but still IE?) substrate, as still a third paper linked at Son of Yamnaya suggests happened in the time period of 1000 to 875 bce in Britain.
I’ve read that the Middle Irish period consists mostly of exactly this – slow – regularisation.
Mongolian comes to mind.
How can you be so sure of the rapidity of that change?
I’m afraid Koch’s “futuristic example” more made my head spin than give me any parallels. Was the Norman Conquest really that rapid of an imposition of a foreign language?
Was it more a replacing of one elite by a slightly different but no more remote elite? William was some sort of cousin to Edward the Confessor, so no weaker a claim to the throne than Harold. Did the Anglo-Saxon elite speak a rarified tongue already distant from common argot?
And the Normans had only just arrived in Francia from Denmark/Norway/Sweden, so what melange of a language did they speak?
Anyhoo, even Chaucer’s English suffers enough “cruel and unusual irregularity”. The situation is like a Cosmologist’s ‘Singularity’: a point so dense you can neither predict the future from it, nor project into its past. Koch might be right; but then he might be wrong; with equal likelihood.
[And thank you to Lameen for finding the paper; and to Hat for facilitating the discussion.]
“if anyone knows of such responses, do share”
Google scholar lists 11 works which cite the paper, but I can’t tell if any amount to responses to it.
The hypothesis sounds entirely plausible to me. It’s basically what happened with the Romance languages – if we had no evidence of what colloquial Latin was like in the last centuries of the Roman Empire, the situation of Latin and its descendants would look very similar to what he describes with Irish. Literary Italian, when it emerged with Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, was very different from classical Latin, and of course the reason is because classical Latin ceased to be a spoken language long before the end of the western Roman Empire.
So it would be useful to know what other linguists working in the same field think of it.
“in the mid sixth to mid seventh century, when for its own purposes the unchallenged church chose to cultivate a vernacular literary language alongside Latin”
I’m curious what those purposes might have been.
@AntC: William the Conqueror is supposed to have tried to learn Anglo-Saxon during the time he spent in England after 1066. However, he apparently gave it up without getting very far. Perhaps he wasn’t good with languages. (I don’t think he is known to have been fluent in anything except Norman French, although he certainly would have been exposed to Latin as well as Anglo-Saxon.) Or he may have decided Old English was not worth the effort, since he was never in Britain more than sporadically, usually to put down rebellions.
@CT
It is hard for me to get my head around Irish Church independence starting in the 7th C, with the ostensible issue being the dating method for Easter. On the Irish side, Columba was not known for willingness to compromise, and Rome may have considered the Irish as barbarian zealots living outside the Empire and writing in a weird Latin or monastic proselytisers on the Continent stirring up trouble with secular authorities.Maybe JWB has a better understanding of the issues.
I suppose I should take it as a compliment of sorts that PlasticPaddy supposes that the rival “insular” algorithm for calculating the date of Easter is exactly the sort of obscure topic I would know quite a lot (too much?) about. But alas no.
I do know that some have claimed that the idea of a “Celtic church” that was defined by its rejection of the authority and practices of Rome is a later invention, suiting the needs of both Reformation-era Protestant polemic and 19th-century Romantic nationalism. And indeed the “insular” method for calculating Easter was simply that which had been in use several centuries earlier in Rome itself before the authorities in Rome decided to try to adopt the Alexandrian approach on the perfectly sensible ground that they knew full well that the ecclesiastical authorities in Alexandria had access to better astronomers and mathematicians than were available in the barbarous and provincial Italy of the post-476 era. (The loss of Alexandria to Muslim rule meant no one properly told the authorities in either Rome or Constantinople that the method being used would need some modest tweaking every century or two, so there was no tweaking until a more radical revision popped up under Vatican auspices close to nine centuries after the Synod of Whitby.) So the “insular” approach was sort of akin to an Old-Believer thing rather than preserving any originally distinctive or local innovation.
“Something like this did in fact happen during the period of the apparent rapid evolution of English between 1066 and c. 1200.”
Anyone who says this should be forced to sit down with a bunch of twelfth and early thirteenth century English, and made to just read until they see sense…
It’s not that there’s no truth at all to that idea, but Late West Saxon was maintained as a literary language well after the Conquest — a large number of our surviving manuscripts in “Old English” are copies from after Bill the Bastard did his thing — and the biggest shifts are because new *dialects* start being written. Comparing even Ælfric with Orrm, or the older and newer sections of the Peterborough Chronicle, is seriously misleading, because a lot of the divergence isn’t between artificially older and younger stages, but between dialects that had probably been divergent for a long time already (not sure if that could potentially play a role in Irish — I thought it wasn’t too varied dialectally in the periods Koch is writing about, but I’m not too up on the details). Better to compare, say, the Life of St. Chad with Laȝamon and the Ancrene Wisse. Certainly don’t compare Beowulf and Chaucer, as is sometimes done!
It’s not that there’s no truth at all to that idea, but Late West Saxon was maintained as a literary language well after the Conquest […] and the biggest shifts are because new *dialects* start being written.
That’s exactly his point, hence the word “apparent.”
Not his point, at least not “exactly”. At least, I think there’s a big difference between, say, Sanskrit versus Prakrits, and the situation with Old English. There, we do find Late West Saxon used as a quasi-standard, so that, for instance, Wulfstan was living in York, but his Sermo Lupi doesn’t reflect the dialects of Yorkshire very well. (He also wasn’t from there himself originally.) But mostly, what we have is just Late West Saxon, and a few bits of other dialects (varieties of Mercian, a few flashes of Northumbrian), that plausibly reflect local conditions fairly well. There’s some conservatism, but on the whole, we can actually trace linguistic change proceeding in a normal and natural fashion, and getting reflected in the texts copied (many of these) and produced (fewer) in the twelfth century.
The impression of a major leap or break is very largely dialectal — that is, dialects that hadn’t been recorded in any surviving manuscripts all of a sudden start appearing. With the Peterborough Chronicle, you have a copy of older Chronicle texts, written in Late West Saxon, with additions by someone speaking the very different local dialect and trying, rather badly, to emulate a norm they didn’t fully understand. With Orrm, he revised some older orthographic traditions of English to represent what is presumably his normal speech extremely precisely (at least in certain respects), giving us, for the very first time, a real picture of East Midlands English. It’s a good deal different from Late West Saxon, but mostly for reasons of dialect.
What Koch (and many others, often supporting the Celtic Substrate hypothesis) misses is that where we have continuity of texts in a given dialect, there simply is no “period of … apparent rapid evolution”. Or apparent, I guess, but only to those who’ve badly misconstrued what the textual evidence actually has to say. For a parallel: imagine if people started comparing Laȝamon and Chaucer, and arguing that the period of 1200-1400 was a period of “apparent rapid evolution” of English. That claim is as well justified as what Koch says about the period immediately following the Norman Conquest.
In other words, there are two things that are not true:
1) That English changed exceptionally fast during this period. (Koch is right about this.)
2) That the textual records for any given variety of English would seem to imply a particularly rapid period of change because of a sharp break in the textual tradition. (This is where Koch is wrong.)
Ah, OK, I see what you’re saying. But the Prakrit thing is Lameen, not Koch. (I wonder how he says his name: Coke, Cock, or Cotch?)
Distance alone ought to have been enough in that age when western mainland Europe lacked infrastructure and barely had countries.
This paper says no:
“Old Irish is a monolithic language, and Early Old Irish of the seventh century is identical to Proto-Irish: spoken Modern Irish, Scots Gaelic, and Manx descend from that language, and no isogloss can be shown to predate it. In this respect, Irish contrasts sharply with all other languages which entered the written record during the Middle Ages: Old English, Old High German, Old Norse, and Slavic, for instance, show dialectal differences as soon as they enter the written record.”
At the same time, there’s evidence for dialect mixture: “*ō ( < Proto-Celtic *eu, *ou, *au) became úa [ua] or ó in an arbitrary manner, it seems (Thurneysen 1946: 39–41; McCone 1996: 134).”
The paper uses both of these facts (plus others) to argue that Celtic arrived in Ireland only in the first century AD. We discussed it here, preceded and followed by comments from you.
I have a high school friend who pronounced it cook.
Since you showed up, Nelson, I’ll mention that I was scrounging for info on these topics yesterday and found a comment of yours at LL (actualy a convo between you and David M)helpful to remind of how some of this must have developed.
> All branches of IE diverged early on, and any truly phylogenetic relationships probably just reflect the very earliest patterns of dialectal innovation. Later relationships (now technically of a contact sort, even if between closely-related dialects) quite possibly cross-cut that. This is obvious with much later similarities, such as those with Celtic, but probably equally true of potentially earlier similarities with Baltic (and Slavic). Those interested in the external histories of prehistoric languages often point to linguistic trees, but this is probably only useful in those contexts where it’s clear that a given subgroup developed for a good while before in turn diverging again – e.g. with Indo-Iranian within IE.
If you’re not schooled in this stuff, it’s easy to think of the known branches as an aboriginally complete set, each growing larger on common trajectories through time, rather than the descendants of a handful of lucky dialects among many, that remained small, localized and divergent for hundreds or thousands of years before a new social development saw them take off.
“But the Prakrit thing is Lameen, not Koch.”
Oh, indeed — my bad.
DM, thanks for those references. Now that you’ve brought him up, I suppose Schrijver is probably where I got the impression that Old Irish is not very dialectally diverse (if nothing else, I have read his 2013 book, which has a fairly brief discussion of the topic).
This line-numbered preprint version of the Large-Scale Influx into Britain paper has more information on the potential relationship with Celtic languages from line 309 or so. This was particularly interesting:
>Our finding of a decrease in EEF ancestry in Iberia, where the proportion was relatively high in the EBA, and a roughly simultaneous increase in Britain where the proportion was rlatively low in the EBA, could in theory reflect a Celtic-speaking group of people spreading into both regions.
They do offer appropriate caveats. But it seems potentially blockbuster if the findings hold. Being able to put a date on the divergence of Celtiberian and insular Celtic would seem to have dramatic implications for not only Celtic, but IE studies and linguistics generally.
I really meant to add that to Son of Yamnaya. Posting on my phone and didn’t realize I had both windows open. I guess it fits here too.
Yes. On the likely age of Celtic in Iberia, there’s this paper we discussed here (the mentioned fig. 1 is here in its full glory).
Cool. I’m trying to understand why you wrote there that an influx into Iberia at 1000 bce is consistent with protoCeltic=La Tene. Is Celtiberian considered a side branch that forked before proto-Celtic?
I might have thought these data were consistent with Hallstadt or even Urnfeld. (Just playing — Hallstatt and Urnfield.)
Aren’t the earliest Lepontic inscriptions before La Tène?
I have no idea whether this paper is consistent with the actual history of Celtic or not; what I like about it is the idea that the maintenance or abandonment of diglossia – i.e., of a particular educational system and language ideology – makes a difference to observed language change, irrespective of the prevalence of writing or the existence of compulsory schooling. If, as David cogently argues, Old Irish really is the product of unusually rapid sound change, that suggests a scenario in the same spirit: that the rise of Christianity (or the Roman collapse more generally) weakened prior sociolinguistic and educational norms in a manner that accelerated language change. That might even be more interesting to explore for Romance than for Celtic; it’s really rather striking the extent to which Romance has moved away from inherited IE norms compared to, say, Slavic or Greek. Of course, Romance ended up maintaining diglossia for much longer, but the educational system was massively transformed (not to say reduced) over the relevant period.
I gather that Late Egyptian was first systematically used in writing under the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten, but most of the (fairly major) changes from Middle Egyptian are thought to have happened a lot earlier. It’s just that proper writing still had to be in Middle Egyptian, until Sunny Boy came along and upset the natural order of things.
I remember reading a monograph which maintained that for centuries after the actual breakup of Latin scribes wrote Latin but actually pronounced it as pre-Old French (or whatever.) It wasn’t until people made the ideological jump to the notion that what they spoke in everyday life was a different language from Cicero’s that they began actually writing their languages differently from Latin.
Something similar must have happened to explain the Old Welsh spelling system, where Latin loans are written with the Latin spelling of word-internal consonants despite the fact that they had all become lenited already in Brythonic.
I seem to remember reading something by Calvert Watkins where he said, more or less, that the rapid development of Old Irish must have reflected a major collapse in relationships between generations. I’m not sure if I really believe that follows, but I seem to remember that he expressed the idea rather well. (I can’t now recall just where I read it, unfortunately. I think it was while I was browsing his volumes of collected writings, which doesn’t narrow it down much…)
I had simply chronically misremembered when the La Tène culture started: only around 450 BC. So… just ignore everything I said about it. ^_^
A chink in DM’s armor!
I chronically misremember most of this stuff.
Lameen: I have no idea whether this paper is consistent with the actual history of Celtic or not; what I like about it is the idea that the maintenance or abandonment of diglossia – i.e., of a particular educational system and language ideology – makes a difference to observed language change, irrespective of the prevalence of writing or the existence of compulsory schooling. If, as David cogently argues, Old Irish really is the product of unusually rapid sound change, that suggests a scenario in the same spirit: that the rise of Christianity (or the Roman collapse more generally) weakened prior sociolinguistic and educational norms in a manner that accelerated language change. That might even be more interesting to explore for Romance than for Celtic; it’s really rather striking the extent to which Romance has moved away from inherited IE norms compared to, say, Slavic or Greek. Of course, Romance ended up maintaining diglossia for much longer, but the educational system was massively transformed (not to say reduced) over the relevant period.
Should we also add the contemporaneous change from (Runic) Proto-Norse to Old Norse?
…That could have been a consequence of it, if umlaut on the Germanic side of things started in England and then spread back to the mainland.
I wonder how he says his name: Coke, Cock, or Cotch?
Per the video linked by Ryan here (3:03), Cotch.
Like the mayor, then. Thanks!