‘A Branch of Indo-European’

The adjective ‘Celtic’ has its most respectable and formal use within linguistics. The idea of the Indo-European languages is a result of the increasingly scholarly and scientific study of language in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Similarities between otherwise very different languages in Europe had long been noticed, with erudite Romans speculating on the relationship of their own language to Greek. 1 Gerald of Wales made some thoughtful suggestions about the relationships between disparate languages in the late twelfth century, which have been seen as an early attempt at comparative Indo-European linguistics. 2 Only in the late eighteenth century, however, did thoughts on this subject begin to assume their modern form. Before then, attempts to understand the relationships between different languages had usually aimed at derivation from Greek or Latin (as privileged languages of ancient scholarship), or from Old Testament Hebrew. In 1786, however, William Jones, in a now famous address to the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, noted that Sanskrit, the language of Indian religious learning, had remarkable affinities with Latin and Greek. He further suggested that these three languages, and indeed other European languages, and Persian, had a common origin. As Lockwood says, ‘the modern science of comparative philology had begun’ (Lockwood, 1969:22). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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