English and Celtic in contact (review)

It is readily apparent that English has been heavily influenced by other languages. Some of the contacts have had very little impact; for instance, Finnish has only contributed a few loan words (e.g., sauna). Others have been significantly more important; a number of diachronic developments in English phonology and morphology have been traced to French influence (see Kastovsky 2006, among others). The traditional assessment of contacts between English and the Celtic languages, popularized by Jespersen (1905) and defended by more recent scholars like Fennell (2001), is that such contacts were not very important. Consequently, there has not been a great deal of research done on English/Celtic contacts, although there are studies like Tolkien (1963) and the series of works by Preusler (1938 and 1940, among others) and Breeze (1993 and 1994, among others). This state of affairs is beginning to change, as increasing attention is being paid to English/Celtic contacts, including a series of conferences on “Celtic Englishes”, a number of recent publications, and a major research project on contact between English and Celtic, with an informative website (www.joensuu.fi/fld/ecc/index.html). This book, written by the three directors of this research project, is a welcome, albeit somewhat flawed, addition to the growing body of literature on the topic.

The book consists of three main parts, as well as an introduction and the usual extra paraphernalia found in scholarly books (list of abbreviations, bibliography, indices for names and subjects, etc). The first part, “Early Celtic influences in English,” contains two chapters. The first, “The historical background to the early contacts” (pp. 7–23), offers a thumbnail sketch of the historical background, covering issues like the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons and the fate of the Celts after their arrival. The second, “The linguistic outcomes of the early contacts” (pp. 24–132), deals with grammar (i.e., syntax and morphology), phonology, and the lexicon, in that order. Topics addressed in this chapter include the emergence of the internal possessor and the cleft constructions (as in sentences like He has a wound on his head and It is he that …, respectively), the retention of interdental fricatives in English as opposed to their general loss in Germanic (they are only retained in English and Icelandic, although they also result from a new phonological process in Danish), place names, and loan words from Celtic.

The second main section, “Celtic influences in the modern age,” also consists of two chapters. The first, “The historical background to the modern contacts and to language shift in Celtic-speaking areas” (pp. 135–167), contains sections on Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and Cornwall and the Isle of Man. These sections provide very readable discussions of language shift in these areas. The second chapter in this section, “The linguistic outcomes of the modern contacts” (pp. 168–220), deals with grammar, phonology, and the lexicon. This chapter covers topics like the use of the definite article (e.g., Can you eat the herring?), the use of the progressive construction with stative verbs (e.g., I’m thinking that this is a bad idea), the presence of ‘clear l’ in word-final position, and various loan words (e.g., saie ‘paddock’, borrowed from Manx into Manx English).

The final section of the book, “Epilogue: The extent of Celtic influences in English,” contains two thematic chapters and a brief conclusion. The first of these, “The debates on the extent of Celtic influences in English” (pp. 223–243), is largely historiographical, tracing the development of linguistic analyses of Celtic-English contacts. The final thematic chapter, “A reassessment of the evidence for Celtic influence” (pp. 244–257), looks at the topic from various perspectives, including historical, typological, and areal. There is also a brief concluding chapter.

In any work of this sort, some inaccuracies and omissions are inevitable. The following list presents a selection of those that caught my eye: p. 28, the term ‘i-mutation...