Everything about Insular Celtic Languages totally explained
The
Insular Celtic hypothesis concerns the origin of the Celtic languages. The six Celtic languages of modern times can be divided into:
The term "Insular" refers to the place of origin of these languages, namely the
British Isles, in contrast to the (now extinct)
Continental Celtic languages of
mainland Europe and
Anatolia. There is a theory that the Brythonic and Goidelic languages
evolved together in those islands, having a
common ancestor more recent than any shared with the
Continental Celtic languages such as
Celtiberian,
Gaulish, Galatian and
Lepontic, among others, all of which are long
extinct.
The proponents of the Insular Celtic hypothesis (such as Cowgill 1975; McCone 1991, 1992; and Schrijver 1995) point to shared innovations among Insular Celtic languages, including
inflected prepositions, shared use of certain verbal particles,
VSO word order, and the differentiation of absolute and conjunct verb endings as found extensively in Old Irish and to a small extent in Middle Welsh (see
Proto-Celtic language#Morphology). They assert that a partition that lumps the Brythonic languages and Gaulish (
P-Celtic) on one side and the Goidelic languages with Celtiberian (
Q-Celtic) on the other may be a superficial one (for example owing to a
language contact phenomenon), as the identical sound shift (Q to P) could have occurred independently in the predecessors of Gaulish and Brythonic.
The family tree of the Insular Celtic languages is thus as follows:
Insular Celtic
