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The Influence of Latin and Norse on the Goidelic Languages

© Morag Gladstone

Celtic languages are divided into two distinct groups: Brythonic and Goidelic. Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx are regarded as the three Goidelic languages, although due to a lack of evidence for Manx before the sixteenth century, it cannot be said with absolute certainty from which branch Manx originated (1, p. 58). Two external linguistic contacts that will be examined here are those of Latin and Norse. The vocabulary is the least stable part of any language, and it is here that it is easiest to see the external linguistic influences. The focus will be on the phonological and lexical influences rather than the syntactic or grammatical. It is more difficult to identify the etymology of Manx Gaelic vocabulary because of the present orthography, which is a recent development which uses the orthography of Middle English to represent the phonology of the language rather than the its relationship to either Irish or Scottish Gaelic, or any other language that it may have been influenced by (2, p. xiii).

Ogham inscriptions suggest that there was a knowledge of Latin in Ireland from the second century (3, p. 170). Trading between Ireland and the Roman world was done primarily in Latin, and this contact would provide a means for transmission of Latin words into Irish. However, as can be seen from the category of loan words, the main source of transmission was Christianity, which had begun in Ireland in the fifth century. With it came increased literacy and the necessity of learning Latin. Latin grammar and religious studies were an integral part of education in Ireland by the sixth century (3, p. 177). Many loan words were borrowed via Brythonic speaking monks and missionaries, as well as from slaves brought to Ireland from Roman Britain in the fourth and fifth centuries (4, p. 15). The pronunciation learned by the Irish was, therefore, British. Latin was accepted as a literary language rather than a spoken, living language. Borrowings into Old Irish underwent morphemic substitution in agreement with Celtic morphology, not Latin (5, p. 16).

Latin loan words can be dated chronologically due to the sound changes that occurred during the early period of Old Irish. The later changes and borrowings tend to indicate borrowing from British, not Latin. Celtic did inherit Indo-European /p/ although this was lost in Proto-Celtic (6, p. 11). Latin phoneme /p/ was substituted by /kw/ in Old Irish in words at a time when there was no /p/ in the language, the most quoted example of this being Patricius > Cothrige (6, p. 43; 4, p. 16; 7, p. 127). As the language underwent internal changes native /kw/ shifted to /k/, losing the labial element, and /p/ reappeared, from this evidence it is deduced that words borrowed after the sixth century retain the sound p: Patricius > Pátric, although this chronological division is by no means exact (8, p. 23).

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