Fifty Years of Celtic Philology

Fifty Years of Celtic PhilologyAuthor(s): Kenneth JacksonSource: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 71, No. 4 (Oct., 1976), pp. xxiii-xxxviiPublished by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3726033 .

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Fifty Years of Celtic Philology KENNETH JACKSON

The Presidential Address of the Modern Humanities Research Association read at University College, London, on g January 1976

I am going to talk this evening about the progress of studies in Celtic philology over the last fifty years. The period of half a century has this advantage, for myself, that it takes us back to 1926, and that since I began the study of Celtic under the Chadwicks in I931, at the age of 21, I can remember almost all of it at first hand. Thus, I can remember a time when the very word 'Celtic' was still regarded almost as a joke, at any rate in England; at least, the idea was not taken seriously. No doubt there were various causes for this, and among them the ancient, deep-seated, almost wholly unconscious English prejudice against 'Celts' and all their works. One result has been that Celtic has found almost no official place in the English universities, and that with a very few exceptions English scholars therefore have not taken any serious interest in Celtic studies. They were hardly encouraged to do so by the fact that there was obviously no career for them in the university world - a situation which unfortunately still obtains to the present.

Meanwhile, outside England and to quite a considerable degree inside it, there has been in the last ten years or so a very remarkable growth of interest in Celtic among the young, among university students and others in the non-Celtic countries, however uninterested their seniors may be. This began much earlier in the United States, where intelligent people are always much more ready than hidebound Europeans are to take peripheral subjects on their own merits if they are intrinsic- ally interesting. Not to mention Europe, this more liberal attitude to Celtic studies has spread more recently to Canada, Australia, and even Russia, Finland, and Japan. This is something one warmly applauds of course, but it can bring with it certain inconveniences. For one thing, the great Ph.D. business outside the Celtic countries has woken up to the fact that here is an almost untilled field, a rich hunting ground for thesis subjects previously almost entirely unexploited. Since the supervisors and examiners may have little or no knowledge of Celtic, nor the candidates either, and they do not realize how unfitted for the task they are, the results may be rather disastrous, particularly if published. Celtic studies are pecu- liarly dangerous for the amateur, but there has recently been an unfortunate tendency for scholars, even good scholars, in other fields such as the history of Roman Britain, post-Roman archaeology and history, or in the study of English place-names, to venture rashly into the Celtic field where they are not qualified to do so. This is apparently on the principle that 'After all, no one knows anything about Celtic anyway, so why shouldn't I have a stab?'. Unluckily for them, some people do know something about Celtic. The result has too often been that where Celtic seems to impinge on their own subject, the writers just mentioned dream up and publish ideas which the Celticist knows to be absurd speculations, which nevertheless tend to be taken for fact when a sufficient number of other unqualified



xxiv Fifty Years of Celtic Philology

persons have repeated them as such in print, so that eventually they become unchallengeable dogma. This sort of thing has increased recently with the general increase of interest in Celtic, but it is a temptation which ought to be resisted.

Of course, a great deal of work had already been done on the Indo-European origins of the Celtic languages long before 1926, and this has been one of the most fertile aspects of Celtic studies ever since. Although its first volume came out nearly seventy years ago, I cannot omit mention of one of the most important, perhaps the most important, of works ever published on Celtic studies, Holger Pedersen's great Vergleichende Grammatik der keltischen Sprachen.1 This was an extraordinary feat of learning on the part of one single man, covering as it does the Indo- European origins and all the early, together with part of the later, history of the Celtic languages. It is the more appropriate to mention it here since the revised and abridged English edition, revised jointly with Henry Lewis, appeared well within the last fifty years - in fact in I937.2 The Brittonic side of this revision was an improvement of the old VKG, having been brought up to date by Lewis, who was admirably qualified to do so, but the Goidelic was rather less satisfactory, since Pedersen was by then an old man and his revisions consisted to a fair extent of the simple omission of those of his theories which had not stood the test of time well. Some of the abridgements were a pity, notably that of the invaluable 'dictionary' of the early Irish strong verbs; and in this and other ways the VKG is still an essential tool of Celtic scholars, dated though parts of it may be.

For the rest, innovations in philological attitudes, and new discoveries and new theories as time goes on, keep changing the picture of the Indo-European background of Celtic. It is true that Celtic scholars have not been much affected by 'Linguistics', apart from the occasional article consisting largely of mathematical symbols. But the discovery of Tokharian had already greatly modified older ideas about Celtic well before our period began, and in the case of Hittite and the other ancient Anatolian languages, some years after it began; and this made necessary the abandoning of some older dogmas. It was discovered, or believed to be discovered, that Celtic was not to be looked on as wholly a relatively late and evolved aspect of western Indo-European, but that it was what came to be called a 'peripheral' language group. That is to say, that it lay on the remote periphery of the Indo-European world. The idea is that common innovations grew up early in the central area, and by spreading, tended to some extent to draw most of the 'central' languages together; and that on the other hand, 'peripheral' languages might preserve very old archaisms at the remote opposite ends of the Indo-European world - notably, in Celtic in the west and in Hittite, Indo-Iranian, and Tokharian in the east.3 This has been a fruitful concept, not least fruitful in controversy. It has led to thoroughgoing and conflicting reappraisals of problems like the origin of the Celtic 'absolute' and 'conjunct' verbal terminations, which earlier Celticists believed were respectively the Indo-European primary and secondary endings. The

1 Gottingen, Vol. I, 1909; Vol. II, I913. Abbreviated as VKG. 2 A Concise Comparative Celtic Grammar (Gottingen, I937). 3 Compare M. Dillon, Celts and Aryans (Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla, I975), passim.



KENNETH JACKSON

school of Pedersen,1 Dillon,2 and others3 has held that 'absolute' versus 'conjunct' is a comparatively late Celtic innovation, and that while the conjunct endings are the old secondary ones, the absolute are simply these plus suffixed subject personal pronouns or other elements. On the other hand the school of Watkins4 and particularly Meid5 has produced a modification of the old theory, and believes the Celtic absolute versus conjunct dichotomy is very ancient indeed, older even than the full establishment of the original Indo-European primary versus secondary opposition. The Celtic conjunct is thought to be none other than the very primitive Indo- European injunctive preserved, and preserved more systematically than in any other known Indo-European language group. This bold idea has naturally aroused dis- sent,6 particularly among those who do not see why an injunctive should change its use so fundamentally as to become limited to positions dependent on a preverbal particle or other preceding element. However, it appears to have been widely accepted none the less; rightly, as I believe.

In a similar way the old ideas of the r-endings of the passive and deponent forms of Italic, Celtic, and those other, mostly minor, Indo-European languages then known to have them, were disrupted by the new discoveries, particularly that of Hittite and its Anatolian relatives. This subject has perhaps caused more spilling of controversial ink in our period than any other. It would take too long to attempt to summarize the controversy. Very briefly, the Italic and Celtic r-passive and r-deponent had been thought to be independent of each other, the passive being derived from an impersonal in r, itself from the old 3rd plural stative perfect ending, but later contaminated in varying ways with the IE middle; and the deponent being an ancient fusion of the middle with the same 3rd plural ending. The Tok- harian 'deponent' was believed to confirm this.7 But the discovery of the ancient Anatolian group showed that these languages had a single medio-passive in 3rd sg. -ari (or -ar) or -tari (or -tar), and 3rd pl. -ntari (or -ntar), which exactly and

strikingly suited in particular the Old Irish passive forms and could be made to suit the Italic and others, though less closely. None the less this caused great difficulties of various kinds, which have led to similarly varied theories,8 many of

1 VKG, nI 340 ff. 2 M. Dillon, in Language, 19 (1943), 252 if.; Transactions of the Philological Society (1947), 2I if.;

('955), I"4ff. 3 For example B. Boling, in Eriu, 23 (1972), 73 ff.; W. Cowgill, in 'The Origins of the Conjunct

and Absolute Verbal Endings', an unpublished paper delivered to a Congress at Regensburg in 1973, differs fundamentally over some important points; compare also his note in Eriu, 26 (I975), 27 f.

4 C. Watkins, in Celtica, 6 (I963), 41 ff. 5 W. Meid, Die Indogermanische Grundlagen der altirischen absoluten und konjunkten Verbalflexion (Wiesbaden, 1963), passim; K. H. Schmidt, in Zeitschrift fir celtische Philologie, 33 (I974), 28 ff.; etc.

6 See, for example, Boling and Cowgill, cited above. 7 See Vendryes, in Revue Celtique, 34 (I 93), 129 ff. 8 The following may be consulted: E. Claflin, in American Journal of Philology, 48 (I917), 157 ff.;

Language, 5 (I929), 232 ff. J. Vendryes, in Revue Celtique, 45 (I928), 410; Celtica, 3 (I956), I85 ff. L. H. Gray, in Language, 6 (I930), 229 if. W. Petersen, in American Journal of Philology, 53 (1922), 208; Language, 12 (1936), I57 ff. Lewis and Pedersen, Celtic Grammar, pp. 306 f., 310 f. M. Dillon, in Transactions of the Philological Society (I947), 15 ff.; (I955), I05 ff. W. Meid, in Orbis, I0 (1961), 434 ff.; Die Ind. Grundlagen, pp. 7I, 102. K. H. Schmidt, in Die Sprache, 9 (I963), 14 ff.; Indogermanische Forschungen, 68 (1963), 257 ff. J. Kurylowicz, The Inflectional Categories of Indo-European (Heidelberg, I964), pp. 56 ff.; Etudes Celtiques, I2 (I968-71), 7 ff. J. Pokorny, in Indogermanische Forschungen, 70 ( 965), 316 ff. P. Flobert, in Annales de Bretagne, 74 (1967), 567 ff. H. Wagner, in Transactions of the Philological Society (1969), 203 ff. C. Watkins, Formenlehre (Heidel- berg, I969 = Vol. II, Part i in J. Kurylowicz, Indogermanische Grammatik), 174 ff.; Eriu, 21 (1969), I2 ff. B. Boling, in Eriu, 23 ('972), 73 if. W. Cowgill, see note 3 above.

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xxvi Fifty Years of Celtic Philology

them more or less forced and over-ingenious. One throws up one's hands and con- tents oneself with thinking it is probably a mistake to try to derive all these things from one exactly identical source. Perhaps one should conclude merely that the IE middle certainly played a part, and so did the IE stative perfect 3rd pl. in r, but that the permutations and combinations of these may have differed in the various language groups; that the fusion of middle and r-endings into 3rd sg. -tro and 3rd pl. -ntro postulated by a number of scholars for the deponent should not be rejected for the sake of dogma; and that the Italo-Celtic likeness to the Anatolian may be a coincidence which arose nevertheless from common sources. Also, that we should not lose sight of a probable early 'impersonal' form in r, as many have done in recent times. Theories that the Old Irish deponent and passive represent a very recent differentiation indeed have ignored the chronology of syncope in the sixth century.

A further matter of argument about Celtic philology has been the question of a non-Indo-European substratum in insular Celtic.1 The theory is that these languages contain features which cannot be explained as Indo-European, but have parallels in others like Berber, and can therefore be referred to a very ancient sub- strate population of such an origin in the British Isles. This idea, first mooted by Morris-Jones,2 and taken up by Pokorny with increasing enthusiasm,3 has more recently been made the main theme of a controversial book by Heinrich Wagner.4 The theory, in its extreme forms, has met with little success, but it is only fair to say that the insular Celtic languages do appear to exhibit a few features which it is very difficult to explain as Indo-European. Since there must have been non- Indo-Europeans in these islands before the Celts got here, the idea is perhaps not to be dismissed as wholly mistaken, particularly as there seems to be evidence for the actual survival of such a language in northern Scotland among the Picts.5 The attempt to identify the influences of known non-Indo-European languages is a different question, notably because we have no evidence whatever on the ancient forms of for example Berber or Basque. To put it differently, the theory of a non- Indo-European substratum may have something to be said for it in principle, but when it comes to practical application, that is quite another thing.

There has been a constant activity in the study of other aspects of Indo-European in relation to early Celtic philology, of course, over the last half-century, apart from those I have discussed, but most of it has been in the form of shorter or longer articles much too numerous to mention here. I should not omit Kurylowicz's The Inflectional Categories of Indo-European, however, nor Watkins's Formenlehre.6

Gaulish studies were not very active, on the whole, during the early part of our period, though in 1920 Dottin had already put together a grammar of the language,

1 That is, the Celtic of the British Isles. 2 See his Appendix B in J. Rhys and D. Brynmor-Jones, The Welsh People (London, I909). 3 Zeitschriftfiir celtische Philologie, I6 (1927), 95 ff., 231 ff., 363 if.; 17 (1928), 373 ff.; 18 (I929),

233 ff.; Die Sprache, I (I949), 235 ff.; 5 (1959), 52 ff., etc. 4 Das Verbum in den Sprachen der britischen Inseln (Tiibingen, I959). See particularly pp. I52 ff. 5 See K. Jackson, 'The Pictish Language' in F. T. Wainwright, The Problem of the Picts (Edinburgh,

I955), pp. I29 ff. 6 See p. xxi, note 8, above.



KENNETH JACKSON

with texts and glossary, running to 364 pages.1 Joshua Whatmough's The Dialects of Ancient Gaul was first published in microfilm in I949-5I,2 and it was not until 1970 that this great body of evidence on Gaulish was made conveniently available as a book, under the same title, by the Harvard Press. Another very important work is D. Ellis Evans's Gaulish Personal Names, published by the Clarendon Press in I967, a great collection of the formative elements found in these, and discussion of their etymology, phonology, and morphology, with a vast amount of bibliographical information.3 It is impossible to enter much further into the question of Gaulish here. Not only do new inscriptions turn up from time to time, but there has also been considerable activity in publication of monographs and articles. Among these however I would specially mention Michel Lejeune's articles on Gaulish and related dialects ('Lepontic') in the twelfth volume of JEtudes Celtiques,4 and elsewhere, and Edouard Bachellery's very valuable brief summary in the same periodical5 of what is now known about the character and distribution of the sources, and the phonology and morphology of the language.

It is in the study of the ancient Celtic of the Iberian peninsula that the greatest progress has perhaps been made recently. The characters in which the inscriptions concerned are written were not even properly deciphered until shortly before our period began, and it has been by no means obvious that they are really to be described as Celtic at all, or if they are, to what degree. There is a considerable body of opinion which believes they are; though if so, one should emphasize that from the point of view of insular Celtic they represent very remote and almost un- intelligible (and presumably comparatively early) offshoots from the Common Celtic stock. The most persistent and prolific advocate of this has probably been Antonio Tovar, notably in his The Ancient Languages of Spain and Portugal;6 and one must not omit Michel Lejeune's writings, particularly his Celtiberica;7 or Schmoll's Die Sprachen der vorkeltischen Indogermanen Hispaniens und das Keltiberische.8 The recent discovery of the long inscription of Botorrita has been thought to advance the case considerably.9

Let us take next Irish, the Greek or Sanskrit of the Celtic languages. When I entered on the study of Celtic in I931 the situation in respect of grammars and dictionaries facing the beginner was desperate; above all in the matter of dictionaries. There existed in fact no real dictionaries of early Irish whatsoever. True, Kuno Meyer had made a beginning as far back as 1900, with his rather

1 G. Dottin, La langue gauloise (Paris, 1920). 2 Ann Arbor, Michigan. 3 Compare also K. H. Schmidt's important 'Die Komposition in gallischen Personennamen', Zeitschriftfiir celtische Philologie, 26 (1967), 33-20 .

4 Etudes Celtiques, I2 (1968-7I), 21-91 and 357-500. 5 Etudes Celtiques, I3 (1972-3), 29-60. 6 New York, 196I; see also for example his 'Das Keltiberische', in Kratylos, 3 (1958), I ff. 7 Salamanca, I955. 8 Wiesbaden, I959. 9 See A. Beltran in Anejos de Archivo Espafnol de Arqueologia, 7 (I974), 73 ff.; M. Lejeune, in Academie

des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Comptes Rendus (I974), 622 ff.; and J. de Hoz and L. Michelena, La Inscripcion Celtiberica de Botorrita (Salamanca, 1974).

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xxviii Fifty Years of Celtic Philology

skimpy Contributions to the Study of Irish Lexicography,l which however got only as far as part-way through the letter D; and in 1913 Marstrander published part of the letter D for the projected dictionary of the Royal Irish Academy but had not reached even so far through that letter as Meyer had; and there the matter rested. There was no dictionary of Middle or Early Modern Irish at all, but there was - and is - at least one quite good dictionary of Modern Irish, Dinneen's.2 If used with caution and with understanding this was a useful guide to the Middle and Early Modern period as well, in the absence of anything better, though it was rather unfairly scoffed at by some scholars. These things apart, the wretched beginner in 1926 was obliged to hunt in the glossaries to publications of early texts, most notably Windisch's Irische Texte of I88o3 and his Die altirische Heldensage Tdin Bo Czalnge (Leipzig, 1905). For eleventh to twelfth-century Irish there was the large glossary to R. Atkinson's Passions and Homilies (Dublin, 1887). In the very year I began Celtic the second fasciculus of the Royal Irish Academy dictionary, the letter E, was published, and also Osborn Bergin's edition of Keating's The Three Shafts of Death (Dublin, 1931), the glossary to which is particularly useful for Early Modern Irish. And there, apart from other, mostly less valuable, glossaries in other editions of texts, the matter of lexicography remained at that time.

All this is now changed out of all recognition. In the succeeding years, particularly after the war, the Royal Irish Academy continued with, and in 1975 completed its great dictionary, in twenty-three fasciculi. This gives numerous examples of each word, with full references, and is in fact a sort of historical Irish Liddel and Scott; but it is a measure of the snail's pace with which early Irish lexicography has advanced, that when Meyer brought out his 'contributions' to the letter B between i 900 and 1904, no one could have foreseen that a full treatment of that letter, by the Academy, would not appear for another seventy years. Besides this, various collaborators published two fasciculi of Hessen's Irisches Lexicon, being the letter A to half-way through C in 1933, and I to the end of R between 1936 and I940 (Halle). This, however, was little more than a conflation of the above- mentioned previously published glossaries to various texts, and the war put a final stop to it in any case. The only attempt at an etymological dictionary ever published is Vendryes's Lexique etymologique de l'irlandais ancien, letters A in 1959, M N O P in 1960, and R S posthumously in 1974 (Paris). It is to be hoped that this will continue, but the gap between A and M is an instance of a curious pheno- menon that has dogged Celtic lexicography throughout our period. However, the completion of the Academy's dictionary in 1975 means that new students 'don't know they are born', as the phrase is, by contrast with my own contemporaries half a century ago.

The situation with regard to grammars of Irish was little better, at that time, than it was for dictionaries. For Old Irish there was, of course, Thurneysen's invaluable Handbuch des Altirischen, published as long ago as I909 (Heidelberg), and what was in effect an English summary of it by O'Connell in I9I2.4 Also

1 Published in parts as a supplement to the three volumes of Stokes and Meyer's Archivfiir celtische Lexicographie (Halle, 1900-1907).

2 P. S. Dinneen, An Irish-English Dictionary (Dublin, 1904; revised 1927; constantly reprinted). 3 E. Windisch, Irische Texte mit Worterbuch (Leipzig). 4 F. W. O'Connell, A Grammar of Old-Irish (Belfast, 1912).



KENNETH JACKSON

grammars by Vendryes' and Pokorny;2 and the third edition of Strachan's 'Para- digms and Glosses',3 revised by Osborn Bergin, appeared in I929, just after our period begins. But Thurneysen's Handbuch remained without a rival until I946, when a much revised and enlarged English edition, translated and annotated by Professors Binchy and Bergin, was published.4 This has remained the Bible of Goidelic scholars ever since, and without a rival, though in the intervening thirty years it has become out-dated in some respects, chiefly in matters of the Indo- European background.

For Middle Irish, the language of the tenth to twelfth centuries, the only grammar that has ever been produced was Dottin's Manuel d'irlandais moyen, brought out in I913 (Paris), and this was little more than a codification of the language of Atkinson's Passions and Homilies. There never has been any grammar of the succeeding Early Modern stage,5 and there is still no adequate or even half adequate one of the recent and contemporary language.6 However, Professor David Greene announced lately that he is writing a historical grammar of Irish,7 and perhaps I may be allowed to mention that I have been working on the same thing myself for many years; so there is hope that this dearth of modern grammars of Irish subsequent to the ninth century may change in due course.

All this is not to say, of course, that articles, and even books, on aspects of the history of Irish have not been published over the last fifty years. Very much the contrary; probably the most active aspect of research in Celtic all through our period has been precisely this one of Irish grammar, using that word in a wide sense, as the learned Celtic periodicals will testify. The barren picture I have just drawn really applies to the matter of overall grammars aimed at the student and scholar. It would be invidious to single out the authors of articles and impossible even to begin on subjects; but limiting myself as before to books, I must mention first Lambert McKenna's Bardic Syntactical Tracts (Dublin, I944). Then, Jean Gagnepain's pioneer work on a historical study of Irish syntax (a far too much ignored subject), La syntaxe du nom verbal dans les langues celtiques (Paris, 1963), which is a full-length account of the usages of the verbal noun from Old Irish down to the present-day language, and should serve as a model for other such researches. A third work is T. F. O'Rahilly's Irish Dialects Past and Present, published in Dublin in I932 and re-issued there forty years later with a much-needed adequate index by Professor 0 Cuiv. This is not really a dialectological study, but rather a historical account of some of the chief features which went to the make-up of the modern dialects, as well as the earlier-differentiated Scottish Gaelic and Manx, in the late Middle and Early Modern Irish period. This book sets the scene for the history of the later period in the Gaelic languages, and maddeningly unsystematic though it is, it is a goldmine for the linguistic historian.

1 Grammaire du vieil-irlandais (Paris, I908). 2 A Concise Old Irish Grammar (Halle, I914). 3 Old Irish Paradigms and Selections from the Old Irish Glosses (Dublin); the fourth edition, further

revised by Bergin, came out in I949. 4 A Grammar of Old Irish (Dublin). 5 Apart from various very outdated seventeenth- to nineteenth-century 'Irish Grammars', which to

some extent represented the literary language of that period. 6 Quite a number have been published during this century, of course, but none come up to the

requirements of modern scholarship. The standard one has generally been regarded as that produced by the Christian Brothers.

7 His little book The Irish Language (Dublin, 1966; 6I pp.) may also be mentioned.

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The Irish dialects have attracted attention all through this century, and the first more or less modern treatments in book form are as old as Finck's Die araner Mund- art of 1899 (Marburg), and Quiggin's A Dialect of Donegal which appeared exactly seventy years ago.1 Ignoring articles, even long and important ones like Sommer- felt's on Ulster Irish,2 as well as 0 Searcaigh's books on the phonology and syntax of northern Irish3 which are not likely to be very useful to most members of this audience as they are written in Irish, the first important dialect study after Quiggin was Marie-Louise Sjoestedt's work on the dialect of the Blasket Island in Kerry, her Phonetique d'un parler irlandais de Kerry in I93 , and her Description of the same dialect in I938,4 the latter being a morphology and syntax. After that there came a series of monographs published for the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies on the phonology of the dialects of West Cork in I944, western Co. Galway in 1945, Co. Waterford in I947, and southern Co. Mayo in 1958, respectively by Brian O Cuiv, Tomas de Bhaldraithe,5 R. B. Breatnach, and Sean de Burca. Nils Holmer's The Dialects of Co. Clare (Dublin, I962) and E. Mac an Fhailigh's The Irish of Erris, Co. Mayo (Dublin, 1968), are both very informative and useful. Heinrich Wagner's vast four-volume Linguistic Atlas and Survey of Irish Dialects (Dublin, 1958, 1964, 1966, I969) will long remain a quarry of material for the painstaking dialectologist. In conclusion I should mention the book Irish Dialects and Irish-speaking Districts by Brian 6 Culv (Dublin, I951), which is a brief but very valuable account of the geographical distribution of the dialects and of some of their chief distinguishing features, as well as of the numbers of native speakers who used them. All this and much else shows the great activity and the healthy state of Irish dialect study since the war.

The other two Goidelic languages, Scottish Gaelic and Manx, have received very much less attention from scholars than Irish has. There are various reasons for this. For one thing, there are virtually no records in them before the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively, so that they do not interest Indo-European philologists. Again, until lately (indeed until O'Rahilly's book just mentioned) they were generally regarded among Irish scholars and others as mere patois of Irish, unworthy of serious study. Also, until relatively recent times Scottish and Manx learned men have mostly themselves lacked the rigorous training in Celtic philology necessary to enable them to handle these languages in an up-to-date fashion, though there have been some brilliant exceptions in Scotland.

The situation about dictionaries is still very bad. Hardly any are still even in print, and almost all of those which have been printed do not come near measuring up to modern standards. Indeed no new ones have been published during our period

E. C. Quiggin, A Dialect of Docngal (Cambridge, 1906). 2 See, for example, his 'Dialect of Torr', Videnskapsselskapets Skrifter, 2, Hist.-Fil. K., 1921, No. 2; and 'South Armagh Irish', Norsk Tidsskriftfor Sprogvidenskap, 2 (I929), 107 if.

3 Dublin, I926 and 1929 respectively. 4 Both Paris. 5 His valuable book on the morphology of the same dialect, Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge (Dublin, I953),

is in Irish; as also is H. Wagner's study of the Teelin dialect of S. Donegal, Gaeilge Theilinn (Dublin, 1959).



KENNETH JACKSON

in either language,l though some have been reprinted. The best Scottish one is Dwelly's Illustrated Gaelic-English Dictionary,2 large but chaotic, which could be made into a valuable tool by some editing, rearrangement, and pruning. However, this will be overtaken before very long, one hopes, by the historical dictionary with full examples and references which is in course of preparation by a team of scholars at Glasgow University under the general editorship of Professor Derek Thomson. This work (or a first fasciculus) is eagerly awaited. For Manx, the chief living authority on this language, Mr Robert Thomson of Leeds University, is engaged on what is going to be a really scholarly historical dictionary.

As to grammars, there have of course been a number of these, particularly for Scottish Gaelic, with 'Readers' and so on of the 'Teach Yourself' type, but few of them are in print and none are up to what modern standards would demand.3 This is probably the most serious lacuna in Scottish and Manx Celtic scholarship; but grammars must if possible be written by those with a native knowledge of the language, and granted the rarity of scholars adequately trained for the purpose, this dearth, however disappointing, is perhaps hardly surprising.

It is in the field of dialect study that progress in Scottish Gaelic and Manx has been really notable, produced almost solely by Scandinavians and other 'foreigners'. The first real work of modern scholarship on a Scottish dialect was Nils Holmer's Studies in Argyllshire Gaelic of 1938 to I939,4 and closely following, C. Borgstrom's large and very enlightening Linguistic Survey of the Gaelic Dialects of Scotland, Vol. I, The Dialects of the Outer Hebrides, and Vol. II, The Dialects of Skye and Ross-shire, published as supplements to the Norsk Tidsskriftfor Sprogvidenskap in 1940 and 1941. Magne Oftedal's equally important Volume im of the same 'Survey', on The Gaelic Dialect of Leurbost, Isle of Lewis, appeared in 1956 and established him as one of the foremost scholars working on spoken Scottish Gaelic. Other valuable publications on dialect are Holmer's The Gaelic of Arran and The Gaelic of Kintyre, respectively 1957 and I962 (Dublin); and one should not forget H. C. Dieckhoff's Pronouncing Dictionary of Scottish Gaelic (Edinburgh) which came out as long ago as 1932, which is really much more a phonology of a dialect, that of Glengarry, than it is a dictionary. Finally, Elmar Ternes has lately published The Phonemic Analysis qf Scottish Gaelic (Hamburg, I974). Although this undertaking sounds rather more ambitious than it is, since the Gaelic in question is in fact simply the dialect of Applecross,5 this is one of the best and certainly the most up to date of such studies that have ever been published, and holds great promise for the future. I should not leave this subject without adding that the University of Edinburgh has been operating a 'Linguistic Survey of Gaelic Scotland' ever since I949, and that a vast archive of written phonetic material in the form of field questionnaires and other- wise, and of tape-recordings, has been collected from all over the Gaelic-speaking areas. It was the policy to concentrate first on those eastern regions where Gaelic was already dying or almost dead, something almost all other modern scllolars

Apart from J. J. Kncens little (86 pp.) English-Mlanx Pronouncing Dictionary (Douglas, 1938). 2 Glasgow, I901-I I; second edition, revised and enlarged, I920; often reprinted. 3 J. J. Kneen's A Grammar of the Manx Language (Oxford, 1931), gives in any case too much of an

'ideal' picture rather than a realistic one. 4 Skrifter utgivna av Kungliga Humanistiska Vetenskapssamfundet i Uppsala, 31, Part i (1938-9). 5 As indeed the sub-title does make fairly clear.

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xxxii Fifty Years of Celtic Philology

working on Scottish Gaelic before and since have regrettably failed to do ;' and as a result much is now known about dialects which have since died out, and would have died almost unknown but for the Survey. Nothing so far has been published, partly because of the difficulty of recruiting staff with the necessary qualifications, and partly because of the inherent complication of the material, but it is sincerely to be hoped that publication need not now be indefinitely delayed.

One can scarcely speak of Manx 'dialects', but phonological and other scientific work on spoken Manx has not been wholly neglected. Marstrander gathered a good deal of phonetic material while it was still to be had in some profusion, but unfortunately very little of it was published.2 Wagner included one 'point' in Man in his Linguistic Atlas already referred to; and I printed a little book called Contributions to the Study of Manx Phonology (Edinburgh, 1955) based on phonetic material collected from the last ten native speakers of Manx still living in 1950-5 .

Incidentally, the very last of these died in I974, and Manx is now a dead language, apart from those enthusiasts who have taught themselves or been taught to speak it.

Now I come to the Brittonic languages, beginning with Welsh. Once more, Welsh has attracted distinctly less attention among non-Welsh scholars than Irish has among non-Irish. This must be due partly to the fact that even in its earliest stages it is a much more evolved language than Old Irish, and consequently casts distinctly less light on primitive Celtic philology. Probably the fact that so many Welsh scholars have written in Welsh has also rather discouraged foreigners, and may therefore have had the effect of tending to cut Wales off from the possibility of fructifying influences coming in from outside.

Here again the absence of adequate dictionaries was a very serious matter when I began Middle Welsh in i93i. There was no real dictionary of early Welsh at all, though Timothy Lewis's Glossary of Mediaeval Welsh Law (Manchester, I913) could be very useful at times. There was also one really good dictionary of Modern Welsh, Spurrell's Welsh-English Dictionary as edited by the Anwyl brothers,3 which however was much more than a purely modern one, since it contained also many obsolete 'poetical' words, distinguished by obelisks, which really belonged to the medieval language. There was nothing for it, in those days, but to start making one's own card-index dictionary of early Welsh for all words whose meaning the obelisks in the Spurrell dictionary suggested was not supported by modern usage, as well as for those which in early texts seemed to differ in their meaning from the modern one. There is still no first-rate, complete, handy dictionary of Modern Welsh; those that have been published since the war do not come up to the standard of Spurrell, which has now unfortunately been allowed to go out of print. In the same 1931 when I began, however, J. Lloyd-Jones had begun to publish his fine dictionary of early Welsh poetry,4 the first fasciculus from A to the beginning of C. This was followed by seven further fascicules from 1946 to 1963, down to early in the letter H, though publication came to a stop with his death. This valuable work was however made less accessible than it might have been to non-Welsh beginners like myself by being entirely in Welsh. But of recent years the situation has im-

1 With the exception of Miss Nancy Dorian's work on eastern Sutherland (not yet published as such) and Mr Joe Watson's on Easter Ross (Lochlann, 6 (1966), 9 ff.) both prompted by the Survey.

2 See the Norsk Tidsskriftfor Sprogvidenskap, 6 (1932), 40 ff., and 7 (1934), 285 ff. 3 First edition of this, Carmarthen, I916. 4 Geirfa Barddoniaeth Gynnar Gymraeg (Cardiff).



KENNETH JACKSON xxxiii

proved out of all recognition by the publication, in parts, of the University of Wales dictionary, edited by Mr R. J. Thomas,l which began in 1950 and late in I975 had reached its twenty-seventh fasciculus, very close to the end of G and therefore more than half-way through the Welsh alphabet. Like the Royal Irish Academy's dictionary, both these Welsh ones just mentioned are of the Liddel and Scott variety, quoting numerous examples of each word, with references; and in the case of the second, with dates as well. Nor is this the whole tale of good lexicography in the last fifty years, for as in Irish, there were always the glossaries of the edited texts to consult. Here of course the prime source was the magnificent editions of very early poetry and prose by Sir Ifor Williams, that indefatigable and brilliant lexicographer. One may get some idea of the learning and the devotion of this great man from the fact that whereas his text of the Gododdin2 is contained in fifty-seven pages, his lexicographical annotations and explanations, all the fruit of his own researches, take three hundred and twenty-eight pages of the same book. I remember from the time when I was his pupil, how his enormous collection of slips was written on the backs of old sheets of paper cut up and kept in shoe-boxes, much as they say Rutherford's experiments at the Cavendish Laboratory were held together with string; the results in both cases must have astonished some of the younger generation of Celticists and physicists respectively, coming as they did from such modest apparatus. Sir Ifor's massive but scattered euvre in lexicography, up to 1939, was made particularly easy to consult by the index to it published in that year by Tom Parry,3 though his later work was not thus indexed.

For grammars of early Welsh, the only ones in existence before 1926 were Strachan's Introduction to Early Welsh (Manchester, I909), which still retains considerable usefulness; and Sir John Morris-Jones's A Welsh Grammar (Oxford, I913), a work of very great value, and only marred by a tendency to unconvincing theories on Indo-European origins which are better forgotten. Of grammars of Modern Welsh up to that date, one may mention Sir Edward Anwyl's concise little Welsh Grammarfor Schools, and Morris-Jones's Elementary Welsh Grammar,4 which is a revision and precis of the Modern Welsh parts of his older Grammar. There has been only one Early Welsh grammar during our period, and that an excellent, very up to date, and very useful one, Simon Evans's Grammar of Middle Welsh published in Dublin in 1964, which is a revision and translation of his earlier Welsh version.5 This has greatly facilitated the teaching of early Welsh in universities. There have of course been several grammars of Modern Welsh in the last fifty years, some in Welsh and some in English, but I do not really know of any in English that one could strongly recommend,6 though I should like to mention M. Jenkins's A Welsh Tutor (Cardiff, I959), and to draw attention to the little book The Basis and Essentials of Welsh, by J. P. Vinay and W. O. Thomas,7 which reduces the subject to eighty-seven pages plus illustrative texts.

1 Geirfa Prifysgol Cymru (Cardiff). 2 Canu Aneirin (Cardiff, 1938). 3 Mynegai i Weithiau Ifor Williams (Cardiff). 4 London (Sonnenschein), I897, and Oxford, I92I respectively. 5 Gramadeg Cymraeg Canol (Cardiff, 1951). 6 In Welsh, J. J. Evans's Gramadeg Cymraeg (Aberystwyth, I946) is useful. 7 London, 1947. The 'self-instructor' by 'Caradar' (A. S. D. Smith) called Welsh Made Easy

(in three parts: Wrexham, 1925, I926 and I929, and often reprinted) was aimed at teaching the colloquial language, morphologically and syntactically a good deal simpler than the literary one, and has been found very helpful by generations of learners.



xxxiv Fifty Years of Celtic Philology

Naturally, the period has produced much activity of the usual kind in the Celtic periodicals, concerning aspects of the history of the language. These are too numerous to mention, but the names of Ifor Williams, Henry Lewis, Tom Jones, J. Caerwyn Williams, P. Mac Cana, and T. Arwyn Watkins are distinguished, among many others. As in Ireland, however, there have been few contributions of book length (T. H. Parry-Williams's English Element in Welsh (London, I923) came just too early to be included in our half-century). But T. J. Morgan's r Treigladau a'u Cystrawen1 is a very learned and exhaustive account of the character and history of the peculiar, complicated Celtic 'initial mutations' as found in Welsh; and T. Arwyn Watkins's Ieithyddiaeth (Cardiff, 1961) is a perceptive series of discussions of aspects of Welsh from a structural point of view, with the historical background. Perhaps I may be forgiven for including a mention of my own Language and History in Early Britain (Edinburgh, 1953), which is an attempt to set out the historical development of the Brittonic languages from their beginnings in British in the first century to the commencement of their 'Middle' periods in the twelfth.

Welsh dialectology has not attracted so much attention and is therefore not so far advanced as Irish or Scottish Gaelic are. Before our period there were the great pioneer works of Fynes-Clinton in Caernarvonshire2 and Sommerfelt in Mont- gomeryshire,3 but since that there have been no comparable publications of similar scope on individual dialects, though before and since there have been by no means few articles and small books on various aspects of dialect. The standard of these in recent years has been both very high and very up to date, notably the articles by Arwyn Watkins, Ceinwen Thomas, Alan Thomas, R. O. Jones, and others in Wales, and of H. Pilch and Magne Oftedal overseas. But this takes no account of work in preparation. In fact there appear to be, or to have been, several 'linguistic surveys' of Welsh dialects carried on; one organized by Mr V. Phillips at the St Fagan's Museum;4 one by Mr T. Arwyn Watkins at University College, Aberyst- wyth;5 and one by Mr Alan Thomas at University College, Bangor. The last has got so far as publication of a volume; The Linguistic Geography of Wales (Cardiff, I973), a highly interesting account, with distribution maps, of over I,ooo dialect words, from close on 200 speakers, gathered on the Dieth-Orton principle, and of what they reveal about the geography of the dialects. The results are not given in phonetics, and postal questionnaires were used.6

Breton was long believed to be the most flourishing of the modern Celtic languages, and a figure of a million has traditionally been bandied about as that of the number of speakers. This has been possible because the French government publishes no census returns throwing light on the question, but it has come to be understood that this rosy picture now bears little resemblance to reality, and that

1 Cardiff, 1952, 494 pp. 2 The Welsh Vocabulary of the Bangor District (Oxford, 1913). 3 Studies in Cyfeiliog Welsh (Oslo, 1925). 4 See Lochlann, 2 (I962), 176. 5 See Orbis, 4 (955), 33 if. 6 The (Gaelic) Linguistic Survey of Scotland regards postal questionnaires as dangerously

unreliable, but doubtless conditions are different in Wales.



KENNETH JACKSON

the language is in retreat to a dangerous extent. Perhaps for this reason, general interest in it has increased distinctly since the war.

From the Catholicon of Jean Lagadeuc of 1464 down to the present there have been dictionaries of contemporary Breton, of which one of the most notable was Le Gonidec's Dictionnaire Breton-Franfais published at Saint-Brieuc in I850. But the two large dictionaries of Middle Breton by that great Breton scholar Emile Ernault' have never yet been outdated as such, nor is there yet any really exhaustive dictionary of Modern Breton, with references, completed. However, the lacuna for all periods of the language is now in process of being filled, in a highly satisfactory manner, by the publication in parts of Hemon's historical dictionary,2 which, with full examples and references, began in 1958 and has now reached its twenty-fourth part at more than half-way through the letter O (without any of the gaps in the alphabet which have disfigured some Celtic dictionaries published in parts). Moreover, Christian Guyonvarc'h has recently begun to bring out an etymological dictionary of the language at all periods, of which the first three parts have now been published,3 coming down as far as the word aer. Old Breton attracted comparatively little attention for a long time,4 until the publication by Leon Fleuriot of his monumental collection of the Old Breton glosses in I964,5 which contains a very large number of newly discovered glosses and a full philological commentary on each. This fine piece of scholarship is an indispensable tool for the student of the early Brittonic languages.

As to grammars, no one ever attempted an Old Breton grammar, doubtless because the material had been too scanty, until Fleuriot's Le vieux-Breton, published in Paris along with his Dictionnaire (1964). It is to be hoped he will bring out a new edition of this very enlightening pioneer work in due course, perhaps with some revisions. Except for Henry Lewis's brief sketch published, in Welsh, in his little Middle Breton reader,6 and 'Abeozen"s short rezadur ar Brezoneg krenn of 88 pages,7 which is in Breton, grammars exclusively of Middle Breton are non-existent. For Modern Breton there have of course been quite a number, of very varying merit, but they have mostly been either rather old-fashioned or else very brief handbooks. This does not apply to Kervella's large Yezhadur Bras ar Brezhoneg,8 but as this is in Breton it will hardly attract many people in this audience. One should also mention Roparz Hemon's useful little Grammaire bretonne (Brest, I941), and Pierre Trepos's grammar with the same title,9 which is more comprehensive but is not ideal. The only grammar in English, D. Hardie's Handbook of Modern Breton (Cardiff, I948),

1 Dictionnaire etymologique du Breton moyen, published as Part ii of his Le mystere de Sainte Barbe (Nantes, 1885), and his Glossaire moyen-Breton (second edition, corrected and enlarged (Paris, 1895-6)). Note also his Dictionnaire Breton-Franfais du dialecte de Vannes (Vannes, 1904; second edition 1938), and his Geiriadurig Brezonek-Gallek (Saint-Brieuc, I927).

2 Dictionnaire historique du Breton; Part i published by the periodical Al Liamm, 1958; all later parts by the periodical Preder, from 1959.

3 Dictionnaire etymologique du Breton ancien, moyen et moderne (Rennes, I973). 4 Joseph Loth's Vocabulaire vieux-Breton (Paris, 1884) contained all the Old Breton glosses then known, and his Chrestomathie bretonne (Paris, 1890) was a valuable collection of names from charters of the Old (and Middle) Breton period.

5 Dictionnaire des gloses en vieux-Breton (Paris). 6 Llawlyfr Llydaweg Canol, second edition (Cardiff, I935). 7 In the periodical Sterenn, 7 (i941). 8 F. Kervella (La Baule, 1947; 473 pp.). 9 Rennes, not dated.

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xxxvi Fifty Years of Celtic Philology

is of little value. But all that I have just said about Breton grammars applies only to the separate ones of the Old, Middle, and Modern periods respectively; a new one has just come to hand which is a grammar of all periods of the language, treated as a historical continuum. This is Roparz Hemon's Historical Morphology and Syntax of Breton (Dublin, 1975), a book which has put the subject of Breton grammar on an entirely new footing, and which has compressed in its modest 320 pages a vast amount of learning.

As to other kinds of study on the history of Breton, a good deal has been done in the form of articles, of course, in our period, particularly after the war, but books have been few. There is one extremely important work on a large aspect of grammar, though not itself an overall grammar, which must be mentioned, namely Le Roux's Le verbe breton, first published in I930, with a second edition in 1957 (Rennes and Paris). This, a work of almost five hundred pages, is an invaluable history of the morphology and syntax of the verb from Old Breton to the modern dialects, with continual reference to Welsh and Cornish. FranCois Falc'hun's Le systeme consonantique du breton' gives a detailed description of the author's own western Leonais dialect as a general specimen of the phonological system of the consonants in Modern Breton, and is the first clear, scientific modern account of what constitutes the fundamental structure of the phonology of the language. Pierre Trepos's Le pluriel breton (Brest, I957) is a most painstaking treatment of the multifarious plural suffixes of the noun in spoken Breton, on a regional basis with numerous distribution maps; somewhat marred rather too often, from the point of view of the philologist, by a failure to make it clear that such and such a suffix is not really a separate one, but merely a local expression of a single common mor- pheme. Finally, possibly I may be permitted to mention my own A Historical Phonology of Breton (Dublin, 1967) which attempts to trace the development of the Primitive Breton phonological system in the sixth century down to the chief present day dialects.

Dialect study has always been more or less active in Brittany for almost a century. Most of these works, however, have appeared as articles in journals, and there are few whole books devoted to these things. The capital publication here is of course Le Roux's Atlas linguistique de la basse Bretagne, the first fasciculus of which appeared in 1924, followed by a further five, of which the last came out in I963.2 This vast work of scholarship, consisting of over six hundred maps of words and phrases, recorded personally by himself in phonetics, from speakers all over Breton-speaking Brittany, was the work of one single man; the same Le Roux whose Le verbe breton and many other studies constituted him one of the greatest scholars of the Breton language. His Atlas has become the indispensable basis of all subsequent investiga- tions into the modern dialects. Of other outstanding publications, Falc'hun's Systeme consonantique has just been mentioned;3 another important and even more up-to-date study is Ternes's Grammaire structurale du Breton de l'tle de Groix (Heidel- berg, 1970). It is impossible to detail articles, but one should draw attention

1 Rennes, I95I. The first really pioneer work was of course Sommerfelt's Le breton parle a Saint- Pol-de-Leon (Paris, 1920), but this falls outside our period, and was not really conceived in terms of modern phonemic study. 2 Rennes and Paris, 1924, 1927, 1937, I943, 1953, 1963.

3 And Sommerfelt's Saint-Pol.



KENNETH JACKSON xxxvii

to the works of Per Denez among Bretons and Wolfgang Dressier among foreigners.

I have left myself little time to say anything much about the last of the Celtic languages, Cornish, in the past fifty years; but then, there is unfortunately nothing very much to say. Very little has been done on it by professional Celtic scholars. There has been some good, and some less good, work by enthusiasts - an honour- able example is Morton Nance - which has certainly advanced the study of the language; but adequate, modern historical dictionaries and grammars are still to seek,1 and there is little scope, in this small country, for dialect studies. Cornish, in fact, shares with Manx the distinction of being the Cinderella of the Celtic languages. This must be due largely to the fact that Cornwall, like Man, has never had a university of its own, and until very lately Exeter University took no interest in Cornish. It is to be hoped that the new Institute of Cornish Studies, founded in I97I jointly by the Cornwall County Council and Exeter University, under the direction of Professor Charles Thomas, will be able to foster research into all aspects of Cornish language, history, and culture. Indeed it has begun to do so already, in various directions, including work on Cornish place-names which should prove of very great value for Cornwall not only in linguistic but also in historical studies.

What I have tried to do this evening is to give an account of the progress of Celtic philological and linguistic research in all their chief fields, over the last half century, almost all of which falls within my own personal observation and life as a Celticist. I hope I have shown that even though work is lagging in certain restricted fields, it is pressing energetically ahead in all others - and that it is no longer true to say 'No one knows anything about Celtic, so anything goes'.

1 The only widely embracing dictionary of the early language (and it is more than slightly chaotic) is R. Williams's Lexicon Cornu-Britannicum (London, I865); and the only good grammar is Henry Jenner's Handbook of the Cornish Language (London, 1904).



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Fifty Years of Celtic Philology