For this reason, on the stark difference between the English of Beowulf and the English of The Canterbury Tales, even specialists agree that there is some discrepancy between what we see in the documents and what was the living reality of everyday Old English. Namely, Middle English is what had been gradually happening to spoken Old English for centuries before it showed up in the written record.
The Old English in writing, then, is the language as it was when the Germanic invaders brought it across the North Sea, preserved as a formal language, a standard code required on the page, kept largely unchanging by generation after generation of scribes and writers imitating the language of the last. The language used every day was quite different, not policed and preserved the way the written language was, free to change naturally as all spoken language does, such as by losing suffixes one by one.
The only thing that led writers to start actually putting this “real” Old English on the page was the 150-year blackout period. When people started writing English once more, the written Old English standard could not exert the pull that it once had. These were now documents of another time. One hundred and fifty years was a vaster amount of time to a Dark Ages Englishman than it is to us—he had no photos or newspapers as we do of the Civil War, and no audio recordings as we do of the 1890s onward—and the continuity between generations of scribes preserving the old language had been broken. It was as the French had taken over Dante’s Italy for 150 years, imposing French as the language of writing. Imagine if after the French left, writers were no longer competent in Latin and felt more comfortable writing in the language people actually spoke, Italian.
In this light, our timing problem with the Celtic features is solved.
Traditional specialists understand that Old English was losing its case markers gradually even though writers wrote as if this wasn’t happening. As such, they should be able to accept that “Celty” English would also have been spoken out on the ground even though no one would have deigned to transcribe it amid the formality of the written word. This is not a studied argument designed to get around something about Old English, but a call to bring scholarship on The History of English in line with the realities of how different writing was from casual speech in the ancient, semiliterate world.
We can assume that Celts were speaking Celtified English starting with the first generation who grew up bilingual, as far back as the fifth century, and throughout the Old English period. However, this was not the English from across the North Sea—Celtified English was likely thought of as “mixed” or at least funny-sounding English for a long time. As such, it would never have been committed to print—and in a world without audio recording technology, this means that this kind of English as spoken during the entire reign of Old English is hopelessly lost to us.
However, starting in the Middle English period, when it became acceptable to write English more like it was actually spoken, this would have included not only virtually case-free nouns, but also our Celticisms. Therefore, it is not that Celticisms only entered English almost a thousand years after Germanic speakers met Celts in Britain. It is merely that Celticisms did not reach the page until then, which is quite a different thing.
People writing the way they actually talked was quite rare anywhere in the world until rather recently, and even today it is by no means universal.
The truth, then, is that if meaningless do and the verb-noun present did pop up in the first Old English documents, or even in Old English documents at all beyond the occasional peep, it would be very, very strange. We would expect that the constructions would show up only after a historical catastrophe such as the Norman occupation, after which, in many ways, England learned to write again. If the Battle of Hastings had not put a 150-year kibosh on written English, then “real” English might not have been committed to print until as late as after the Reformation, in the 1500s.
In the obituary of someone who started some famous chain of stores, often the date that the first establishment opened seems much earlier than you would have expected. The first McDonald’s, for example, opened in 1955. That doesn’t “feel” right: McDonald’s was an entrenched part of American life only ten years after that or more. For example, there is an I Love Lucy episode from 1956 where Lucy and Ethel are making a long road trip and running low on food, as fast-food restaurants alongside interstate highways were not yet ubiquitous. For a long time after 1955, McDonald’s restaurants were in business, but because they had yet to proliferate widely, to most people they were barely known. The first Wendy’s was opened in 1969—my intuition would have put it in about 1978.
Likewise, the Celtic imprint on English would have thrived below the radar long before it appeared regularly in print, even when meaningless do and the verb-noun present had long been well established as ordinary speech. They just weren’t being publicized in commercials yet, so to speak. Since there was no recording technology, we can’t hear Old English speakers using them. But they did. We know that because English was the only Germanic language spoken by people whose native languages had the selfsame traits.
One Last Assumption: Where Are the Celtic Words?
There is one last thing that misleads linguists into thinking the Celts could not have had any significant impact on English: the fact that there are, essentially, no words in English that trace to Celtic.
One might expect there to be some, after all. The Vikings left a whole mess of their words, as did the Normans. One would presume that when large numbers of people start using a language imposed on them and start speaking it in their own way, that they will sprinkle their version of the language with a lot of their own words. The Vikings left behind their get and skirt and even their their; the Normans left behind seemingly every word we use to step beyond humility. So where are the long lists of Welsh and Cornish words?
Instead, there are only a dozen-odd words that have been traditionally traced to Celtic, and most of them are arcane, obsolete ones introduced by Christian missionaries from Ireland. Naturally, then, experts assume that the Celts must have just learned English the way they encountered it and added nothing to it. This assumption is reasonable. It is also mistaken.
The fact is that people scattering their own words into their new language is not a universal. It might happen—the Vikings did it; the Slavonic-speaking people who picked up Latin in what is now Romania did it to Romanian. But it might not.
Russian, for example, has some quirky features that show that at some point way back, it was learned by so many speakers of another language that it was never the same again in terms of grammar. The culprit was a language of the family called Uralic. Its most famous members are Finnish and Hungarian, but other ones have long been spoken across a vast expanse of what is now northern Russia. In Russian, it seems odd that in negative sentences an object has to be rendered as “of” itself: “I see a girl” is Ja vižu devočku, but “I do not see a girl” is Ja ne vižu devočki where the -i ending connotes “of-ness” (“I do not see of a girl”). Odd, that is, until you notice that Finnish and its relatives do that same thing. In Russian, unlike in a “card-carrying” Indo-European language, you do not “have” something: rather, something “is to” you: “I have a book” is U menja kniga (“to me is a book”). Again, something similar is par for the course in Finnish.
No one interested in the Russian-Uralic encounter denies that Russian picked up these and other things from speakers of Finnish-related languages. It’s as if your child comes back from summer camp with some downloaded music they never listened to before, from some friends they met who were into that kind of music.
Yet there are at very best about a couple of dozen Uralic words in Russian, most of them obscure. The Vikings left about a thousand in English, and the Normans left ten thousand. Yet the Uralic speakers left just a handful in Russian. We will never know just why; certainly it was due to specific cultural factors lost to us because the people had no writing.
It is the same in India: in
the southern part, there is a smallish family of languages, Dravidian, completely unrelated to the other ones, which are of the Indo-Aryan subfamily of Indo-European. When you hear that a person from India speaks Tamil, for instance, that is a Dravidian language, as unlike Indo-Aryan Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, and the others as Finnish is unlike English. In any case, along the barrier between the Dravidian area and the Indo-Aryan area, people have often been bilingual in Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages—but over the past thousand years, almost no Dravidian words have seeped into Indo-Aryan languages. Yet Indo-Aryan words are fairly dripping with features in their grammars which, again, no linguist denies are the result of Dravidian speakers learning Indo-Aryan ones.
It also bears mentioning that, really, etymology is not the most rigorously policed of fields. Much of the basic work was done long ago under different standards of evidence than linguists would admit today; there are a great many holes (“etymology unknown”), and legions of etymologies that, if linguists were moved to seriously examine them today, would fall apart. In that light, there is some work suggesting that there are at least a few more Celtic words in Modern English than once thought. Candidates include brag, brat, curse, and baby.
In any case, the paucity of Celtic words in English is no argument at all against meaningless do and present-tense -ing being due to Celtic influence. It’s interesting—the work that argued that Dravidian languages decisively shaped Indo-Aryan grammar is today cherished as sage, classic, and incontrovertible. Yet a very similar argument about Celtic and English is received as quirky, marginal, and eternally tentative.
Celtic Underground Even Today
To show how ordinary it would have been for a “Celtified” expression to almost never make it onto the page over centuries’ time, here is a living example. There is a queer little wrinkle in regional dialects in the north of England. Standard English verb conjugation in the present tense involves one thing: tacking on -s in the third person singular:
In the northern dialects in question, instead the rule is that you tack on the -s in all persons and numbers:
Except for one thing: in the third person plural, when you use the pronoun they instead of nouns like Betty and Shirley, or children, or McDonald’s outlets, you drop the -s:
So Betty and Shirley walks, but they walk.
Weird, isn’t it? There is nothing like it in any Germanic language but English. But there is something just like it in—need I even finish the sentence?
With the Welsh verb, in the third person plural, when nouns like Betty and Shirley are involved, the conjugational ending is the same as for the third person singular one. Again, verbs are first, and so Welsh has learned she for she learned, learned Betty and Shirley for Betty and Shirley learned:
dysgodd hi (“she learned”)
dysgodd Betty a Shirley (“Betty and Shirley learned”)
But if you use the pronoun they, the verb takes a third person plural ending:
Dysgon nhw (“they learned”)
Cornish has the same thing.
Thus in Welsh, Cornish, and these dialects of English, how you conjugate the verb in the third person plural varies according to whether the subject is a noun or a pronoun. In itself, that seems an arcane and, to anyone but a linguist, dull thing. But for our purposes, the crucial fact is that no Germanic language other than English knows anything like this.
And overall, in terms of English or any European language beyond Celt land, this quirk, which linguists call the Northern Subject Rule, is one of those “Who’d a’ thunk it?” things. Even History of English specialists see it as an oddity: it is not a run-of-the-mill development that happens in this and that language randomly like, say, conjugational endings.
In fact, it is something that happens occasionally in one specific type of language: the roughly one in ten worldwide that put the verb first. Like Tagalog in the Philippines. Or like . . . hmm. Thus we can form a good idea as to why these English dialects have taken on such a bizarre trait.
Yet the reader, especially if American, is unlikely ever to have known of the Northern Subject Rule, because it happens to have taken hold only in northern British dialects. Standard English developed from dialects far southward, and so the Northern Subject Rule has remained a strictly spoken feature, uttered countless times daily and evaporating into the air, recorded on the page only by occasional diligent dialecticians. It is unassailably Celtic, and yet unknown in the pages of The Economist, and always will be.
Crucially, there is no reason that meaningless do and the verb-noun present could not have thrived in obscurity in the exact same way until “real” English got to come out of the closet in the 1200s. The Northern Subject Rule is living the same closeted life today, showing us clearly that what is written can often be strikingly different from what is said.
What Is Proof?
As to whether English has a goodly dose of Celtic in it, at this point there is little that The History of English orthodoxy has left to deny it.
The scholars working in the traditional vein seem unable to arouse genuine interest in changes in the language that they cannot trace step-by-step in the documents starting as soon as they emerged. Hence the judgment on the issue in a benchmark study of Middle English: “There might be something to say for Keller’s and Miss Dal’s assertions that the ancient Britons were not exterminated but became amalgamated with the Germanic invaders and assumed their language while retaining some syntactical peculiarities of their ancient native tongue, but such statements remain necessarily hypothetical for lack of documentary evidence.”
Even though that was written in 1960 (hence the “Miss Dal”), mainstream sentiments have not changed since. Developments that cannot be followed from when they started are, to the experts, not worth extended engagement.
But following changes in English starting from when they hit the ground in casual speech is a luxury available only from documents dating from when English was written more or less as it was spoken. Old English was almost never written that way. The Celtic impact must be embraced in the frame of mind of, say, a paleontologist who reconstructs the behavior of dinosaurs from fragmentary but indicative clues.
There are pathways of footprints left by herds of sauropod dinosaurs, the Brontosaurus (okay, Apatosaurus) type, in which smaller footprints run in the middle while the bigger ones run along the sides. Paleontologists have inferred from this that younger sauropods were protected by being flanked by the big older ones, as among some animals today. We will never have film to prove this, and most likely will never resurrect sauropods with DNA and watch them do it. Yet it is accepted that the paleontologists’ reconstruction is a valid approach to the evidence available, and almost certainly correct.
The likenesses between Celtic languages and English are a similar case. Realities of the history of writing among human beings in ancient semiliterate societies make it impossible that we would find meaningless do in Old English documents like Beowulf, the Lindisfarne Gospels, Aelfric’s Colloquy, or Cædmon’s Hymn, even if meaningless do was being used casually every day all over England. Yet the presence of the same feature in Welsh and Cornish, and its absence used this way anywhere else in the known world, make treating it as something that just happened all by itself in English seem almost strange.
Overall, scholars of English’s history are less resistant to than uninterested in the impact of Celtic. The reason, one senses, is that charting how Celtic languages shaped English does not involve using the tool kit they are accustomed to. These scholars are trained to examine aspects of English grammar that really did emerge by themselves and were never thought of as “bad” or “peculiar,” and thus were committed to the page not long after they got going.
Going is, in fact, a good example, in the going to future marker, English’s alternate to good old will. This is the kind of thing English specialists love to sink their teeth into. In Old English, there was no such thing as using the word for go to put a verb in the future as in I’
m going to think about that. Go was about going somewhere and that was that. Even as late as Shakespeare, at the end of the 1500s, go still meant go. In Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Duke asks Valentine, “Sir Valentine, whither away so fast?” and he answers, “Please it your Grace, there is a messenger that stays to bear my letters to my friends, and I am going to deliver them (III, I, 54-57).” Valentine means that he is literally going in order to deliver the letters.
However, if you are going in order to do something, then automatically what you are going in order to do will actually occur in the future. As such, Valentine’s statement could be taken as meaning that his delivery of the letters will occur in the future—that is, that he will deliver the letters. Because of that ever-looming implication of futurity whenever one said going to, after a while going to started to actually mean the future rather than actual going.
It is about fifty years after Two Gentlemen that Charles I, amid the crisis that would soon cost him his head, rallied the gentry of Yorkshire saying, “You see that My Magazine is going to be taken from Me.” (Poor Charles, for the record, was not complaining that he was to be deprived of his Sports Illustrated; by magazine he meant “arms depot,” more pertinent to his situation.) This was a usage of going to that was not literal—the arms depot could go nowhere. Going to here had become a future marker like will, and wouldn’t you know, around the same time in 1646, a grammarian popped in specifying that now “ ‘going to’ is the signe of the Participle of the future.”
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