What other languages and people can you find Celtic traces in ?

Question

Apart from Manx, Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Breton, Welsh and Cornish ?

I was thinking about (West-) Flemish and it's people, amongst others.

Answer 1

I remember reading an article in "Colliers Encyclopedia" once that said that the Dutch were descended from old Celtic stock modified with some Frankish, Saxon and Frisian elements. It always sounded reasonable to me.

The Dutch and Flemish languages are essentially Germanic but there is almost certainly a Celtic substratum of some kind underlying them which distinguishes them from German. That is also partly why we don't call them "German."

The theory about Dutch having a Celtic substratum is not new. It was first proposed by a German linguist in the mid-nineteenth century. Unfortuneately I can't remember his name.

Belgium and Holland (The Netherlands) were both the homes of several powerful Celtic tribes in ancient times, the Nervi, the Batavi and the Morini. The name of the latter means "Sailors" or "Sea-goers" and is related to the Welsh and Breton words 'mor' meaning "sea."

It appears that the invading Germanic tribes in the 6th century A.D., Saxons, Franks and Frisians, did not completely expel the earlier Celts and Roman colonists living in the Low Lands but simply absorbed them.

There is no unanimity among linguists about the Celtic substratum in French. However, it almost certainly exists. For example, the French word brisser "to break" is related to Irish brisim meaning "to break" also. The Latin word for "to break" was rompere. The French word ruche (beehive) is an obvious cognate with Breton ruskenn, "beehive" and Irish rusc "bark."

There are only slight Celtic influences on Spanish and Italian. However, they appear to be stronger in Portuguese and Catalan.

A Celtic influence in Romanian cannot be ruled out either. Many of the Roman legionaires who fought in Trajan's Dacian war and who later settled in Dacia (Romania) came from regions in Europe where Celtic was spoken: Britain, Belgian Gaul, Rhaetia (Switzerland) and Galicia (Northern Spain). Roman records mention a Cohors Primus Battavorum which fought in Dacia. The soldiers that made up this unit came from present day Holland, Belgium and Britiain.

Answer 2

Before the Italic and Germanic expansions of the last millennium BCE most of western and central Europe was home to Celtic-speaking tribes. It's only logical that there is Celtic vocabulary in all the successor languages. There are Celtic loanwords in Proto-Germanic that were inherited by all the daughter languages. There are Celtic loanwords in Proto-Italic that were inherited by all the daughter languages. Subsequently, there are Celtic loanwords in most of the Romance languages, and most of the Germanic languages outside Scandinavia. To call these borrowed words a "substrate", however, is stretching the linguistic meaning of substrate. Substrate influence is typically much more extensive in nature (compare the non-English vocabulary of Tok Pisin for a good example) than the few Celtic loanwords one finds scattered in Romance and Germanic languages. Celtic loanwords form only a very tiny percentage of the vocabulary of any Romance or Germanic language, so the word "substrate" is quite inappropriately used. There are loanwords from Celtic, and certainly many placenames, but not enough to rise to the level of calling it a linguistic "substrate".

LATER EDIT: I just did a quick search of the on-line Frisian Etymological Dictionary of Boutkan (there isn't an on-line Etymological Dictionary of Dutch right now). I searched globally in the database for "Celtic" and got 48 records. Of the first 12 records only one of them mentions a possible borrowing from a Celtic language and the other 11 just mentioned a Celtic form as one of the cognates (along with Italic forms, Slavic forms, etc.). So the notion that Celtic forms any kind of significant substrate in the western Germanic languages is not borne out by the linguistic evidence (that's why the issue was dropped in the last century).

In actually looking at the Germanic languages, there is a more pervasive substrate that is non-Celtic and is the source of much of the sea and sea-related vocabulary of Germanic. There are dozens of words from this unidentified substrate while Celtic loanwords are not nearly so numerous.

Answer 3

They have been a tribe that lived in eire, Britain, Spain, and France. "Insurar Celtic subculture different into that of the Gaels (Irish, Scottish and Manx) and the Brythonic Celts (Welsh, Cornish, and Bretons) of the medieval and modern-day sessions. a trendy "Celtic id" exchange into built interior the context of the Romanticist Celtic Revival in great Britain, eire, and different ecu territories, together with Galicia.[7] at present Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and Breton stay spoken in areas of their historic territories, and the two Cornish and Manx are presently present technique revival.