From 'Ambassador' to 'Whisky': A Note on Celtic Elements in Contemporary Polish Vocabulary

The Playful Lexicon in the Romance Languages: Prosodic Templates, Onomatopoeia, Reduplication, Clipping, Blending

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.455 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

David Pharies

Keyword(s):

Lexical Item ◽

Repeated Sequences ◽

The Other ◽

Romance Languages ◽

Social Convention ◽

Separate Category ◽

Semantic Effect ◽

Full Form ◽

Per Se ◽

Lexical Items

A lexical item is described as “playful” or “ludic” when it shows evidence of manipulation of the relation that inheres between its form (signifier) and its meaning (signified). The playful lexicon of any given language, therefore, is the sum total of its lexical items that show signs of such manipulation. Linguists have long recognized that the only necessary link between a word’s form and its meaning is the arbitrary social convention that binds them. However, nothing prevents speakers from creating additional, unnecessary and therefore essentially “playful” links, associating forms with meanings in a symbolic, hence non-arbitrary way. This semantic effect is most evident in the case of onomatopoeia, through which the phonetic form of words that designate sounds is designed to be conventionally imitative of the sound. A second group of playful words combines repeated sequences of sounds with meanings that are themselves suggestive of repetition or related concepts such as collectivity, continuity, or actions in sequence, as well as repeated, back-and-forth, or uncontrolled movements, or even, more abstractly, intensity and hesitation. The playfulness of truncated forms such as clips and blends is based on a still more abstract connection between forms and meanings. In the case of clipping, the truncation of the full form of a word triggers a corresponding connotative truncation or diminution of the meaning, that is, a suggestion that the referent is small—either endearingly, humorously, or contemptuously so. In blending, truncation is often accompanied by overlapping, which symbolically highlights the interrelatedness or juxtaposition of the constituents’ individual meanings. Prosodic templates do not constitute a separate category per se; instead, they may play a part in the formation or alteration of words in any of the other categories discussed here.

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Bilingual Communities: England/National Profiles and Verbal Repertoires

Annual Review of Applied Linguistics ◽

10.1017/s0267190500003147 ◽

1985 ◽

Vol 6 ◽

pp. 205-219 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Euan Reid

Keyword(s):

Scottish Gaelic ◽

Limited Space ◽

Celtic Languages ◽

Bilingual Communities ◽

Educational Debate

The scope of this brief review, and of the bibliographies which follow, has been restricted to England itself, and includes only passing reference to the Celtic languages in general (Durkacz 1983, Price 1984, Trudgill 1984), or to Scottish Gaelic and Welsh in particular (McKinnon 1977, Murray and Morrison 1984, Price and Dodson 1978). The decision to limit the scope in this way was made essentially because of the very extensive existing literature on the sociolinguistic situation of the Celtic languages in Britain, and on related educational questions. It also seemed more useful at the present time to use the limited space available to focus on the much less explored field of bilingualism and educational debate about bilingualism in England itself.

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The rise of it-clefting in English: areal-typological and contact-linguistic considerations

English Language and Linguistics ◽

10.1017/s1360674309003025 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 13 (2) ◽

pp. 267-293 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

MARKKU FILPPULA

Keyword(s):

Historical Linguistic ◽

Middle English ◽

Point Of View ◽

Romance Languages ◽

Eastern European ◽

English Grammar ◽

European Languages ◽

Syntactic Features ◽

Modern Period ◽

Celtic Languages

Recent areal and typological research has brought to light several syntactic features which English shares with the Celtic languages as well as some of its neighbouring western European languages, but not with (all of) its Germanic sister languages, especially German. This study focuses on one of them, viz. the so-called it-cleft construction. What makes the it-cleft construction particularly interesting from an areal and typological point of view is the fact that, although it does not belong to the defining features of so-called Standard Average European (SAE), it has a strong presence in French, which is in the ‘nucleus’ of languages forming SAE alongside Dutch, German, and (northern dialects of) Italian. In German, however, clefting has remained a marginal option, not to mention most of the eastern European languages which hardly make use of clefting at all. This division in itself prompts the question of some kind of a historical-linguistic connection between the Celtic languages (both Insular and Continental), English, and French (or, more widely, Romance languages). Before tackling that question, one has to establish whether it-clefting is part of Old (and Middle) English grammar, and if so, to what extent it is used in these periods. In the first part of this article (sections 2 and 3), I trace the emergence of it-clefts on the basis of data from The York–Toronto–Helsinki Corpus of Old English Prose and The Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, second edition. Having established the gradually increasing use of it-clefts from OE to ME, I move on to discuss the areal distribution of clefting among European languages and its typological implications (section 4). This paves the way for a discussion of the possible role played by language contacts, and especially those with the Celtic languages, in the emergence of it-clefting in English (section 5). It is argued that contacts with the Celtic languages provide the most plausible explanation for the development of this feature of English. This conclusion is supported by the chronological precedence of the cleft construction in the Celtic languages, its prominence in modern-period ‘Celtic Englishes’, and close parallels between English and the Celtic languages with respect to several other syntactic features.

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The Celtic Languages in the Сравнительные Словари (1787–1789): An Introduction

Roczniki Humanistyczne ◽

10.18290/rh216911-9s ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 69 (11 Zeszyt specjalny) ◽

pp. 171-187

Author(s):

Mark Ó Fionnáin

Keyword(s):

Russian Empire ◽

Scottish Gaelic ◽

Saint Petersburg ◽

Celtic Languages ◽

The Russian Empire

In the 1780s, a multilingual dictionary was published in Saint Petersburg in the Russian Empire, under the editorship of the German Peter Simon Pallas (1741–1811). As its title— Сравнительные Словари Всѣхъ Языковъ и Нарѣчiй [Comparative Vocabularies of all Languages and Dialects]—explains, it aimed to be a comparative dictionary of almost 300 headwords and numbers in Russian and their equivalents in 200 languages and dialects from all over Europe and Asia. Amongst these are five of the six Celtic languages—Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish and Breton, as well as an unknown “Celtic”—and this paper gives a brief overview of the background to the dictionary, and then focuses on the first 10 lexemes in each of the Celtic languages as they are presented in the dictionary itself, pointing out various inaccuracies, but also the historical value therein.

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Some Breton Words in the Dictionary of the Russian Empress

Studia Celto-Slavica ◽

10.54586/dbzc7654 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 1 ◽

pp. 143-148

Author(s):

Anna Muradova ◽

Keyword(s):

Scottish Gaelic ◽

Southern Siberia ◽

Xviii Century ◽

European Languages ◽

The World ◽

Celtic Languages ◽

French Words ◽

Academy Of Sciences ◽

Different Parts ◽

Made In

The first mention of the Breton language in the Russian linguistical literature was made in the XVIII century when the Empress Catherine II decided to make a wide research in order to compose a dictionary where all the languages in the world would be represented. This work was carried out by a German scientist Peter Simon Pallas (1741–1811). He was the head of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the years 1768–1774, and he also took part in several expeditions in which he studied many regions of Russia, including Southern Siberia. The languages of the peoples living in different parts of Russia were largely represented in his study, and the European languages were also collected, assembled into different groups. The first edition of the dictionary, Vocabularia Linguarum Totius Orbis (“Сравнительные словари всех языков и наречий, собранные десницею Всевысочайшей Особы”) was published in 1787–1789. This edition contained 185 entries from 142 Asiatic and 51 European languages. The second edition was published in 1790–1791, and it contained the information on 272 languages and dialects, and 273 entries were represented in this edition. The Celtic languages were well represented in both editions as follows: Celtic (it is not clear what were the specifically Celtic languages), Breton, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Cornish. The information for the Breton language was made available by several intermediaries: some Russian words were translated into Latin, after that – into French and transmitted to the ambassador of France, Le Compte de Segur. He sent the French words list to Baron de Breteuil, who employed the Intendant of Brittany Antoine-François Bertrand de Moleville. De Mollevile was not a Breton speaker and his task was to find someone who could do this job. Even in the XVIII century it seemed difficult to find anyone who was capable of providing a translation. This was a paradox: the Breton language was largely spoken by that time in the Western part of the peninsula (Lower Brittany). One of the difficulties was the absence of a “standard” Breton, and of a “standard” Breton spelling, the four dialects being too different from one another (therefore each author who was writing in Breton used his own variant of spelling). De Mollevile seemed to have had some difficulties to find out which of the dialects was the “correct” one. So he sent the list to Le Goazre in Qimper (where the Cornouaille dialect was spoken) and to Le Bricquir Dumezir in Lannoin (the Tregor dialect). Meanwhile, in order to find out the “correct” forms, the translators seemed to use Gregor Rostrenen’s dictionary (1732). The two versions (from Lannion or from Qimper) were sent to Pallas, and the differences between them made it possible to indicate two Breton forms for one Russian word. It is impossible to use Vocabularia Linguarum Totius Orbis for modern Celtic studies as all the foreign words used in the dictionary were transcribed into Cyrillic. Therefore we cannot make any conclusions with regard to the authentic spelling of these words. Meanwhile, this document is precious as it provides the first mention of Breton in Russia.

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Mapping Celticity, Mapping Celticization

Communities and Connections ◽

10.1093/oso/9780199230341.003.0024 ◽

2007 ◽

Author(s):

John T. Koch

Keyword(s):

Bronze Age ◽

First Language ◽

Language Family ◽

Human Beings ◽

Scottish Gaelic ◽

The Past ◽

Celtic Languages ◽

Celtic Culture ◽

Per Se

‘Celticity’ means the quality of being Celtic. ‘Celticization’ means the process or event(s) of becoming Celtic. Thus, Celticity involves a static or synchronic perspective and Celticization a dynamic, diachronic one. ‘Celtic’ is used here in a linguistic sense, because the debates of the past few decades over the term ‘Celtic’ seem to have left intact the concept of the Celtic languages as a proven and closely definable scientific fact, whereas Celtic culture (including Celtic art), Celtic identity, and so on, remain controversial and are prone to ambiguity (see e.g., James 1999; Sims-Williams 1998). Therefore, ‘Celtic’ here means belonging to the Indo-European sub-family of languages represented by the living Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and Breton. These four, together with the recently extinct and now revived Manx and Cornish, and the ancient Celtiberian, Gaulish, Galatian, and Lepontic together form a genetic language family. That means, rather than having anything to do with biological genetics per se, that these languages show systematic similarities—more closely with one another than with any other attested language or group of languages—implying that they descend from a single proto-language, usually called ‘Common Celtic’ or ‘Proto-Celtic’, which had been the speech of a people, who had once formed a coherent community, occupying a particular geographic territory, at a particular time. The principle is the same as Latin and the Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish), but in the case of classical Latin and its daughter languages the ancient proto-language is fully attested and its epicentre can be pinpointed in time and space. It is highly unlikely that Celtic or a language directly ancestral to it was the first language spoken by human beings in any part of Europe. For example, Celtic was not the language of Palaeolithic France nor of Mesolithic Ireland. Proto-Celtic is the descendant of another reconstructable language, Indo- European, which itself dates, according to various experts, somewhere within the Neolithic or Early Bronze Age (Mallory 1989). How does a language appear in a country? We shall consider three general paradigms.

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Special issue on Re-evaluating the Celtic hypothesis

English Language and Linguistics ◽

10.1017/s1360674309002962 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 13 (2) ◽

pp. 155-161 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

MARKKU FILPPULA ◽

JUHANI KLEMOLA

Keyword(s):

English Language ◽

British Isles ◽

Place Names ◽

Special Issue ◽

Scottish Gaelic ◽

Celtic Languages ◽

History Of ◽

Similar Vein ◽

Linguistic Influences

Present-day historians of English are widely agreed that, throughout its recorded history, the English language has absorbed linguistic influences from other languages, most notably Latin, Scandinavian, and French. What may give rise to differing views is the nature and extent of these influences, not the existence of them. Against the backdrop of this unanimity, it seems remarkable that there is one group of languages for which no such consensus exists, despite a close coexistence between English and these languages in the British Isles spanning more than one and a half millennia. This group is, of course, the Insular Celtic languages, comprising the Brittonic subgroup of Welsh and Cornish and the Goidelic one comprising Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic. The standard wisdom, repeated in textbooks on the history of English such as Baugh and Cable (1993), Pyles & Algeo (1993), and Strang (1970), holds that contact influences from Celtic have always been minimal and are mainly limited to Celtic-origin place names and river names and a mere handful of other words. Thus, Baugh & Cable (1993: 85) state that ‘outside of place-names the influence of Celtic upon the English language is almost negligible’; in a similar vein, Strang (1970) writes that ‘the extensive influence of Celtic can only be traced in place-names’ (1970: 391).

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A perspective on the vocabulary common to Classical and Vulgar Latin

Diacronia ◽

10.17684/i7a98en ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

George Bogdan Țâra

Keyword(s):

Spoken Language ◽

Romance Languages ◽

Common Language ◽

High Level Language ◽

Lexical Items ◽

Latin Culture ◽

High Level ◽

Semantic Evolution

This paper stems from two different perspectives—that of the Latinists, and that of the Romanists—upon the concept of ‘Vulgar Latin’, perspectives that have given rise to a friendly debate between Pierre Flobert and Eugeniu Coșeriu. We try to highlight a number of lexical elements that are common to Classical and Vulgar Latin. Our approach leans upon the idea (found also with Maria Iliescu) that the diachronic vision upon language must take into consideration the sum of the histories of the words that belong to that language. Observing several lexical items excerpted from texts belonging to various epochs of the Latin culture (Archaic, Classical, Late), to various authors (Cicero, Vergilius, etc.), and to authors whose works contain elements of spoken language (Plautus, Petronius, etc.), from works of a high level language (epics, discourse, dissertation), and from texts with strong marks of orality (comedies, letters, sermons), we were able to see the semantic evolution of several Latin words preserved in the Romance languages. Our conclusion endorses the notion of a “common language”, which explains the parallel existence of words like casa, pauimentum, caballus, formosus, uetulus, auricula, gula, bucca, manducare, incendere, draco both in the Classical and Vulgar Latin, without notable differences.

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Arthur in the Celtic Languages, The Arthurian Legend in Celtic Literatures and Traditions, ed. Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan and Erich Poppe. Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages IX. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2019, xxiv, 408 pp.

Mediaevistik ◽

10.3726/med.2019.01.15 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 32 (1) ◽

pp. 256-258

Author(s):

Andrew Breeze

Keyword(s):

Middle Ages ◽

Scottish Gaelic ◽

Arthurian Literature ◽

Arthurian Legend ◽

What Is Said ◽

Celtic Languages ◽

The Usa ◽

The Middle Ages

In twenty-four chapters, Arthurian tradition in Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Irish, or Scottish Gaelic is surveyed by writers from Wales, Germany, the USA, and beyond. What they offer is familiar enough, with no surprises. The surprises are in what is ignored, not what is said. Before we reach that, however, a summary of contents.

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Aliquis from Latin to Romance

Indefinites between Latin and Romance ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198812661.003.0003 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 88-136

Author(s):

Chiara Gianollo

Keyword(s):

Syntactic Structure ◽

Decisive Factor ◽

Romance Languages ◽

Process Of Change ◽

Semantic Component ◽

History Of ◽

Lexical Items ◽

Historical Developments

This chapter investigates some crucial steps in the evolution of the continuations of Latin aliquis ‘some (or other)’ in the Standard Romance languages. These historical developments represent parallel instantiations of the Quantifier Cycle, a process of change involving indefinites which is well-attested crosslinguistically. The guiding hypothesis is that emphatic strengthening is a decisive factor in the Quantifier Cycle, much like what is observed with the development of negation in Jespersen’s Cycle. What the Quantifier Cycle and Jespersen’s Cycle have in common is the fact that focus interacts with the implicatures triggered by the lexical items in certain grammatical contexts (most notably and clearly, negation) and this results in systematic meaning effects that become conventionalized (grammaticalized) in the course of time. In this case study from the history of Romance, the emphatic semantic component leads to a peculiar grammaticalization pattern also involving the syntactic structure of the DP hosting the indefinite.

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