An Introduction to the Celtic Languages

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Longman, 1995 - Celtic languages - 347 pages
Speakers of the modern Celtic languages, Irish, Scottish, Gaelic, Manx, Welsh and Breton, are today only to be found on the western seaboards of the British Isles and France. However, they are inheritors of languages which some two thousand years ago were spoken throughout Europe and even in Asia Minor. The first half of the book considers the historical background of the language group as a whole. There follows a discussion of the two main sub-groups of Celtic, Goidelic (comprising Irish, Scottish, Gaelic and Manx) and Brittonic (Welsh, Cornish and Breton) together with a detailed survey of one representative from each group, Irish and Welsh. The second half considers a range of linguistic features which are often regarded as characteristic of Celtic: spelling systems, mutations, verbal nouns and word order.

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Contents

The Goidelic languages
25
Irish
69
The Brittonic languages
111
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