Celts. The Celtic nations of antiquity had no comprehensive name. Those of the Continent were called Galli by the Romans, and less usually Celtæ. The Greek equivalents for these terms were Galatai or Galatae, and Keltoi or Celti. But neither Greeks nor Romans regarded the British Isles as belonging to the Celtic world. They were situated outside it, and lay over against it in the sea; still it was known to men like Julius Cæsar that certain portions of Britain were inhabited by Celts in the sense of Galli or Belge.
Celtic ethnology involves many difficult questions, and we shall speak of them in this article mostly according to the more palpable distinctions of speech; and in order to proceed as much as possible from the known to the unknown, we begin by classifying their idioms. These, whether dead or still spoken, belong to the Aryan or Indo-European family of languages, and those of them spoken in modern times divide themselves into two groups—viz. Goidelic and Brythonic. (1) The Goidelic group embraces the dialects termed Gaelic, that is to say, Irish Gaelic, or Irish as it is now more frequently and briefly called; Manx Gaelic, or the Gaelic dialect not yet extinct in the Isle of Man; and Scotch Gaelic, or the Gaelic spoken in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. In ordinary Scotch and English parlance this is what is understood by the word Gaelic when it is used without any qualification. In order to resist one of the delusions to which charlatans are always leading the unwary, it is right to say that the words Gael and Gaelic have nothing to do with Galli. Gael is the simplified English spelling of a word which is now written in Scotch and Irish Gaelic Gaidheal, with an evanescent dh; but the most ancient form known of it was Goidel, whence the adjective Goidelic, which has been resorted to by Celtic scholars as applicable equally to all three Gaelic subdivisions of the Celtic group here in question. The Celtic languages of this group are sometimes also called Eirse, which is a term derived from the Scotch form of the adjective Irish; this was Ersch or Yrisch, the longer and shorter forms of which appear, used without any distinction, by Kennedy in his answer to the poet Dunbar, when the latter had called Kennedy an 'Ersch brybour baird' and an 'Ersch katherane,' in reference to his alleged extraction from the Irish Scots of Galloway and Carrick. Kennedy's reply contains the following line (see Murray's Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland, 1873, pp. 43-44):
Thou luvis nane Erische, elf, I undirstand, and he goes on to add
Thy fore fader maid Ersche and Erschmen thin.
(2) The Brythonic group embraces the following languages: Welsh, Breton, and Cornish, which has been extinct now for about a century. Two of these belong to Great Britain, and one, the Breton or Armoric, to Little Britain on the other side of the English Channel. These three might be collectively termed British or Britannic, but that both these adjectives have connotations which would be misleading, as they tend to confusion; so here, also, a neutral form, Brythonic, is used, which is derived from Brython, one of the Welsh words for the Welsh and the so-called Ancient Britons, whence their language is sometimes called Brythoneg in Welsh. This last was in Cornish Brethonec, and in Breton Brézonek, meaning respectively the Celtic of Cornwall and of Brittany. Brython or Britto was the national name of all peoples of this branch, just as Goidel or Gael may be treated as the national name of the other branch.
All this applies only to the neo-Celtic nations, or those among whom Celtic languages are or have been in use in modern times, and a question of much greater difficulty presents itself when one attempts to classify likewise the continental Celts of ancient history. The reason for this is chiefly the fact that the linguistic data become more precarious as one goes back. Thus, for example, the language of the ruling people of ancient Gaul has been left us only in a very few inscriptions, so that our knowledge of it from that source has to be complemented by the study of Gaulish proper names, of which a considerable number is extant in Latin inscriptions and in the writings of Roman and Greek authors. Now, when we apply the test of some of the most palpable differences that are known to exist between the Goidelic and the Brythonic idioms to the remains of the Gaulish language, we find at once that it is to be ranked with the Brythonic dialects, and not with the Goidelic ones, and our Brythonic group becomes what may be more exactly described as a Gallo-Brythonic one. This further suggests the question whether there was no continental Celtic idiom which partook of the characteristics of the Goidelic branch. The probability is that there was; for one finds Sulpicius Severus, an ecclesiastical writer of the 4th century, distinguishing between Celtic and Gallic or Gaulish, as if both were spoken in his time. (See Dialogue i. 26, in Migne's Patr. Lat. vol. xx. col. 201: 'Tu vero, inquit Postumianus, vel Celtice, aut, si navis, Gallice loquere, dummodo jam Martinum loquaris.') And the use of the two names Celtæ and Galli would seem to point to the same inference—viz. the existence in Gaul of two Celtic peoples, the one, probably, superimposed on the other, as on a vanquished population, or driving it towards the south and west. Thus, if the Celtic language which Sulpicius Severus distinguished from Gaulish should be ranked with the Goidelic dialects, we should have alongside of a Gallo-Brythonic group another which might be called Celto-Brythonic were it not inconvenient to use the words Celt and Celtic in two senses. For while the modern usage applies them indifferently to the whole family, Sulpicius indicates a narrower sense; and so, in fact, had Cæsar done centuries before, when he wrote that one of the three peoples of Gaul was called Celtæ in their own tongue. He states that these Celtæ proper, so to say, were separated by the Garonne from the Aquitani, and by the Seine and the Marne from the Belgæ. In other words, their country extended from the Garonne to the Seine and Marne, and other Roman writers give it the name of Celtica; and Dionysius of Halicarnassus had heard of a river Celtus, from which Celtica was supposed to derive its name. From this narrower Celtica, in the sense which Roman writers gave it, one might form the adjective Celtican, to apply to its people, in order to avoid the confusion which must arise from calling them Celts, whilst using that word also of the whole family.
In order to show the philological reasons for this classification, it would be necessary to go into a variety of details; but let one of these suffice for the present. The Gallo-Brythonic dialects used p where the others would have qu. Take, for example, the early inscriptional Irish for the genitive of the word for 'son'; it was maqvi, corresponding to a nominative which appears as macc or mac in the oldest manuscript Irish; and mac is still the word for 'boy' or 'son' in all the Goidelic dialects. Now the early Brythonic form of this genitive would have been mapi, while in the oldest manuscript Welsh we have map, and in later Welsh mâb, 'boy' or 'son.' From this word was formed another, mabon, a 'boy' or 'youth;' and this in its old form appears in Latin inscriptions as maponus in Roman inscriptions found in Britain in honour of the Celtic god Apollo Maponus, so called in reference to his youthfulness. Now from Gaul we have such names as Eporedorix, Parisi, Petrocorii, and many others, with the consonant p; but every now and then we have also names with qu, such as Sequana and Aquitani, together with several instances from Spain, where a people of the same Celtic branch as those of Celtica had also probably established themselves.
So far, then, as one can get philological data to reason upon, it would seem that the west of Europe had in early times been subjected to two Celtic invasions; the one is represented by the Celts whose position, geographically speaking, is the farthest from the home of the Aryans. These would be the Celticans of Gaul and Spain, as compared with the Gallic tribes to the east of them towards the Rhine and the Alps; the same relative position is also taken up by the Goidelic Celts of the British Islands, occupying, as we find them doing, the Isle of Man, Ireland, and the Scotch Highlands and Islands. The other, here represented by the Brythons, must have come later and driven out the Goidels, or subdued them, in the rest of this island. This may be supposed, also, to have been the case on the Continent, so that we have to regard the later comers, the Galli, as invaders and conquerors forming another Celtic population. In the eastern portions of Gaul they may have formed the bulk of the population, but in the rest of that country they probably only constituted a ruling class of comparatively small importance in point of numbers. Such a state of things would adequately explain the great dearth of linguistic remains belonging to the older and subjugated people. Roman authors and other strangers would naturally speak most of the ruling classes, and information about the others must reach strangers through the medium of the Gallic rulers and their language, at any rate, so far as concerns the time before Latin became the official tongue of all Gaul. A somewhat similar conclusion has been arrived at by studying the burials and megalithic monuments of France and the neighbouring lands to the east of it. In Central and Western France menhirs, dolmens, and cromlechs prevail, while the eastern side of France shows the prevalence of mounds and barrows, which are here and there found penetrating into the other domain, giving us a sort of rude sketch, as it were, of an invasion advancing irregularly towards the west. See M. Bertrand's Archéologie Celtique et Gauloise; also K. von Becker's Versuch einer Lösung der Celtenfrage (1883), pp. 114-119.
For reasons already indicated, the question of Celtic ethnology is a very difficult one, but it is considerably more difficult than would appear from what has here been mentioned; for besides two Celtic sets of invaders, there are also to be taken into account the non-Aryan races that previously occupied the countries to which the Celts came. These pre-Celtic populations probably survived in considerable numbers, and one of the effects of a second Celtic invasion may be supposed to have been to force the earlier Celtic settlers to amalgamate with the ancient inhabitants, and to make common cause with them against the later Aryan hordes. So it may be expected that the language of the Goidelic Celts will prove to have absorbed a larger non-Aryan element than that of the Brythons. Similarly, one might take for granted that the physical type of the people speaking the Goidelic dialects should prove less purely Aryan; but this feature is obscured by the fact of the counter-invasions which Wales and other western portions of Britain have undergone in historical times at the hands of Ireland. Lastly, it is right to add that in so far as the people, whose language is or has been Celtic, are Aryans, one might expect the type to be that of tall men, with more or less light hair and blue eyes; on the other hand, the smaller men, with dark hair and black eyes, which it was the fashion till lately to regard as the genuine and typical Celts, are probably not to be regarded as Celts at all, but as Ivernians or representatives of the pre-Celtic and non-Aryan race, whose hunting-ground the soil of the British Islands may be said to have been long before the first Aryan set foot in them.
The Celtic languages and literatures will be found under BRITTANY, CORNWALL, GAELIC, IRELAND, WALES. See also ARYAN, ETHNOLOGY, PHILOLOGY, DRUIDISM.
Besides the works already mentioned, the following should be consulted: Müllenhoff's Deutsche Altertumskunde (Berlin, 1887); Windisch's article 'Keltische Sprachen' in the Allgemeine Encyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, together with the reviews on the same in the Revue Celtique, vol. vi. pp. 395-400; Hübner's Inscriptiones Britanniae Christianae (Berlin, 1876); Brambach's Corpus Inscript. Rhenanarum; and the volumes of the Corpus Inscript. Latinarum, published by the Berlin Academy, especially those for Britain (vii.), Spain (ii.), Gallia Narbonensis (xii.), Gallia Cisalpina (v.), and Illyricum (iii.).