Du breton armoricain aux « celticismes »

Abstract

The transition from Gaulish to Breton has been much discussed. Recent publications have shown that Brythonic and Gaulish hardly differed, ‘similes sunt’ according to Tacite, and Caesar before him. It is possible to draw a parallel between Breton, Cornish and Welsh in relation to insular Celtic on the one hand and the Romance languages in relation to Latin on the other. The Gaulish words we know of (around a thousand words plus compounds) can all be found if not in Neo-Celtic, Breton and its sister languages then in Gaelic. One well-known example is the Breton brug (continental Celtic) and the Welsh grug, both meaning ‘heather’, which evolved from the same *uroica (in Irish fraoch). Breton almost universally features the Celtic in S (se), an dra-se (that), and in H (he-, henn), an dra-he (this & that), the Brythonic or insular variant of the same root.

Keywords

• Breton (language)
• Brythonic
• Celtic
• Gaulish (language)
• linguistics