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two grammatical genders (modern Insular Celtic only; Old Irish and the Continental languages had three genders, although Gaulish may have merged the neuter and masculine in its later forms) [67] [citation needed] a vigesimal number system (counting by twenties) Cornish hwetek ha dew ugens "fifty-six" (literally "sixteen and two twenty")
Gaulish is an extinct Celtic language spoken in parts of Continental Europe before and during the period of the Roman Empire.In the narrow sense, Gaulish was the language of the Celts of Gaul (now France, Luxembourg, Belgium, most of Switzerland, Northern Italy, as well as the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the west bank of the Rhine).
Contrast Old Irish seir 'heel, ankle' *srogna 'nostril' became Welsh ffroen, Cornish frig and Breton froen. Contrast Irish srón *swīs 'you' (plural) became Welsh chwi, Cornish hwi and Breton c'hwi. Contrast Old Irish síi; Lenition: Voiceless plosives become voiced plosives in intervocalic position. d [d], g [ɡ], b [b] Contrast Irish th, ch, ph
Several old Celtic languages (such as Old Irish, Old Welsh, and Lepontic) used letters for voiceless stop phonemes to write both voiceless stop phonemes and their voiced counterparts, especially non-word-initially. (But in the case of Lepontic, this is because the alphabet was derived from Etruscan, which has no voice contrasts in plosives.)
Gaelic, by itself, is sometimes used to refer to Scottish Gaelic, especially in Scotland, and therefore is ambiguous.Irish and Manx are sometimes referred to as Irish Gaelic and Manx Gaelic (as they are Goidelic or Gaelic languages), but the use of the word Gaelic is unnecessary because the terms Irish and Manx, when used to denote languages, always refer to those languages.
Breton is spoken in Lower Brittany (Breton: Breizh-Izel), roughly to the west of a line linking Plouha (west of Saint-Brieuc) and La Roche-Bernard (east of Vannes).It comes from a Brittonic language community that once extended from Great Britain to Armorica (present-day Brittany) and had even established a toehold in Galicia (in present-day Spain).
Map of the Gaelic-speaking world. The red area shows the maximum extent of Old Irish; the orange area shows places with Ogham inscriptions; and the green area are modern Gaelic-speaking areas. Although Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic are closely related as Goidelic (a.k.a. Gaelic) Celtic languages, they are different in
Pictish is an extinct Brittonic Celtic language spoken by the Picts, the people of eastern and northern Scotland from late antiquity to the Early Middle Ages.Virtually no direct attestations of Pictish remain, short of a limited number of geographical and personal names found on monuments and early medieval records in the area controlled by the kingdoms of the Picts.