The History of the Celtic Language

the inhabitants of France before the Roman conquest in the first century BC. The tablet turned out to be one of the most important sources of words from this extinct language. B Two researchers, geneticist Dr Peter Forster and linguist Dr Alfred Toth, have now used the calendar and other Celtic inscriptions to reconstruct the history of Celtic and its position in the Indo-European family of languages. They say that Celtic became a language in its own right and entered the British Isles much earlier than supposed. Then in the first century BC, the Romans defeated the Celts, both in France and in Britain, so decisively that their language, Latin, and its successor languages displaced Celtic over much of its former territory. In the British Isles, Celtic speakers survived in two main groups: the Goidelic branch of Celtic, which includes Irish and Scots Gaelic, and the Brythonic branch, formed mainly of Welsh and Breton, a Celtic tongue carried to Brittany in France by emigrants from Cornwall. C Because languages change so fast, historical linguists have little faith in language trees that go back more than a few thousand years. Dr Forster has developed a new dating method for relating a group of languages, basing it on…