What else happened to English? A brief for the Celtic hypothesis

Abstract

This article argues that despite traditional skepticism among most specialists on the history of English that Brythonic Celtic languages could have had any significant structural impact on English's evolution, the source of periphrastic do in Cornish's equivalent construction is virtually impossible to deny on the basis of a wide range of evidence. That Welsh and Cornish borrowed the construction from English is impossible given its presence in Breton, whose speakers left Britain in the fifth century. The paucity of Celtic loanwords in English is paralleled by equivalent paucity in undisputed contact cases such as Uralic's on Russian. Traditional language-internal accounts suffer from a degree of ad hocness. Finally, periphrastic do is much rarer cross-linguistically than typically acknowledged, which lends further support to a contact account.

Language contact and V3 in Germanic varieties new and old

“…Since the Brythonic Celtic language does not now survive in most of England, this implies a situation of diglossia with eventual language shift (Green 2011: 6). Linguists have been slow to accept these conclusions, instead preferring the traditional view that the Britons were displaced or died out, though in recent years some have argued vocally for Celtic influence (e.g., van der Auwera and Genee 2002;Tristram 2004;Laker 2008;Lutz 2009;McWhorter 2009;Trudgill 2011). The traditional linguistic argument against extensive Celtic contact is that English shows few lexical borrowings from Celtic, and this view was adopted by Victorian historians (e.g., Freeman 1871).…”

Language acquisition and language change

“…This shift was due to two prior changes and we see another domino effect. The first was the recategorization of modal verbs that we just discussed, and the second was the emergence, first in the Westcountry (see Ref 17 but now MacWhorter argues that the change may reflect the influence of Cornish 18 ), of 'periphrastic' do forms as an alternative option for expressing past tense: John did leave, John did not leave, instead of John left and John left not. As a result, the Inflection position was occupied by modal auxiliaries and by do and was not available as a target for verb movement in those instances.…”

9. The historical geographical distribution of periphrastic do in southern dialects

“…The possibility of reinforcing substratal influence is made more probable by the lack of the past tense form of periphrastic do in these two nonadjoining varieties of English. For the possibility of Celtic influence on the origin of do in English, see further van der Auwera & Genee (2002) and McWhorter (2009) very patchy (cf. Thomas 1985: 214), and it is therefore not very easy to determine the geographical distribution of periphrastic do in Welsh English in any detail from it.…”