Some of you may know that I’ve been teaching myself Welsh—or maybe it’s more accurate to say I’ve been trying to learn Welsh—over the past few years. I have no practical reason to do this, but it has been a fun and fascinating journey, even if I never speak a word yn y Gymraeg to another human being. Some of the things I’m enjoying about it are the same things I love about language in general, but there’s an extra element of discovery.
Studying Welsh is like finding a new branch of the family when you’re doing genealogy research. In all the “history of English” courses I’ve taken and pop-linguistics books I’ve read, the emphasis has always been on English’s evolution through contact with various “outsiders” like Romans and Vikings.
English is part of the West Germanic group of languages, and that’s still easy to see. Language reflects the history of cultural contact, and English bears scars and souvenirs from conquest, trade, and assimilation. The statistic I’ve seen is that about 80% of English is comprised of loanwords, drawing from at least 350 other languages.
Why didn’t I know this?
I took German and French as a student, and both of those made a certain amount of intuitive sense to this native English speaker. They are among the biggest influences on English. The words, the grammar, even the sounds often felt familiar—though of course not always. Latin roots show through quite often. In school, those influences were frequently pointed out.
What’s been astonishing to me is that I made it so far in my logophile life without knowing what we owe to our Celtic roots. And it’s not just me. For a variety of cultural and historical reasons, Welsh influences haven’t gotten their due, but Welsh shaped English in some fundamental ways.
There are some words we’ve kept from Welsh, but not as many as you’d expect. However, two of the most significant Celtic influences on English are structural. The “meaningless do” is one, and the other is what linguist John McWhorter calls the “obsessive progressive.” You can read explanations of those here. To my mind, that structural influence should be considered at least as important as the lexical influence from elsewhere. The concepts baked into that structure are the invisible part of the framework of meaning.
An action in progress
One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about this is that in my writing, I find I use present participles a lot. Grammar checkers seem to hate the obsessive progressive. He was sitting is flagged to be changed to he sat, because the default principle is that brevity is always better. Of course they are not the same thing at all. Sometimes the swap is fine, and for the most part the meaning is clear enough, but if a character arrives at a scene and finds someone else doing something, the continuous verb feels right to me. That distinction, which is such a part of my way of thinking, isn’t common in other languages, but it’s baked into English and the Celtic languages.
I ran across this professionally with a French colleague once because I was trying to understand how she would distinguish between habitual and current activity. It was a very Abbott & Costello conversation, because I had a hard time even explaining. “How do you convey something that’s happening right now?” turns out to be a confusing question across a language barrier. She was pretty sure I was out of my mind. I think I recall her saying maintenant and à présent with beautifully Gallic disdain for my ignorance.
For an English-speaker learning Welsh, an odd thing is that it seems to go the other direction. Everything is in progress. (Even, it seems, adjectives.) If there’s a way to distinguish between I walk and I am walking, I haven’t encountered it yet.
Yes, I do
Meanwhile, the meaningless do carries on. Do you walk to school? I do not. We also use it for emphasis (I do think it serves a purpose) which is another unusual trick of English. That construction is found only in the Celtic languages, and the fact that we’ve kept it is another of the bits of Welsh that has lived on.
For an example, I’ll use to walk. To me, I walk to school sounds habitual. It could describe current activity, but that would sound odd to me. (On the one hand, it sounds colloquial and on the other literary, like a first-person, present-tense narrative. “I walk to school and I find my friends, and then we go.”) To me, I am walking to school is much clearer as an indication that it is happening Right Now. I walked to school is specific to an historical, completed instance, whether that’s once or every day. So that leaves I was walking for a specific and incomplete or interrupted activity.
I wrote a book last year. I was writing one that was interrupted by real life events. I write whenever I have the chance. I am writing now.
Always Doing
For me, there’s an interesting subjective effect of these two seldom-noticed special features. With so much emphasis on “do” and the fact that actions are ongoing, Welsh feels like a language for doers. With that impression in mind, I like to think it’s meaningful that those features of Welsh are embedded so deeply in English. We don’t even notice it, but our language pushes us to action, and to a subtle reinforcement of intentionality. It really does.
P.S. Not long after I posted this, I came across Colin Gorrie’s article on the topic: The Celtic roots of English (if indeed there are any), which provides an interesting counter to this hypothesis. I didn’t realize this was a topic of debate among professional linguists, but I should have guessed!
