by Mick Harper » 6:28 pm
I wonder where these dudes suppose 'trade languages' come from. It is certainly true that you can simplify an existing language into a 'pigin' as they did in the West Indies and Papua New Guinea but that is for the benefit of (sorry!) low caste people. It is also true you can elevate an existing language into a genuine trading one, as they did with Swahili and Mandarin. But you gotta have a language to start with. So what's with this 'Celtic'?
I suppose one lot of Celts (the Welsh, Cornish and Bretons) might need to trade with -- and communicate with -- the other lot of Celts (Irish and Scots Gaels) and might have developed something with elements of both but since there is no evidence of it anyway, why bother to conjecture it into existence? Everyone else just trades and uses an interpreter.
All these problems arise because even relatively sensible people like Cunliffe persist in assuming that most of Western Europe was speaking Celtic languages because the 18th/19th century Welsh/Scottish/Irish nationalists purloined the word 'Celtic' for themselves because the Classical authors had bigged them up. (Like the Swedes nicked the Goths for similar reasons.) That turned 'Celtic' into a language group and suddenly everyone, even dear old us, was speaking one or other member of the Celtic language family. Brythonic is the agreed term now. And why not? At least it isn't Gaulish or Belgae.
As I pointed out in THOBR this language family has, according to academic historians, gone from being the biggest in Europe to the smallest. So, yes, I suppose it is kinda special.