Podcast episode 44: Ian Stewart on the Celts and historical-comparative linguistics

In this interview, we talk to Ian Stewart about modern ideas surrounding the Celts and how these relate to historical-comparative linguistics.

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References for Episode 44

Crump, Margaret, James Cowles Prichard of the Red Lodge: A Life of Science during the Age of Improvement (Nebraska, 2025).

Davies, Caryl, Adfeilion Babel: Agweddau ar Syniadaeth Ieithyddol y Ddeunawfed Ganrif (Caerdydd, 2000).

Droixhe, Daniel, La Linguistique et l’appel de l’histoire (1600-1800): rationalisme et révolutions positivistes (Geneva, 1978).

Lhuyd, Edward, Archaeologia Britannica: Vol. 1 Glossography (Oxford, 1707).

Pezron, Paul-Yves, Antiquité de la nation et de la langue des Celtes, autrement appellez Gaulois (Paris, 1703).

Pictet, Adolph, ‘Lettres à M. A.W. de Schlegel sur l’affinité des langues celtiques avec le sanscrit’, Journal asiatique 3.1 (1836), 263-90, 417-448; 3.2 (1836), 440-66.

Poppe, Erich, ‘Lag es in der Luft?: Johann Kaspar Zeuß und die Konstituierung der Keltologie’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft 2 (1992), 41-56.

Prichard, James Cowles, The Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations: Proved by a Comparison of their Dialects with the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Teutonic Languages (London, 1831)

Roberts, Brynley F., Edward Lhwyd: c.1660-1709, Naturalist, Antiquary, Philologist (Cardiff, 2022).

Shaw, Francis, ‘The Background to Grammatica Celtica’, Celtica 3 (1956), 1-16.

Sims-Williams, Patrick, Ancient Celtic Place-Names in Europe and Asia Minor (Oxford, 2006).

Sims-Williams, Patrick, ‘An Alternative to “Celtic from the East” and “Celtic from the West”’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 30 (2020), 511-29.

Solleveld, Floris, ‘Expanding the Comparative View: Humboldt’s Über die Kawi-Sprache and its language materials’, Historiographia Linguistica 47 (2020), 49-78.

Stewart, Ian, The Celts: A Modern History (Princeton, 2025).

Stewart, Ian, ‘After Sir William Jones: British Linguistic Scholarship and European Intellectual History’, Journal of Modern History 95 (2023), 808-846.

Stewart, Ian, ‘James Cowles Prichard and the Linguistic Foundations of Ethnology’, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 46 (2023), 76-91.

Van Hal, Toon, ‘Moedertalen en taalmoeders’. Het vroegmoderne taalvergelijkende onderzoek in de Lage Landen (Brussels, 2010).

Van Hal, Toon, ‘When Quotation Marks Matter: Rhellicanus and Boxhornius on the differences between the lingua Gallica and lingua Germanica’, Historiographia Linguistica 38 (2011), 241-52.

Van Hal, Toon, ‘From Alauda to Zythus. The emergence and uses of Old-Gaulish word lists in early modern publications’, Keltische Forschungen 6 (2014), 219-77.

Transcript by Luca Dinu

JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:16] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:21] Today we’re talking to Ian Stewart, who’s a historian of Britain and Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries and a researcher at the University of Edinburgh. [00:32] Ian’s latest book, The Celts: A Modern History, is coming out in March 2025 with Princeton University Press. [00:42] In this book, Ian offers a path-breaking, and at the same time magisterial, account of how the modern notion of the Celtic nations took shape. [00:51] Linguistic evidence and theorizing, as Ian shows in his book, played no small part in these developments. [00:58] Ian’s also looked at the early history of historical-comparative linguistics in Britain and suggested some key revisions to the standard narrative of how this field took root there. [01:10] The stories of the modern notion of the Celts and of early historical-comparative linguistics in Britain have many points of contact, and this is what Ian will be talking to us about today. [01:21] So, Ian, who are the Celts? [01:23] What was the significance of identifying the so-called Celtic nations in the modern period? [01:30]

IS: Hi, James. [01:32] As you know, I’m a big fan of the podcast, and so it’s really exciting to be here. [01:36] Who are the Celts? [01:38] Well, that depends on who you ask and when. [01:42] It’s a question that’s been asked in many different ways over the last two and a half thousand years, at least. [01:48] To begin with, the Celts are a people who started to be mentioned in classical sources in about 500 BCE. [01:56] Herodotus, for example, refers to them as a people living somewhere in Western Europe. [02:02] In the 4th century BCE, people like Plato and Aristotle refer to them as a warlike people. [02:07] This is especially after a Celtic group sacked Rome in about 387 BCE, and then 100 years later, another group invaded the Balkans. [02:18] And so, you see, the Celts remained the steady presence as a bellicose people somewhere in Europe, but they became sort of less feared as the Romans grew in power. [02:30] Caesar’s famous Gallic Wars, obviously written in the middle of the 1st century BCE, is about the conquest of Gaul, one of whose parts is called Celtica. [02:40] And so, as we move into the first few centuries of the Common Era, references to the Celts start to become fewer, and by 500 CE, you know, they stop altogether. [02:49] So, to sum up, basically, from the classical sources, the Celts are a barbarian people who were fearsome enemies, with their own complicated social, cultural, and religious structures, who feature strongly in the literary record between about 500 BCE and 500 CE. [03:08] The details about this group, or groups, are really hazy. [03:12] They’ve been argued about in all sorts of different ways. [03:15] We don’t know, you know, how much sort of common identification among groups there was, but what we can basically say is that there were people speaking Celtic languages in most of Western and Central Europe, including Britain and Ireland, modern France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Central Europe, Southern Germany, and as far east as Anatolia. [03:38] And so even though the Celts didn’t have their own literary cultures, and even though the historical record left by classical writers is pretty imperfect, the Celts left behind all sorts of evidence — including linguistic evidence, as you alluded to — that later scholars would make use of to construct this picture that we now have. [03:56] Now, why they become important in the modern period is, basically, they become rediscovered during the Renaissance [04:04] — when the predominant approach to history was genealogical, and the origins of nations, regions, cities, dynasties, all sorts of institutions, take on huge importance in establishing legitimacy — [04:19] and so scholars devoted considerable energy in tracing the migrations and conquests of ancient peoples [04:26] in order to give their own nation, or whoever they were writing for, a prestigious pedigree. [04:32] And basically, because of what I just mentioned about their extensive presence in the classical sources, and through their close association with the Gauls especially, the Celts retained this important place in the historical imagination. [04:45] So basically, from the early modern period, it’s off to the races, and they become claimed as prestigious ancestors in all of the countries I mentioned. [04:56] And so, my book is basically about this Celticism, which is basically why people in different places around Europe, from the early modern era to the present, have answered the question, who are the Celts and the way that they did, usually in favor of their own nation. [05:12] They’re usually trying to claim the Celts as their particular special ancestor, and the wranglings over the Celts basically change… [05:23] I sort of say that they’re determined by… basically, that these pictures of national images of ancestry change as a result of scholarly imperatives, but also political imperatives. [05:35] So it’s not just that nations are invented from scratch. [05:39] You know, in the modern period, as some of the literature, some of the classical literature — you know, classical in terms of history of modern nations and nationalism — basically, nation builders work with materials at hand. [05:50] But at the same time, scholars are often nation builders, and their political commitments shape their scholarship. [05:56]

JMc: And why is genealogy the dominant model for nation building in this period? [06:02] Why is the key thing to trace your nation back to a particular set of ancestors? [06:08]

IS: Basically, I think it’s a pretty simple equation that primacy was really important, so being the first people somewhere, having had, you know, the most extensive territory or the most glorious conquest. [06:25] And so basically, pedigree meant prestige, and we have to remember that before the rise of modern scholarship, you know, before modern historical linguistics, archaeology, folklore I suppose, and things like that, you’re basically working with the classical sources, [06:43] and so if a people is mentioned extensively in the classical sources, like the Celts are, there’s a lot more you can do with that. [06:50]

JMc: So you mentioned that the Celts left behind a certain amount of linguistic evidence. [06:55] How much of a role did this linguistic evidence play in the modern project of constructing Celtic identity, and was it the main kind of evidence, or was archaeological evidence just as important, for example? [07:09]

IS: Things change over time, but I would argue that language has been the most important and consistent thread in tracing the history of the Celts over the last five centuries. [07:20] Basically, linguistics is crucial in the Celtic case for two reasons. [07:26] The first is that it’s only through linguistic scholarship that the entirety of the modern Celtic family was recognized, [07:33] so in other words, that the speakers of the two linguistic branches — so Welsh, Breton, and Cornish speakers — are related to speakers of Irish, Scots Gaelic, and Manx Gaelic. [07:46] And that’s realized about 1700. [07:48] And the second is that it was only through comparative linguistics that the Celtic nations were recognized to be a part of the wider Indo-European family, as opposed to an indigenous population that was pushed further west by invading Romans or Goths, etc. [08:05] And so I can unpack those two things for you. [08:08] On the first point about providing a more holistic picture of the Celts, the interesting thing is that in the early modern period, neither the Welsh nor the Irish, their dominant linguistic tradition isn’t thought to be Celtic, and they actually weren’t thought to be related to each other, and I think this is particularly striking because these are probably now seen as two of the most Celtic nations. [08:32] But basically, native Irish tradition held that the language derived from the ruins of Babel, where the best parts of all languages were cobbled together, and then taken by the Scythians, who became the Scots, to Egypt, Spain, and then Ireland. [08:46] And it’s really complicated, but the point is that it definitely wasn’t Celtic. [08:50] Meanwhile, Welsh tradition held that it derived from Hebrew. [08:54] So before the 18th century, the Celts are sort of most associated with Gaul, and therefore France, and more surprisingly, with Germany. [09:02] So Toon Van Hal has shown how French and German humanists argued over what language Gaulish really was, and which of their modern vernaculars was closest to it, and so the languages of Britain and Ireland aren’t really into the picture. [09:16] It’s more of a Continental argument until about the end of the 17th century, and in fact, no classical sources refer explicitly to the inhabitants of Britain and Ireland as Celts. [09:28] But basically, the important thing that happened was that Caesar had actually described many of the cultural links between Gaul and Britain, and one of those that he’d mentioned was language. [09:37] So as soon as scholars in the early modern period started to get their hands on Welsh vocabularies, they were able to trace links between the few Gaulish words that they had and Welsh, [09:49] and the person who provided the most crucial work was the Dutch scholar Marc van Boxhorn, who recorded that he was so pleased to receive a Welsh dictionary that he kissed it. [09:59] And if the ancient Celts spoke Gaulish, the thinking went, and, according to Caesar, the ancient Britons spoke a similar, if not the same, language as the Gauls, then because Welsh was descended from the language of the ancient Britons, it was probably Celtic too. [10:16] And it was already recognized that Breton and Cornish were related to Welsh, so they all became seen as this cohesive group with likely ties to the ancient Gauls or Celts. [10:26] This is hammered home increasingly towards the end of the 17th century, especially by a Breton monk named Paul-Yves Pezron, who got many things wrong but really succeeded in driving that point home. [10:38] But at this point… [10:39] So in the 1690s, the Brittonic languages and the Gaelic languages were still seen as unrelated. [10:46] The key move here was made by a Welsh scholar named Edward Lhuyd. [10:50] He’s a real hero in Celtic studies. [10:53] He travelled around Britain and Ireland doing fieldwork for several years at the turn of the 18th century, and he actually recorded words from speakers of these languages and drew up vocabularies. [11:06] So in late 1699, he had composed a comparative vocabulary of Welsh, Irish and English words, and there he noted that there were a number of sound correspondences, and the most famous of these is the P and C or Q distinction in Celtic. [11:23] And this is a quote from Lhuyd. [11:24] He said, “I cannot find the Irish have a word purely their own that begins with a P and yet have almost all of ours which they constantly begin with a C.” [11:36] So some of the classic examples of this distinction are pen and ceann (so pen is Welsh for “head,” and ceann is obviously Irish) or pedwar and cathair, which is the number four. [11:50] But it can also be mac, which is the Irish word for “son,” and mab, which is the Welsh word. [11:56] This is now called the P and Q Celtic distinction, and this gave rise to the terrible joke that Celticists have to mind their P’s and Q’s. [12:05] But so it was Lhuyd’s achievement to show that these two branches of language were related and could be referred to as Celtic. [12:16] And so for the second part, connecting the Celts to the Indo-European family, it was comparative philology, obviously, that did this. [12:23] And so after the Celts become established as this cohesive group, there are still lots of opinions flying around in the 18th century. [12:32] We’re still in the era before comparative and historical linguistics became a cohesive discipline with recognized principles and dogmas, really, if you like, [12:42] and actually, some people might have recognized that the Celts were a distinctive family, but they started to doubt whether it was a family that belonged to the larger Indo-European family, because the Celtic languages have some strange features. [12:57] Its vocabulary is quite different. Its grammar also seems strange. [13:02] So, most obviously, it’s a VSO grammatical system, so verb, subject, object. [13:07] It also has, and this is probably the most famous thing, a system of initial mutations where the first sound of a word changes based on its grammatical function in relation to the word before it. [13:18] This can be for grammatical purposes or just euphony. [13:22] And so some people doubted that together these features could be reconciled with the other Indo-European languages, and people like A. W. Schlegel, so no mean philologist, was someone who doubted the position of Celtic. [13:36] And just to make a long story short, in the 1830s, three works were published by the English scholar James Cowles Prichard, by the Genevan Adolph Pictet, and by the German Franz Bopp, who published work explaining these differences and showing how they fit within the European… Indo-European framework. [13:55] Prichard compared Welsh and Sanskrit, Pictet, Gaelic and Sanskrit, and Bopp showed the principles and operation behind the initial mutations, and so these three works together definitively established that the Celtic languages were Indo-European, and therefore that the Celtic race, as it was starting to be called at this time, was part of that larger Indo-European family or race. [14:17]

JMc: So one of the key figures that you mentioned just there was the Englishman James Cowles Prichard. [14:23] So what exactly was his contribution to demonstrating that the Celtic languages are part of the larger Indo-European family, and how exactly did his proof work, and what methods did he use to construct it, [14:37] and did he have any priority over any of the other scholars working at the time on the problem of Celtic as an Indo-European language? [14:46]

IS: That’s a really, really interesting question, one that I’ve worked on for a long time. [14:51] I think he… [14:52] Well, he was someone that was overlooked both in Celtic studies and in the history of Celtic philology, and therefore in the history of Celticism. [15:00] He’s most recognized for having been Europe’s leading ethnologist, so kind of the first phase of anthropology. [15:08] He’s like a physical and cultural anthropologist, but really his largest concern was to ensure that the Celtic nations were — in this instance, his largest concern — was to show that they were part of the Indo-European family for two reasons. [15:23] The first one is biblical orthodoxy. [15:25] He was raised a Quaker, he converted to Anglicanism, but he still obviously adheres to the biblical account. [15:32] And the second reason is that he’s Welsh. [15:34] His mother was descended from a Welsh family, at least is what I think we know, but accounts kind of differ on this. [15:41] Some say that he could speak Welsh with his patients, where he was a physician in Bristol, but it’s clear that he could read Welsh, and he was connected to Welsh cultural circles. [15:50] But the thing that I think that’s most interesting about him in this case is that he was recognizing the sort of the full import both of the Indo-European idea, and of the possibilities for comparative philology, before the major developments in Germany, above all. [16:06] So in 1813, he said that “[i]t’s only an essential affinity in the structure and genius of languages that demonstrates a common origin. [16:15] This sort of relationship exists in the Sanskrit, the ancient Zend, as well as the modern Persic, Greek, Latin, Germanic dialects; and is found, though not to the same extent, in the Celtic and Slavonic.” [16:26] And so basically, what you have there is a pretty clear paraphrase of the philologer passage from William Jones. [16:34] So I think Prichard comes to that as… [16:36] That’s an early conclusion, both in the context of Celtic comparative philology, and I think in the history of comparative philology writ large, but basically, he puts off… [16:47] He says he’s going to publish a work about the Celtic and Slavonic dialects, as he calls them, but he puts this off until 1831. [16:55] He did publish an essay in 1815 where he showed some of these proofs that would appear in his later work, but these were mostly just comparative vocabulary, [17:06] but once you see everything that he puts together, it’s pretty clear that this needs to be explained, and that if it’s not borrowing, you know… [17:17] If it’s borrowing, then there’s a lot of explaining to do, because there is a ton of similarity, but what he eventually does is, he shows some of the grammatical similarities in 1831. [17:28] So he shows that verbs — that’s his main point of evidence — he shows that verbs are conjugated in the Celtic languages in essentially the same way as we’re familiar with in, you know, with the Indo-European languages. [17:40] He shows that verb endings come from abbreviated pronouns, and he’s really riffing off of the work of Franz Bopp here. [17:48] But Prichard was working with modern Welsh, and so he couldn’t really construct a historical grammar in the way that Grimm had for German, but his vocabulary proofs, like I said, are very convincing. [17:59] And Grimm himself announced as soon as he read this work that he had decided… that Prichard had shown this was Indo-European. [18:06] Now, at the same time, Adolph Pictet is working in Geneva on a proof using mainly Irish and Scots Gaelic to show similarities with Sanskrit, and he’s really targeting A. W. Schlegel, and he publishes this proof in a series of three open letters. [18:22] And it’s really funny, Pictet definitely owned Prichard’s work because his copy exists in the Cornell Library, but he never references him, and just over 20 years later, he writes to an Irish scholar who is reviewing a work by Johann Kaspar Zeuss, who wrote the first historical grammar of the Celtic languages. [18:43] This Irish reviewer had written that Zeuss proved the Celtic languages to be Indo-European, and Pictet actually wrote that, “No, no, no, I showed this many years ago, and it’s not fair that you’re saying it was Zeuss.” [18:58] So it’s ironic because Pictet was himself being unfair to Prichard. [19:02] And so, while I think Prichard is recognized to some extent in the 19th century, once we get to the 20th century he’s really written out of the story for reasons that we’re familiar with in the history of linguistics: because as soon as someone’s proof is superseded, they become basically dismissed. [19:21] And so I think part of what I’ve tried to do is recover Prichard both for Celtic studies and for the history of linguistics as part of this sort of new narrative… well, a revision to the standard narrative that you said earlier about what’s happening in the field, and he’s a good example of how approaching the history of the subject in this way can show new things, I think. [19:43]

JMc: So Prichard’s been forgotten in the standard narrative that we tell these days about the history of historical-comparative linguistics. [19:53] How does restoring him to his proper place in this narrative challenge this received story that we usually tell in the history of linguistics? [20:03]

IS: Well, basically, I focus on Prichard because he’s the best linguist out of all the British scholars I’ve worked on, but he actually comes at the end of this line of scholars in Britain who realized the significance of the Indo-European idea well before the sort of German developments. [20:26] And they were all Scots, actually, except for Prichard, though he studied at the University of Edinburgh, and I think that’s really important, because it’s the Edinburgh Review where a lot of this stuff is aired. [20:37] And so this is significant for a couple reasons, one of which is that the history of comparative philology or historical-comparative linguistics in Britain hasn’t really moved on from Hans Aarsleff’s book in 1967, The Study of Language in England, and there, you know, he includes some Scottish developments as part of the English story. [20:59] But so basically, what I’ve tried to do is add Scottish scholars to the picture, and also tried to show that, against Aarsleff’s narrative, that there were people aware of basically the importance of the Indo-European idea, and what comparative philology could do, well before the 1830s, but they were all doing different things with it. [21:21] So Alexander Hamilton, who’s famous for having taught Friedrich Schlegel, he constructed a comparative vocabulary in 1810 in the Edinburgh Review, which Prichard then picked up on, but he was more of a philologist than a comparative philologist, and ultimately, he wrote a really big work on Indian mythology. [21:40] John Leyden was another comparative philologist, but he was far too ambitious, and he was more interested in South Asian and Asian languages, and he died before he could complete anything substantial. [21:51] His friend Alexander Murray completed a big magnum opus, where he clearly recognized the Indo-European idea, and he included the philologer passage, but he was trying to trace the origin of language, which he reduced to nine sounds, which made his book kind of ridiculous at the time. [22:06] But the point is that he was interested in the origin of language and not necessarily the comparison of language for its own sake. [22:13] And all of these guys came before Prichard, who I said had reached this sort of Indo-European recognition by 1813, but his main interest was ethnology. [22:23] And so, what I think I’ve shown is not that British scholars invented comparative philology or anything like that, but basically that they were better than they’ve been getting credit for, and they were interested in many other things, and they died before they could produce anything substantial. [22:38] And British scholars, in this respect, I think, fit into this larger story where, since we’re moving beyond the standard narrative where Jones discovers the Indo-European connection and then it sort of is built from there, [22:52] there’s obviously this revised story that’s developed over the last few decades, like Daniel Droixhe and Toon van Haal are two people who have shown that there was a great deal of what could be called comparative philology going on in early modern Europe. [23:04] Okay, the grammatical aspect wasn’t developed, but the framework is definitely there. [23:09] And our friend Floris Solleveld has been rewriting the history of linguistics in the 19th century and showing how that similar ideas that we think of with the Indo-European family were being developed in relation to families like the Malayo-Polynesian group. [23:25] But Floris has really shown also just how difficult it was to get linguistic samples, and that scholars actually had to have the material with which to work. [23:36] And so, if you read Wilhelm von Humboldt or Peter Stephen Du Ponceau, two early 19th-century linguists, they weren’t talking about the philologer passage. [23:45] They were praising, you know, Adelung and Vater and the Mithridates, you know, for bringing much more linguistic evidence beyond Europe to light, and Prichard actually also reviewed the Mithridates, and that’s where he lays out his idea of the Indo-European idea fairly early. [24:03] And so with this… the revised standard narrative is part of realizing that people were using language and linguistic studies for things far beyond just, you know, the intrinsic language of… language itself. [24:16] I think it should help us to realize that language was… is, was and has always been, you know, a central point of consideration in definitely the Western intellectual tradition from the ancient period onwards. [24:31] So I think it’s, you know, it’s helpful for us to realize that with the study of language, we can learn a lot more about the human sciences and the humanities, and I think also that the humanities and human sciences, social sciences, have a lot to learn by considering the history of linguistics. [24:46]

JMc: Great. Well, thank you very much for answering those questions. [24:50]

IS: Yeah, thanks. Thanks. Thanks for having me, James. [24:52]