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Pronunciation Of "Celtic"

From: Lyndon Watson
Newsgroups: soc.culture.Celtic Heritage
Subject: Is it "sel tik"or "kel tik"?
Organization: University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

There ought to be a mini-FAQ just for this ever-recurring thread.

The pronunciation of the ancient Greek word does not determine how the modern English word is pronounced. The word was copied in English from either the Latin "celticus" or the French "celtique" which in its turn came from the Latin. The Latin word is believed to have been copied from the Greek.

Both the Greek and the Latin words were pronounced with the "k" sound, the French with the "s" sound. The regular English pronunciation of "ce-" words derived from French or Latin is with the "s" sound. This word, at least outside Scotland, was predominantly pronounced with the "s" sound as recently as the 1960s but there has been a movement towards the "k" sound except for the Scottish soccer team which is always pronounced with the "s". The Concise Oxford Dictionary has changed its first preference from the "s" sound to the "k" sound in recent editions.

If you want to know what the dominant pronunciation is where you are, the best you can do is listen to what people say. The "correct" pronunciation is the one that is used.

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From: Suze Hammond
Newsgroups: soc.culture.Celtic Heritage
Subject: Re: Is it "sel tik"or "kel tik"?
Organization: Dis-

I think it's important to realize that however you pronounce it, it's a fairly recent name, coined by scholars to track these people, and comes from a typical sort of stone axe shape they used, and also from a few "outsider" references by the Greeks to "Keltoi", meaning "people who hide". (I assume because Celts used ambushes and Greeks thought that was "unfair" according to Greek rules of engagement...)

(I'm not a linguist, so I can't tell you whether these words are related or merely coincidental.)

We do know that a lot of modernly "primitive" peoples use names that mean, essentially, "Us Folks" (as averse to "them folks":-). We do know that a lot of them have names familiar to _us_ that come (like Keltoi) from enemies' descriptions (ie, "Eskimo") and are objected to by the actual people referred to.

We don't know if "the Celts" had a "race name" that they recognized among their various tribes, themselves. We do know the names of some of the tribes, such as the Votadini, and can track some of the tribes' names across various modern languages and borders by figuring for the shifts in pronunciation over time. But we don't know of a name they, themselves, had for all of their people. Or if there was one.

(Whatever it was, if they had one, it probably wasn't "Celt"...)

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