celtic languages

[jvasss]

hi, i was doing some reading about celtic languages and their relative resurgence in popularity in britain, and i was wondering how similar modern gaelic, welsh cornish and irish compare with what was spoken in the time period of the mod.
Also if anyone knows a good place to to do some further reading about this sort of thing that would be great.

[Elmetiacos]

There's been a great deal of change over the last 2000 years. The Celtic languages spoken in the EB2 period had declensions and conjugations, like Latin, which modern Celtic languages have largely lost, but the notorious mutations of consonants at the beginnings of words (Welsh for cat is cath, but my cat is fy nghath and her cat is ei chath) were not around back then. There have also been changes in the sounds technically known as lenition and spirantisation.

[Boogie Knight]

As Elmetiacos says, there's been a lot of change over the last 2,000 years. It's important to note that none of these Celtic languages ever actually died out; people have been speaking them since the year dot, and it's only very recently that more of these people have come to speak English as their first language while their native tongues become a second language. In Wales especially, the phenomenon of people growing up not learning to speak Welsh at all was a very modern thing, and is almost confined to just one generation. The children of that generation, whom most would call 'millenials' (which isn't a term very often used in Britain, incidentally) actually speak Welsh better than their parents, and seem to be about on the same level of fluency as their grandparents. So the real severe drop only lasted for about a generation. Basically it was in response to English overtaking these languages in prominence that the very modern resurgence has happened; simply put, more is being done to protect them.

So what people are speaking is not a carbon copy of the languages as they existed back then, but a language that has, since that time, undergone the same changes and evolution as the English language has done. So you can think of them as having made the same transformation from their Iron Age versions as English has from Old English, obviously give or take a few degrees of difference (English has a tendency to straight-up rip things from other languages if they're found to be useful, in which it's not entirely unique but does stand out from its Celtic neighbours - although watching Welsh news reports can be funny when, in the middle of a stream of Welsh words, the phrase 'nuclear power plant' appears, for which there is no Welsh alternative so the English is used). Of course, that doesn't mean they're unrecognisable - much as English contains plenty of Old English, these modern Celtic languages contain a great deal of their old variants. But that tends to be in individual root words rather than in full-on syntax and spelling.

[EL Hespíritu]

How much accuracy do you think can be achieved by ancient celtic languages researchers?
Meaning if they can actually re-create the old celtic languages, with their shape and sound or it's more about a lot of "educated guesses" based on projecting nowadays celtic into the past?
Mmmh... not sure if made myself clear.
You'll tell me.