{{Gaelic.
{The Gaidelic,{Irish.
{{Manx.
CELTIC { {Welsh.
{ {Cornish (extinct).
{The Brythonic, {Breton.
{ {Gaulish (extinct).

The differences between Gaelic, Irish, and Manx are merely dialectic. The Cornish became extinct last century. The Gaulish is also extinct; and what remains of it is found only in the names of places.

To Zeuss is due the credit of having assigned its proper place to Celtic in the family of languages. The problem before his great publication in 1853 was the relationship in which the Gaels, the Welsh, and the old Gaulish people stood to one another and to the other nations of the world. Numerous publications on this question appeared during the last two centuries. But from a scientific point of view they are of very little value. Errors and unscientific theories abound in every work. At that time the scholars of France and Germany never mastered the Celtic languages; indeed, there were few reliable grammars by which they could be acquired. The native scholars were deficient in linguistic training, in common sense, and frequently in common honesty. No Gaelic scholar was conscientious enough to learn Welsh, no Welsh scholar to learn Gaelic; but each and all were ready enough to compare their languages with Phœnician, Persian, Etruscan, Egyptian, Hebrew, Arabic, &c., of which, again, they knew in reality next to nothing; though a few of them might know a little Hebrew. There was one remarkable exception, however, to this—the great Welsh scholar Edward Llhuyd, of whom it may be said that he lived a century and a half before his time; but, incapable of following him, the native school of philologists sank into chaotic and puerile etymological dreams. The Celtic problem became more hopeless than ever, and Gaelic philology became distasteful to sober minds.

At the same time many Celts insisted “on the lofty claim they used to advance of speaking the primeval language.” It is only recently that they have learned “to submit to the logic of facts and listen to the voice of science.” A Gaelic poet, in an elaborate poem on his native language, thus declares his conviction on the much-debated subject, what language was spoken in Paradise—

“By Adam it was spoken

In Eden, I believe,

And sweetly flowed the Gaelic

From the lovely lips of Eve.”

Some fifty years ago the science of comparative philology began to make itself felt, and Celtic scholars tried to apply its principles to Celtic. Pritchard, Bopp, Diefenbach, Pictet, and others worked in the right direction, but they failed fully to solve the Celtic problem. J. Caspar Zeuss, a Bavarian Highlander, at last succeeded, by combining with a mind of unusual power a devotion to the subject which amounted well-nigh to a sacrifice of his life. This devotion might not even have been sufficient if he had not possessed what no one before him possessed—the really oldest manuscripts of both the Irish and Welsh dialects. The labours of Zeuss have shown:—That the Gaelic and Welsh languages were originally one; that dialectic differences in Cæsar’s time were so small that an old Gael would be at once understood in Wales; and that the Gaels and Cambrians were identical with the Celts of the Continent—with those of Spain, Gaul, Lombardy, and the Alpine countries; that this Celtic tongue is one of the branches of the Aryan stock of languages.

The consequence of these established facts is to put an end to all attempts at connecting the Celtic with the Semitic class of tongues.