While I don't wish to mute your enthusiasm, I honestly would not recommend shadowing any language before you have studied its grammar and phonology a bit. Simple passive listening would be better if you are new to any language. When I started to learn Scottish Gaelic, which was my first Celtic language, I simply listened to audio passively for about two months without even attempting to make the sounds, because I had never heard the language before. I've been studying Gaelic for about a decade now and i still think that was time well spent. I think we often get too impatient with approaching a new language and try to learn too much at once. Sometimes just spending the time to get to know a language before trying to really learn it is better in the long run.
I don't know if there's anyone else here who also has spent some time with all 6 Celtic languages, but I think I may be the only one, at least among the recently active users here. Unfortunately, my experience some of the languages is much more in-depth (Gaelic, Breton) than with others (Cornish), but I do know enough to grasp the general differences and similarities. I had previously considered making a specific thread here devoted to exploring this topic but I decided that interest in and appreciation for the Celtic languages was too low here to warrant the amount of work and time that would have required.
But since you asked specifically i can share a few bits.
David1917 wrote:Would we compare languages within the same branch to, say, Spanish and Italian, but across branches as French and Romanian? Any tips, advice, etc. are greatly appreciated!
I wouldn't compare the Celtic languages to the Romance family like that. These language groups evolved quite differently. The Celtic languages were all long rooted in their own Proto-Celtic origins and for many centuries were largely uninfluenced by other languages in any significant way nor did they "graft" their language onto existing vernacular languages the way Vulgar Latin did. This helped their modern forms to retain some very distinct syntactical and grammatical similarities with each other--VSO word order, no indefinite article, conjugated prepositions, initial mutations,etc.--despite divergence in vocabulary, phonology and orthography over time and geography.
I'll give you an example of a basic sentence in each language to help point out a couple of the similarities and differences (although one sentence will hardly be exhaustive on this topic).
I like that song. GA: Is maith liom an t-amhrán sin
GD: 'S toil leam an òran sin
GV: S'mie lhiam yn arrane shen
KW: Da yw genev an gan na
BR: Ar ganaouenn-mañ a blij din
CY: Dw i'n hoffi'r gân yna 1) The words for "song"--
amhrán/òran/arrane and
kan/kanaouenn/cân--are obviously related within the two branches, despite clear orthographic changes. Note that in the Brittonic languages, they all have the same initial mutation following the definite article. Overall, you will frequently see common words within the two branches, and sometimes common words across all 6 of them. Often times there are commonalities between when to use an initial mutation, but not always the same mutation or for the same grammatical purpose.
2) All six languages use the same construction for expressing "this/that [noun]" that consists of definite article+noun+that/that
an t-amhrán sin
an òran sin
yn arrane shen
an gan na
ar ganaouenn-mañ
ar gân yna3) Each language uses idiomatic constructions to express certain common actions, such as to like something. The Gaelic languages all use the copula (or assertive verb)
is/'s/s' with an adjective (
maith/toil/mie) and a conjugated pronoun (
liom/leam/lhiam--"with me") to express liking:
Is maith liom
'S toil leam
S'mie lhiamHere we see the Gaelic languages have largely remain close in this respect, but the Brittonic languages are a slightly different story:
Da yw genev -- this more or less means "Good is with me" with
genev being the Cornish equivalent of the Gaelic
liom/leam/lhiama blij din* --Breton has been slightly influenced by French here, as
plij (which becomes
blij following the particle
a) comes from the French
plaît, but the syntax is still Celtic.
Din is another conjugated pronoun that means "to me" rather than "with me," so this means more literally "is pleasing to me"
* Note that this Breton construction to express liking follows the object in this particular sentence. Breton word order is probably the most fluid of 6 languages, but it still adheres to a VSO logic, as seen in the
plij din/dit/denzhañ construction. The Celtic languages are rooted in a syntactical logic that likes use word order to focus on the most important data in a sentence--this is the heart of the Celtic VSO word order. Breton is more emphatic about this with constructions like this sentence that places the object at the front of a phrase even though the same thought can also be expressed in its regular VSO order just as well. (This can happen in the other Celtic languages too, just not as often as in Breton.)
Dw i'n hoffi (yr ydwyf fi yn* hoffi) -- For whatever reason, Welsh diverges a bit more on this simple expression than the other Celtic languages.
Hoffi means sort of like "to find endearing" and the phrase
Dw i'n hoffi that is often translated as simply "I like" means more like "I find endearing" if you dig into the etymology.** What's more notable is this common construction doesn't use a conjugated preposition, even though Welsh has conjugated prepositions just like the other Celtic languages--it's just for whatever reason, Welsh doesn't use it here and this phrase simply follows the standard VSO Celtic word order.
* this is the full, or literary, form which gets reduced to
dw i'n in spoken Welsh (particularly in South Wales).
** In Welsh, one can also say
Dw i'n licio to say "I like" but note that
licio (also spelled
leicio) is actually from the English word "like" and carries more or less the same connotation as the English word. Using either
hoffi or
licio changes nothing regarding syntax or word order.
This is of course just one, short sentence. As a starting point, I would say that the Gaelic languages are more similar to each other while the Brittonic languages diverge more, but that of course is an oversimplification. Things get more complicated the further into the languages you go. But you can see there are some obvious similarities and differences, and like with the example of Welsh here, even when you think they'll be similar, you can't always count on all of them following the pattern.