The Scots Gaelic Myth

[OC Richard]

Please correct me if I am wrong but is the Gaelic spoken in Scotland not different from that in Ireland? Many place names, even districts, seem to have more in common with Welsh than Gaelic.

The Irish language, and Scots Gaelic, and Manx, are closely related Q Celtic or Goidelic languages.

As to the differences between Irish and Scots Gaelic, they're the things that happen in any two sister languages:

-shared core vocabulary
-sound shifts
-semantic shifts
-grammar differences

The longer two sister languages are separated the greater the divergence in sounds, word meanings, and grammar, yet the core vocabulary remains the same. I have been told by native speakers that Irish and Scots Gaelic are somewhat mutually intelligible, not unlike Italian and Spanish.

Welsh, Breton, Cornish, Cumbric, and Pictish are from a different Celtic branch, P Celtic or Brythonic.


Called Q-Celtic and P-Celtic because of word-pairs like ceann/pen (head) and mac/map (son) etc which is due to a sound shift quite some time ago, like the thing between German and English where Germanic G became English Y.