Les langages en pays celtique

The Languages in Celtic-Speaking Countries - Of the Celting languages which survived into the Middle Ages (and beyond) in the British Isles, only two were used extensively in written form : Irish and British (ancestor of Welsh). Both were written in the Latin alphabet, British exclusively, Irish predominantly (with an early phase of ogam). It can be maintained that at the beginnings of writing these two languages occurred roughly at the same time, namely around A.D. 600 (ogam was written earlier). It is at first sight curious to find that Irish was written much more extensively than British even though the Irish and the British shared a comparable cultural background. In addition, British had existed for several centuries in Roman Britain amidst a Latin written culture. In this paper it is suggested as a hypothesis that writing British may, for this very reason, have been retarded, whereas in Ireland, where alphabetic writing arrived late, the native language had long been cultivated by men of learning, and therefore no inhibition was felt to place the native language beside Latin, on the same level.Richter Michael, Banniard Michel, Bührer-Thierry Geneviève. Les langages en pays celtique . In: Médiévales, n°25, 1993. La voix et l'écriture, sous la direction de Michel Banniard . pp. 53-60