2710: What Tannins Have to Do with Oak May 22, 2024

We don’t get many scientific words from Celtic, and in a particular way ‘tannin’ exists as a modern word because of Latin, but the origin goes much further. The English word ‘tan’, as in the color, comes from a Celtic root meaning ‘oak’, and since acorns and oak bark are used in the production of leather, the verb ‘to tan’ also comes from this. Likewise, the bitter quality of acorns comes from their tannic acid, named for the same reason. So the word ‘tannin’ is used in science now because it is derived from Latin according to the guidelines of scientific nomenclature, but Latin ‘tannum’ got it from a Celtic source.

2418: Hallstatt Aug 4, 2021

Hallstatt, Austria was the location of Johann Georg Ramsauer's discovery of multiple Bronze Age and Iron Age, Celtic settlements which helped to understand the vast pre-Roman civilizations. Coincidentally, both now and historically, the area was known for its important salt-mines, and even the modern German name for the town 'Hallstatt' is derived from the Gaulish word for 'salt', related to the Welsh 'halen', Cornish 'haloin' and Breton 'halen', all P Celtic (Bretonic) languages. In Q Celtic (Goidelic) languages an [s] is retained instead of an [h] such as Irish and Scots Gaelic 'salann'.

2149: Celtic Mutation, & Vowel Harmony Nov 2, 2020

Learning a language and its irregularities can be a real frustration, but some languages make this harder than others. Hungarian, Finnish, and Turkish feature so-called vowel-harmony, where the vowels near each other change regularly depending on the how affixes are attached (and there are a lot). For instance in Hungarian, -nek/-nak are the same dative suffix, but change depending on the vowel in the root word.

város város-nak 'city'

öröm öröm-nek 'joy'

On the opposite conceptual end, Celtic languages have mutations, meaning—as in the chart below—that based off of the surrounding words there is consonant mutation. For example

coeden goeden nghoeden choeden

meaning 'tree' in Welsh are all different forms of the same word, depending on what comes before it, and this process is how words are formed normally.

Celtic Vowel Mutations (imagine: public domain)