ABSTRACT
What we have in this book called the ‘Celtic hypothesis’ forms a most interesting chapter in the history of diachronic studies of English and also in a wider cross-linguistic context. Torpedoed at its birth by some of the most eminent scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Otto Jespersen and Max Förster, it has simply refused to die, surfacing over the following century here and there in the writings of scholars who have probably even put their academic careers at risk in challenging the prevailing doctrine by re-raising the possibility of substratum transfer from Celtic. To what extent the ‘anti-Celtic’ stand in historical-linguistic scholarship has been a matter of an ideological, more or less hidden, agenda is difcult to tell, but certainly the wordings used by Jespersen, for example, closely echo the general tenets of nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonist historians. That these views have then come to be repeated in even some of the most recent textbooks on the history of English can be explained by the general trend in scholarship in any discipline: once a theory or view becomes widely accepted, it is very hard for subsequent research to break free from the existing ‘paradigm’ in the Kuhnian sense of the word. As has become evident from the foregoing chapters, this is no longer the situation in the research into the contacts between English and the Celtic languages: new voices have joined those of the early pioneers of the Celtic hypothesis, and it now seems that the balance of opinion is in the process of shifting towards a more favourable stand on the issue of Celtic inuences.
