Gaelic and English: Their common origins

By George McLennan

This book sets out to illustrate the relationship between Gaelic and English words within the wider Indo-European context. Many Scots, finding Gaelic difficult, are unaware that much of Gaelic comes originally from the same source as English (and many other European languages), this origin being an early language of Europe and areas of the India

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Argyll Publishing
• Release date: Nov 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781907165405

George McLennan

George Robert McLennan (MA Hons, PhD) was born in 1945 and studied Classical Languages at St Andrews and McMaster Universities and Birkbeck College. In addition he obtained three post-doctoral posts at the Universities of Bonn, Urbino and Nsukka (Nigeria). After returning to Scotland, he studied Scottish Gaelic and settled in Argyll with his family. Through the encouragement of his students, he began writing and started a small publishing company and in total wrote six popular books on Scottish Gaelic, its history and its links to other languages. George McLennan died suddenly in 2021 and Scottish Gaelic and its European Cousins was his final work and is published posthumously.

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Gaelic-English Correspondences

Each section below deals with a particular feature of the two languages. As mentioned above, the sections are in alphabetical order according to the letter or feature under discussion, beginning with consonants (§1 to §30).

§1 b as English p or w

A Gaelic b frequently takes the place of a p or pp in a Gaelic word borrowed from another language (double b is not a permitted Gaelic combination). There are various reasons for this. P is not an original Gaelic consonant (see §20), and when found in modern Gaelic, it occurs in borrowed words – mainly from English, Norse and Latin.⁹ Also, a b in Gaelic is pronounced like an English p, i.e. it is unvoiced, except when it occurs at the beginning of a word. Elsewhere in the Celtic language family, e.g. in Welsh, a p regularly changes to b in a word, one of the soft mutations. And Greek and Latin regularly interchange b and p, with the result that we have English words like ‘ambidextrous’ and ‘amphora’, the prefix meaning on both sides. And this is what lies behind ‘scribe’ and ‘script’. So Gaelic obair ‘work’ is from Latin opus (the stem of which is oper-) and relates to English ‘opus, operate’ etc.

Other borrowed words showing the same feature are:

abstol – apostle; borrowed from Latin, like a lot of other Gaelic ecclesiastical words.

cabar – Capricorn, caprine. Cabar is ‘a rafter, deer antler, caber’. Caprine relates to a horned goat. In Late Latin, from which the Gaelic is borrowed, the word was used of rafters rather like cruck timbers. English language versions of placenames with cabar keep the Gaelic b, as Cabrach ‘Place of Antlers’, in the south of Jura.

cabstair – capable, capture. Cabstair is ‘a bit’, part of a bridle held in a horse’s mouth. Borrowed from Latin.

caibeal – chapel. Another borrowing, ultimately from Late Latin cappella. See also §4.

caibideil – chapter. Borrowed from Latin capitulum ‘heading’. See also §4. Another classical cognate is ‘capital’.

cìobair – keeper (of flocks, herds). Now ‘a shepherd’. Borrowed from English.

crùbach – cripple. Borrowed from Norse. See also crùb §42. Related also is ‘griffin/gryphon’.

cùbaid – pulpit. Borrowed from Latin pulpitum ‘platform’. See also §5 and §7.

cùbair – cooper. Borrowed from English.

lùb – loop. Lùb is ‘a bend, curve’. Common in placenames, as Luib in Skye, Ross & Cromarty and Perthshire, while Loch Lubnaig north of Callander, Perthshire is the boomerang-shaped loch. Probably borrowed from