Episode 192: English in the Celtic World
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Overview
The episode traces how the English Civil War's aftermath accelerated English expansion into Scotland and Ireland, where Scots, Gaelic, Ulster Scots, and the old Wexford dialect Yola competed with newer forms of English. It connects political and military events, especially Oliver Cromwell's campaigns and the redistribution of Irish land, to language change, while also explaining the histories of Halloween, Quaker pronouns, and familiar English phrases.
Key takeaways
- Scots developed from northern Old English into a distinct Lowland language, retaining older vocabulary and avoiding many southern English sound changes; English-language Bibles and printing later shifted Scottish writing toward English.
- Yola, the Forth and Bargy dialect of County Wexford, preserved pre-Great Vowel Shift English sounds and showed Gaelic contact effects, including th substitutions and consonant-cluster changes.
- The Ulster Plantation established a lasting Scots-speaking population in northern Ireland: many settlers came from Scotland, and their language developed into Ulster Scots.
- Cromwell's Irish conquest combined mass killing with land confiscation and forced relocation; the resulting English landowning class gave standard English social advantages that helped drive its spread.
- The word Halloween derives from Scots Hallows' Even, while jack-o'-lantern originally named a spirit-associated marsh light before Americans applied it to illuminated carved pumpkins.
- George Fox's use of thou and thee challenged social hierarchy, while the rhythmic structure of courtroom oaths such as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth reflects older oral traditions.
Chapters
- After the English Civil War, royalist support in Scotland and Ireland brought renewed conflict with England and helped expand standard English into Celtic-speaking regions.
- The word pumpkin entered English through Nathaniel Ward's 1640s pamphlet, The Simple Cobbler of Agawam in America; its proposed origins include French pompon and the Indigenous word popukan.
- Jack-o'-lantern first referred to a mysterious marsh light associated with spirits, and only became a name for a carved pumpkin in 19th-century America.
- Samhain marked the Celtic end-of-harvest season, a time associated with winter's dangers and the belief that the boundary between the living and dead grew thin.
- The Christian church moved All Saints' Day to November 1, linking it with Samhain; Old English hallow meant a saint or holy person.
- Scots preserved the form even in Hallows' Even, which was reduced to Halloween and appears in Scottish records by the mid-1700s.
- Scots descended from the northern dialect of Old English spoken by Anglo-Saxons who settled the Scottish Lowlands, and it diverged over centuries of relative isolation.
- Scots retained some Old English vocabulary, absorbed Norse and Gaelic words, and did not undergo many sound changes that affected southern English.
- By the 1500s, Scots was the language of Scotland's Lowland nobility, government, and literature, while Gaelic remained dominant in the Highlands.
- Scottish Protestants used the English-language Geneva Bible and later the King James Bible because no Scots Bible was available.
- English religious books, supplied by dominant English printers, helped make English the language of the Scottish Kirk and gradually displaced Scots in writing.
- James VI of Scotland moved his court to London after becoming James I of England; his son Charles grew up speaking standard English with a Scottish accent.
- After Charles I's execution in 1649, Parliament abolished the monarchy and House of Lords, leaving the army-backed Rump Parliament to govern the Commonwealth.
- Scotland recognized Charles II as king, while Irish forces continued resisting Parliament and could potentially provide a base for a royalist or Catholic-backed invasion.
- Oliver Cromwell was selected to lead an expedition to Ireland, despite formally serving under New Model Army commander Sir Thomas Fairfax.
- English arrived in Ireland in the 1100s with Anglo-Norman forces under Henry II; their territory around Dublin and the southeast was called the Pale.
- Many settlers outside the Pale assimilated into Irish society and adopted Gaelic, leaving English concentrated around Dublin and in a separate pocket in County Wexford.
- The Wexford dialect, called Yola or the Forth and Bargy dialect, survived into the 1800s and combined Middle English roots with French, Gaelic, Welsh, and Flemish influences.
- Surviving Yola examples include a version of the Lord's Prayer, the folk song The Maiden of Rosslare, and a Yola Hurling Song possibly dating to the 1600s.
- Yola resembles English West Country speech in voicing sounds, with examples such as s pronounced z and f pronounced v.
- Its vowels often preserve older sounds from before the Great Vowel Shift, making the dialect resemble Middle English more than contemporary London English.
- Gaelic influence appears in Yola spellings such as treshpass, grash, and hash, where s can take a sh-like pronunciation.
- Because Gaelic lacked the English th sounds, speakers substituted t or d, a pattern also found in modern southern Irish English.
- Yola reduced consonant clusters or inserted a schwa, as in land becoming lone and calf becoming caliph; similar vowel insertion survives in Irish pronunciations such as fillum for film.
- From the mid-1500s, English plantation schemes seized Irish land and redistributed it to settlers, introducing Elizabethan English into Munster and Ulster.
- After rebellion in Ulster was suppressed and Irish nobles fled in the early 1600s, James I's government confiscated land and renewed settlement there.
- Many Ulster settlers came from Scotland and northern England; by the century's end, they formed most of the settler population, and Scots became Ulster Scots, still spoken in parts of Northern Ireland.
- Cromwell landed in Dublin in August 1649, then besieged Drogheda, where approximately 3,000 people were killed, including about 1,000 civilians.
- At Wexford, near the Yola-speaking region, another assault killed around 2,000 people, including about 200 women.
- Cromwell's defenders argued that the killings followed contemporary rules of war after the towns refused surrender, while Irish memory regards the events as atrocities.
- Cromwell's forces stalled at Waterford in November 1649 because of cold, wet weather, equipment problems, food shortages, and sickness, then captured the city the following summer.
- A letter Cromwell wrote during the siege referred to the Garland as a third-rate ship, using a naval ranking system based on ship size and crew.
- First-rate initially designated the largest ships; first-rate and second-rate later became general quality descriptions, while third-rate came to suggest poor quality.
- The saying keep your powder dry was later attributed to Cromwell's Irish campaign, but there is no contemporary evidence he said it; William Blacker's 1830s poem helped popularize the story.
- Cromwell left Ireland in 1650 to address the Scottish threat, while his lieutenants continued the conquest; war, starvation, and plague killed hundreds of thousands, possibly a third of Ireland's population.
- George Fox's followers became known as Quakers after a Derby magistrate mocked Fox's call to tremble at God's word; the group was formally the Society of Friends.
- George Fox insisted on thou and thee for everyone to reject status distinctions, even though you had largely replaced those singular pronouns in general English by the mid-1600s.
- The Book of Oaths helped spread the courtroom formula the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; its rhythm and alliteration recall older English oaths designed for oral repetition.
- An act passed in autumn 1650 required legal proceedings and documents to be in English, replacing the continued use of Latin for many written legal records.
- Charles II arrived in Scotland in 1650 and was crowned king in January 1651; Fairfax refused to lead a campaign against Scotland, so Cromwell became commander-in-chief.
- Cromwell won the Battle of Dunbar despite being outnumbered two to one, securing much of southern Scotland for the Commonwealth.
- After Charles led Scottish forces into England in August 1651 and was defeated, he escaped in disguise, reportedly hiding in a tree, and eventually fled to France.
- By 1652, Cromwell's forces controlled Ireland; approximately two-thirds of its land was confiscated, and an estimated 44,000 Irish people were forced west to Connacht, behind the phrase to hell or Connacht.
- Catholics' share of Irish land reportedly fell from about 60 percent to under 10 percent, while English landowners acquired estates worked by Irish tenants and laborers.
- English settlers brought a more standard, 17th-century English into positions of power, encouraging Gaelic speakers to learn it and gradually displacing older dialects such as Yola.
- Gaelic remained Ireland's majority language until the 1800s, while Ulster Scots persisted in the north; later Irish migrations carried distinct English varieties to Barbados and North America.
Transcript excerpt
0:03 [music] >> Welcome [music] to the history of English podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language. This is episode 192, English in the Celtic world. This time, as we work our way through the story of English, we're going to look at the period immediately following the English Civil War in the mid-1600s. While the war came to an end in England, there was still support for the monarchy in Scotland and Ireland. So, the English army soon found itself at war again, this time with its Celtic neighbors. As we'll see, those conflicts had consequences that are still with us today. One of those consequences was the
0:50 expansion of standard English into those regions, which gradually replaced the existing manners of speech. And in Ireland, one of those existing manners of speech that was lost was an obscure dialect of English. So, we'll look at that long-lost dialect as well. But, before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com, and you can sign up to support the podcast and get bonus episodes at patreon.com/historyofenglish. And speaking of those bonus episodes at Patreon, let me make a quick note about how those episodes relate to the regular podcast. Over the past few years, I've settled
1:37 into a regular routine where I produce an episode every month, usually released at the end of the month. Every other month, I produce a regular episode like this one, which traces the chronological history of English. And every month in between, I produce a bonus episode at Patreon. Those episodes are usually between a half hour to an hour in length and they cover random topics in the history of English. So, they're not really related to the regular podcast series. But, if you like to get access to an
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