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Why is it pronounced like that in English? And why are the Boston Celtics pronounced differently? For thr record in French we pronounce Celtes with a soft "c".
by littlestymaar 2y ago
Why is it pronounced like that in English? And why are the Boston Celtics pronounced differently? For thr record in French we pronounce Celtes with a soft "c".
- spookie 2y agoEnglish doesn't share the same linguistic root, so these differences are bound to appear. Well, if you take out indo-european that is.
- littlestymaar 2y ago> English doesn't share the same linguistic root. […] Well, if you take out indo-european that is. It's a bit more complex, English is half a Germanic language but also half French. But that doesn't explains why “Celtic” is pronounced differently in “Boston Celtics”.
- spookie 2y agoThat I presume is just the natural evolution of language, their origins fade away, they become culturally assimilated, and pronounced more in line with the hosts. Nothing new. But interesting nonetheless. I don't have a definitive answer but I presume it was something like that.
- bee_rider 2y agoI believe what happened is, at some point in the past we used the soft-c (I guess this is when all the sports teams were named). But more recently it was switched to hard-c, to reflect the Greek origin of the word.
- ttyprintk 2y agoI think that’s right: from 300 AD to 1700, nobody used the word. Medieval Latin dominated in the meantime, and so preferred a soft c in Celtae without an academic to insist on the k in Keltoi.