Wales goes Gaelic - possible?

Abdominalz

Would it be possible for the Irish, just like they did in Dal Riada, to start off colonising Anglesey, Llyn and Dyfed along with other coastal areas and by the end of the Viking Age (bonus points if by the start of the Viking Age)have subdued and Gaelicised everywhere west of the seven and be in a position to prevent the Saxons from taking those lands? Thus Brythonic languages only survive in Cornwall and Brittany.

What would they and ATL Wales be called?
Would this scenario make/require Christianisation of The Gaels by Patrick to not happen and instead happen after the Saxons?
Would these people have a better chance at achieving unification by 1066 than the Irish and the OTL Welsh?
Considering that these Gaels would be less peripheral than the Scots and Irish, would their existence manage to butterfly the idea that the Gaels were a barbaric race?
 

Dathi THorfinnsson

Tripledot said:
I'm assuming it'd be called Wales, since the Gaels are still a Celtic people.
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Filling in a couple of steps: "Wales" comes from Anglo-Saxon (and Old High German) "Walh", meaning foreigner, which also gives Wallachia for Romania and Old Norse "Valland" for France.

Since the people there iTTL are still non-Germanic, they could still be called the same 'foreigner' name, and thus Wales and Welsh, even if they're Goidelic (Gaelic), not Brythonic (Britons)
 

Abdominalz

Dathi THorfinnsson said:
Filling in a couple of steps: "Wales" comes from Anglo-Saxon (and Old High German) "Walh", meaning foreigner, which also gives Wallachia for Romania and Old Norse "Valland" for France.

Since the people there iTTL are still non-Germanic, they could still be called the same 'foreigner' name, and thus Wales and Welsh, even if they're Goidelic (Gaelic), not Brythonic (Britons)
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But the world Welsh, or a variant of it eventually, soon came to mean the Britons in general. That is why Cornwall and Wales have that element to their name but not Scotland. I reckon OTL Wales would end up being called something like West-Scotland or a variant of that and OTL Scotland, North Scotland. What it would have been called by the Gaels themselves is anyone's guess but we as alternate historians can think up a name.
 

steve_wilson

The Gaels did colonise parts of Wales after the Roman retreat, to the often unacknowledged point that all Welsh Ogham stones are actually in Gaelic.

And please be very wary of using the word "Celtic", it was a 19th century construction by English academics aimed at bundling all pre-Roman (and therefore pre-Saxon) peoples into a single, inferior group.
Most modern historians and archaeologists have abandoned the term.

For example, the Welsh counting system is closer to Greek than Gaelic, whose counting system is closer to Latin than Welsh.

The whole thing comes from the "invasion and annihilation" view of British archaeology, which invented an Iron Age invasion that never happened.
 

Finbarr the Fair

Interesting

steve_wilson said:
The Gaels did colonise parts of Wales after the Roman retreat, to the often unacknowledged point that all Welsh Ogham stones are actually in Gaelic.

And please be very wary of using the word "Celtic", it was a 19th century construction by English academics aimed at bundling all pre-Roman (and therefore pre-Saxon) peoples into a single, inferior group.
Most modern historians and archaeologists have abandoned the term.

For example, the Welsh counting system is closer to Greek than Gaelic, whose counting system is closer to Latin than Welsh.

The whole thing comes from the "invasion and annihilation" view of British archaeology, which invented an Iron Age invasion that never happened.
Click to expand...

All true but AIUI there are sufficient linguistic links between Gaelic and Brythonic languages that justify them being linked as "Celtic".

Which does not mean that 5th century CE Irish have much in common with post-Roman "British" of course. So the incoming Saxons might not distinguish between them but it doesn't mean the "opposition" would be the same.

Still, I think both Welsh and Irish had similar systems of inheritance and "clans" so maybe there would be little difference in the outcome?
 

steve_wilson

9 Fanged Hummingbird said:
I'm not aware of any real Welsh equivalent to the clan system, even in the 5th century.
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Well, they had been romanised for four centuries, the Gaels hadn't been romanised at all (though there is a disputed Roman trading post excavated near Dublin).

In spite of this Gaelic is closer to Latin than Welsh is, but there's something else:

Gaelic has a present tense but rarely uses it. Instead a verb Ta (it is) is used, so instead of saying "I am ploughing the field" Gaels say "it is me at the plough in the field". This is not related to any other Indo-European construction. It is found in Semitic languages in one sense, and is similar to Basque's use of main and supplementary verbs (but not much).

It suggests that Gaelic is an Indo-European tongue overlayed on an earlier non-IE base.
 
Errnge

Errnge

steve_wilson said:
The Gaels did colonise parts of Wales after the Roman retreat, to the often unacknowledged point that all Welsh Ogham stones are actually in Gaelic.

And please be very wary of using the word "Celtic", it was a 19th century construction by English academics aimed at bundling all pre-Roman (and therefore pre-Saxon) peoples into a single, inferior group.
Most modern historians and archaeologists have abandoned the term.

For example, the Welsh counting system is closer to Greek than Gaelic, whose counting system is closer to Latin than Welsh.

The whole thing comes from the "invasion and annihilation" view of British archaeology, which invented an Iron Age invasion that never happened.
Click to expand...

Or it has to do with the cultural/linguistic connection between the peoples the Greeks referred to as Keltoi and the Romans called Celtae-- The Gauls (another "wahl" word). While there are significant differences between P-Celtic groups and Q-Celtic groups, they are still Celtic groups, and I don't know any academic that doesn't recognize that.

Anyway, I don't think Wales would still be the word used. The Saxons would likely recognize the difference between the foreigners they were invading, and the foreigners that were invading who they were invading.

So, if we go by the OP, and have the conquest resemble that of Scotland, we'd probably see an Gaelic realm that initially includes the Isle of Man, Anglesey, and Northern/ Coastal Wales. I'd imagine it would be a group out of Meath or Leinster, perhaps Ulster (but that's the group colonizing Caledonia) that leads the colonization. If they managed to unify in a similar time table, you'd have a unified realm that equates approximately to Wales by the 9th or 10th centuries. This, I think, would be a pretty stern threat to the Saxons, who wouldn't be unified for another century. Will these Gaels ally themselves with the Danes? Also, insofar as butterflies are concerned, how does this affect Strathclyde, Cumbria, or Cornwall?
 

Tate the Brewer

Banned
All true but AIUI there are sufficient linguistic links between Gaelic and Brythonic languages that justify them being linked as "Celtic".

Which does not mean that 5th century CE Irish have much in common with post-Roman "British" of course. So the incoming Saxons might not distinguish between them but it doesn't mean the "opposition" would be the same.

Still, I think both Welsh and Irish had similar systems of inheritance and "clans" so maybe there would be little difference in the outcome?
Click to expand...


As someone who speaks both Scottish Gaelic and Welsh, I can tell you that the two are actually fairly closely related, and the relations are easy to spot in conversation quite a bit of the time in terms of grammar. Vocabulary not as much so, since phonologically speaking the two are quite different (I would go as far to say that Welsh is considerably more conservative in terms of phonology than Gaelic). Now, how these languages are related to their continental counterparts is much less clear, though the latest consensus seems to be that they are closer to each other than they are to say, Gaulish or Celtiberian, though it is possible that this is because Gaulish and Celtiberian are just attested at an earlier stage of the family's evolution, before the major grammatical restructuring that took place in Insular Celtic had happened. But at the moment, Gaulish and Celtiberian, especially the former, have a lot in common with classical Indo-European languages, or at least they seem to, like Latin, Sanskrit, and Ancient Greek.


Now, in terms of the political systems of Wales and Ireland, I don't that they're very compatible with each other. The Welsh political system had more in common with the invading Saxons, with roaming kings and their warrior bands that defended/raided different peoples, but were usually associated with a given area of land. Early Medieval and Medieval Irish politics were very tribal, being totally centered on the clan, and thus family ties. Wales also never had anything quite like the tanistry system, which fostered huge amounts of political upheaval in Ireland when "high-kings" died and obscure members of their family claimed the right to be the tánaiste or when the toisigh couldn't agree on a tánaiste.
 
The Professor

The Professor

One way to get the area of Wales as a Scotland equivalent would be to strengthen Strathclyde so that it's harder for the Irish/Scots to invade northwards.
They'd then go south in more numbers separating the Britons under Strathclyde and Cornwall
Since Scots were the names of the Irish settlers perhaps Wales in TTL would be named Scotland? :D
 

Finbarr the Fair

Thanks for correction

Tate the Brewer said:
Now, in terms of the political systems of Wales and Ireland, I don't that they're very compatible with each other. The Welsh political system had more in common with the invading Saxons, with roaming kings and their warrior bands that defended/raided different peoples, but were usually associated with a given area of land. Early Medieval and Medieval Irish politics were very tribal, being totally centered on the clan, and thus family ties. Wales also never had anything quite like the tanistry system, which fostered huge amounts of political upheaval in Ireland when "high-kings" died and obscure members of their family claimed the right to be the tánaiste or when the toisigh couldn't agree on a tánaiste.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the correction regarding political structures and society in Wales and Gaelic Ireland

I was thinking of things like partible inheritance rather than primogeniture, but I suppose Dark Age Anglo-Saxon society was the better comparator for Wales.

So, would a Gaelic elite replacement type invasion lead to changes in Welsh society as well as change the language? I'm presuming there wouldn't be a mass migration or genocide of the native peasantry.
 
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