Celtic Studies in its Early Days

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Other Title
  • 黎明期のケルト学
  • レイメイキ ノ ケルトガク

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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to survey the development of Celtic studies over 200 years from its beginning at the early 18th-century. The academic study related to things Celtic was first established by the Welsh naturalist Edward Lhwyd, as a field of comparative linguistics, which was later to be incorporated into the philological study of the Indo-European language family. Also the Romantic movement in Germany and elsewhere stimulated deep interests in the culture and institution of the nation in the past and their ultimate origin. While Celtic studies in the 19th-century Germany contributed mainly to the reconstruction of relationships between the Celtic and other Indo-European branches of languages in terms of their morphological and phonological comparisons, the French equivalent introduced a wider scope to their approaches. One of the fruitful results is the publication of Revue celtique launched by the French philologist and folklorist Henri Gaidoz in 1870. It is the first international journal dealing with Celtic studies, and involved Continental as well as insular Celticists, such as Whitley Stokes and John Rhŷs, under Gaidoz’s credo of the ‘alliance’ of universal Celtic scholarship. Another significance brought by the journal is its devotion to the study and collection of folklore in Celtic-speaking regions. The history of Celtic studies outlined here reveals how the discipline changed from more comprehensive and holistic socio-cultural studies in its early days to a narrower and more segmented one in the 21st century.

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