The Celtic roots of English. Ed. by Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, and Heli Pitkänen. (Studies in languages 37.) Joensuu: University of Joensuu, Faculty of Humanities, 2002. Pp. xii, 330. ISBN 9524581647. €22.

Reviewed by David Stifter, University of Vienna

Whereas recent influence exerted by the vernacular Celtic languages on the local varieties of English in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland is a well-known fact, the influence of Celtic languages on the development of the early stages of English in England itself has been widely ignored or even positively denied. The received view, reiterated in influential textbooks throughout the twentieth century (1–5), holds that the invading Germanic tribes either drove out or massacred the previous inhabitants or put the earlier population in a subjugated position where—despite 1,500 years of coexistence on the British Isles—they were able to leave only a minimal amount of influence on English phonology, syntax, and lexis. Only a small number of place names is supposed to have not been taken over by the new ‘masters’. This textbook view goes against what modern contact research has taught us to expect. Languages in coexistence for such a long time normally give rise to various effects of mutual influence (Sarah Grey Thomason & Terrence Kaufmann, Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics, University of California Press, 1988).

The study of Insular Celtic substratum influence on the grammar, especially the syntax, of English has therefore received relatively little attention; it says something about the attitude prevalent among scholars in the Anglo-Saxon world that the main advances in the last several years have been made through the initiative of people from Germany (notably Hildegard L. C. Tristram) and Finland. In August 2001, in Mekrijärvi, Finland, a colloquium on ‘Early contacts between English and the Celtic languages’ was held to reassess and to challenge the orthodox view from historical and linguistic perspectives. Fourteen contributions to this colloquium are assembled in the present volume. The highly informative ‘Introduction’ (1–26) by the editors provides an account of the history and current state of research on ‘Early contacts between English and the Celtic languages’, together with an extensive bibliography. The editors believe ‘that the Anglo-Saxon–Celtic contact situation must have been a case of language shift of the type which involves a large shifting group, and is further characterised by a relatively rapid process of shift and imperfect learning of the target language’ (7).

The other contributions are divided into four parts: Part 1 is devoted to ‘The earliest Anglo-Saxon/British contacts: Historical and linguistic perspectives’. Richard Coates, in ‘The significances of Celtic place-names in England’ (47–86), offers the first comprehensive list, supplemented by distribution maps, for all reasonably claimed examples of Celtic place names in England. Peter Schrijver’s ‘The rise and fall of British Latin: Evidence from English and Brittonic’ (87–110) is an important contribution to the history of the formation of the British languages. Contrary to received scholarship, Schrijver argues that Brittonic was exposed to an ‘extremely heavy Latin substratum influence … which transformed its phonemic and phonetic structure’. He argues that British sound changes went parallel with developments in Vulgar Latin/Romance in Britain. Hildegard L. C. Tristram, in ‘Attrition of inflections in English and Welsh’ (111–49), suggests a multicausal model involving internal factors and drift, but also contact-induced shift between superstrate speakers of Anglo-Saxon and substrate speakers of British to explain the change of English from a language of the synthetic type to an analytic one. Finally, Nicholas Higham discusses ‘The Anglo-Saxon/British interface: History and ideology’ (29–46).

Part 2 is entitled ‘Linguistic outcomes of Medieval and Early Modern contacts’. Against the traditional view that the English (especially Old English) lexicon contains only a handful of loans from Celtic languages, Andrew Breeze, in ‘Seven types of Celtic loanword [sic]’ (175–82), adduces a considerable list of possible examples. His contribution is a survey of the research undertaken mainly by himself (sixty-six out of the seventy-two entries in the reference list are his own!); some of the examples, however, would merit a critical reevaluation. Other chapters include: David L. White, ‘Explaining the innovations of Middle English: What, where, and why’ (153–74); Stephen Laker, ‘An explanation for the changes kw-, hw– > χw in the English dialects’ (183–98); and Juhani Klemola, ‘Periphrastic DO: Dialectal distribution and origins’ (199–210).

Part 3 is devoted to ‘The early Irish input’. Anders Ahlqvist, in ‘Cleft sentences in Irish and other languages’ (271–81), outlines the development of cleft sentences in the history of Irish (‘an obligatory part of the grammar’ of VSO languages (280)) and compares it typologically and contrastively to similar constructions in other languages. Part 3 also includes chapters by Patricia Ronan (‘Subordinating ocus “and” in Old Irish’, 213–36) and Erich Poppe (‘The “expanded form” in Insular Celtic and English: Some historical and comparative considerations, with special emphasis on Middle Irish’, 237–70).

The last part, but chronologically earliest in scope, is ‘Pre-historical linguistics’. Theo Vennemann, in ‘Semitic → Celtic → English: The transitivity of language contact’ (295–330), attempts to demonstrate on typological grounds that certain peculiar features of Irish English ultimately reflect substrate and superstrate influence from ‘Semitidic languages’ spoken in prehistory in parts of Europe and the British Isles. The article contains an appendix that lists the sixty-four Hamito-Semitic linguistic features claimed for Irish by Julius Pokorny in the 1920s (324–26). Part 4 is rounded out by Kalevi Wiik’s ‘On the origins of the Celts’ (285–94).

Reviewed by Rachel Stauffer, University of Virginia

In her introduction, Martha Tennent states: ‘Translation . . . does not occupy a neutral space. It is much more than a mere cross-cultural exchange, and the task of training aspiring translators/interpreters requires new directions, as well as revisions of traditional notions concerning their roles’ (xxiv). This statement and the essays within this volume are the result of a conference known as the Vic Forum, held in Spain in 1999 at the University of Vic. The conference was attended by linguists and scholars in cultural studies, and Tennent claims that the collaboration of professionals in the two disciplines directly contributed to the creation of the present volume, a collection of papers that deal specifically with the problems of effectively training translators and interpreters to achieve cultural as well as linguistic accuracy. In recent years the field of translation and interpretation has gained in popularity and focus, and this publication seeks to continue that trend as well as to improve the state of the field by exploring strategies that better prepare and train the world’s translators.

The book is arranged into three major subject areas: training programs (sixty-three pages), pedagogy (110 pages), and theory (seventy-one pages). Part 1 on training programs contains two papers: ‘Training translators: Programmes, curricula, practices’ by Margherita Ulrych, and ‘Training interpreters: Programmes, curricula, practices’ by Helge Niska. As both titles suggest, these articles attempt to characterize the current state of existing vocational, undergraduate, and postgraduate curricula in the field. Part 2, ‘Pedagogical strategies’, contains five chapters and is the most substantial of the three. ‘Minding the process, improving the product’, by María González Davies, offers innovative and contemporary methods designed to enhance traditional pedagogy in the field, with special emphasis on experiential and task-based learning. Technology integration is addressed in Francesca Bartrina and Eva Espasa’s ‘Audiovisual translation’, which suggests strategies for the teaching of dubbing, subtitling, and multimedia translation, as well as in Richard Samson’s ‘Computer-assisted translation’. Teaching methods for simultaneous translation and interpretation appear in Daniel Gile’s ‘Teaching conference interpreting’ and in Ann Corsellis’s ‘Training interpreters to work in the public services’. In Part 3, ‘The relevance of theory to training’, on theory, Francesca Bartrina’s ‘Theory and translator training’ stresses the need for a theoretical foundation in training programs. Andrew Chesterman’s ‘Causality in translator training’ presents a scientific approach to the field by offering an empirical model of translation. Christiane Nord’s ‘Training functional translators’ emphasizes the importance of teaching translators to be interculturally competent, and Rosemary Arrojo’s ‘The ethics of translation’ recommends that instructors call attention to the responsibility of the translator to strive for accuracy as the sole means of cross-cultural and interlingual communication.

The volume’s epilogue contains Michael Cronin’s ‘Deschooling translation: Beginning of century reflections on teaching translation and interpretation’. This final part appropriately highlights the influence of technology that continues to impact the function of human translators. It is a fitting conclusion to the articles within this book as it serves to facilitate the discourse in all areas of this significant field.