Qualities and attributes of a critical thinker

As part of the Open Learn on-line course "Succeeding in Postgraduate Study" I've been thinking about what the attributes and qualities of a critical thinker are.

While critical thinking is separate from subject knowledge it would be difficult for postgraduate study for anyone without a deep knowledge of the subject matter, so an extensive understanding of the subject is essential. The critical thinker will need good observation and information gathering skills. He or she needs to analyse evidence, arguments and claims and to be able to evaluate them - critical thinking requires the ability to distinguish between fact and opinion. The critical thinker needs to be able to make inferences based on deductive and inductive reasoning and apply this to decision making and imaginative problem solving. 

We would expect our critical thinker to be very inquisitive and have a passion for uncovering the truth. They must be empathetic and open minded, able to view things from other peoples' point of view and able to take on board new ideas, and, if necessary, discard or modify ideas in the light of new evidence. He or she should have a balanced and fair opinion of the work of others, and reflect carefully on their own knowledge and critical thinking skills.

Article - Tartessian as Celtic and Phoenician as a possible substrate? Steve Hewitt

I was interested to read this article because having read the summary article on Celtic from the West, I was interested in the idea of Tartessian as an ancestor of the Celtic languages, as this would fit in well with the idea of migration from the Iberian peninsula through the Atlantic coastline.

However, while it appears that there are some similarities between Tartessian and the Celtic languages, there also seem to be a number of things that suggest that they are not related. Few professional Celticists support the idea.

The other suggestion proposed in the article is that Phoenician was a possible substrate to Tartessian, as there were Phoenician trading settlements in the area. However, it looks unlikely, not least because when a dominant language acts as a superstrate to a subordinate language the influence is mainly lexical. When a subordinate language acts as a substrate then the influence is mainly structural. Phoenician was the dominant language, and unlikely to have influence on the structure of Tartessian.

So, it looks like these hypotheses are to be rejected.

Article - Celtic From the West - A summary of the argument - Steven A Williams

A summary of the article "Celtic from the West" Barry Cunliffe and John Koch.

The article suggests that the Celtic homeland, rather than being in middle Europe arose in the West of the British Isles and that the Celtic languages arose as a lingua franca (descended from PIE) between the communities along the Atlantic coast. There are three strands to the evidence: linguistic, genetic and archaeological. 

Linguistic: the earliest mention of the Celts in classical literature places them along the Atlantic coastline. The distribution of Celtic place names matches well to the distribution of the communities along this coast. Analyses of Celtic languages suggest that they split from PIE ancestor before 4000 BCE. This article mentions that Tartessian (from southern Iberia) may be an ancestor of Celtic (see genetic evidence below also blog post on Tartessian as Celtic)

Genetic: genetic evidence (Oppenheimer) shows people migrating from the Iberian peninsula and settling along the Atlantic coastline. There is no genetic evidence for mass migrations of people from the 'traditional' Celtic homelands in middle Europe at the appropriate period.

Archaeological: Cunliffe shows that there was a 'flowering' of an Atlantic Cultural Zone which matches well to the other evidence.

This Atlantic Cultural Zone traded within the communities and would have required a shared lingua franca. Trade also developed with NW Europe.

The evidence for this seems solid to me, and matches well to the arguments that I am currently reading in Oppenheimer "The Origins of the British".

Notes - The Celtic Hypothesis by M. R. Quartz

One of the big things that historians and archaeologists believed in the past was that there had been a series of 'invasions' of Britain - hordes of invaders sweeping in from the Continent and overwhelming the more 'primitive' society living here with their greater numbers and better weapons technology. Then it began to be recognised that, actually, there is very little archaeological evidence for invasions. Now genetics has taught us that while we know that there were movements of people into Britain after the Last Glacial Maximum (when Britain was uninhabitable), the 'invasions' were largely movements of cultures, not the movement of large numbers of people, and not extermination of the previous populations. The hordes of Angles, Saxons and Jutes, who were supposed to have slaughtered the Celtic Britons, and extinguished their language just didn't exist. 

But, there is a problem inherent in this. English is a West Germanic language, and, as far as is known, the language in Britain at the time of the Roman Invasion was Brittonic, or Brythonic, a Celtic language that is the ancestor of the Celtic languages Welsh, Cornish and Breton. As we now know that while there were Anglo Saxons arriving in Britain in the Dark Ages (450 - 650 CE), these were not in vast numbers. Not enough?to extinguish the Brittonic language, so why is all the evidence that is left of it in England a few toponyms (place names) - in particular, river names such as Avon and Esk/Usk? The question, then, is what happened to the Brythonic language if it wasn't a massive invasion that slaughtered the vast majority of the Britons and stamped out their language? People don't just stop talking a language. After the Norman invasion the English didn't start speaking French - yes, they took on Norman French words, but the basic grammar of the language, and most of the really key words are still descended from Anglo-Saxon.

There are a number of possibilities, which I intend to return to in later posts.

This book proposes that there were sufficient Anglo Saxons that arrived to have their own settlements, and that they were more of a ruling class than the existing natives of the area - perhaps they would have had more weapons than the local? Then these two groups, the local Brittonic speakers, and the speakers of Anglo-Saxon lived in the same area in parallel. The Saxons largely spoke Old English, the Celts spoke Brythonic. The Celtic language acted as substrate to the English, and caused a number of grammatical changes in it. Effectively, Old English was a pidgin of Anglo Saxon and Brythonic, that developed into the Creole of Modern English. There are certainly a number of pieces of evidence for this in the structure of  English (and in earlier regional variations of English - under the influence of local Celtic speakers).

For one researcher Theo Vennemann, if a Celtic form of English varies from Standard English or if an English form varies from other Germanic languages, then it is due to a Celtic substratum. There are some interesting examples discussed, including:

• the form of the possessive, which comes in two forms: 'internal' eg: his head and 'external' the head. Old English changed from the external variety, to the internal variety, which is different to most other Germanic languages. This is the common form in Insular Celtic languages.
• the English progressive structure 'to be (do)ing', which has few parallels in Germanic languages, but is a feature of Celtic languages.
• alternatives to Yes/No answers. Speakers of Welsh know that you can't just answer a questions with Yes or No. Like the old 'Take Your Pick!' show with the minute of questions which you couldn't answer Yes or No to - without being 'Bonged out', you have to reply with an answer "He did..", "I will.. ", "She is...", etc. English, unlike other Germanic languages uses this form a great deal, sometimes with a Yes, or No included. "I didn't, no," "He can't," "Yes, she could," etc. The prime example of this is the ritualised answers in the marriage service: "I do", which begins with "Ja" in the German equivalent.
• Use of reflexive pronouns with '-self' including 'oneself', which has parallels in all Insular Celtic languages, but none in any other Germanic language.
• Germanic languages lost the interdental fricatives:

  /q/ and /ð/ at an early stage. As these are still used in Welsh it makes sense that they were retained in English from a Celtic substratum.

There are other examples given as well. It is certainly an interesting theory, that hopefully will yield more information with more research. I will return to the issue of "Why do we speak English?" in my notes on Stephen Oppenheimer's "the Origins of the British".

The Structure of Breton 2 - Mutations introduction

Initial consonants of words in Celtic languages undergo mutation in certain conditions. This means that the first sound of the word changes to another sound. In Welsh, nine sounds can mutate: t, c, p, b, g, d, ll, m, rh.

Note that the sound in Welsh that is written F is pronounced as /v/, DD is pronounced /ð/ - as in the English word "these", TH is pronounced /q/ - as in the English word "three".

The nine initial consonants in Welsh that can mutate, 

and the three types of mutation

The eight initial consonants in Breton that mutate
and the four types of mutation

Mutations in Breton happen in certain conditions and environments: 

• after certain words ('mutators')
• depending upon gender and number of a noun and following adjectives
• to distinguish homophones

(Links to be added)

HARD MUTATION

SPIRANT MUTATION

SOFT MUTATION

MIXED MUTATION

The Structure of Breton 1 - definite and infinite articles

Breton is an insular Celtic language, most closely related to the other two languages in the Brythonic branch, Welsh and Cornish. It shares many common features with the other Celtic languages, and additionally has both vocabulary and grammatical features which have been added under influence of the French language.

The normal word order for Breton, as with other Celtic languages, is VSO, but there is considerable freedom in Breton about word order, especially with emphatic sentences - more later in a separate post.

Breton has two genders, masculine and feminine, number (singular and plural). It has definite articles in common with the other Celtic languages. Uniquely for a Celtic language it also has indefinite articles under influence of French.

Like Welsh the definite article depends not on gender, but on the initial sound of the following word.

Breton Articles

Following the preposition e "in" the direct articles combine with the preposition to give el, en, er "in the":

er gambr - "in the room"

el labouradeg "in the factory"

In common with all other Celtic languages, when a noun is followed by a complement - it is qualified by another noun which follows it - it does not use the article.

"The door of the house"

Notes - Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher

When I was studying for my degree in Linguistics we were told very firmly that, "All languages are equally complex". Not only did our professors tell us so, but it was in the text books too.

I've always thought that was a bit odd, but I couldn't put my finger on why. I never challenged it, but neither did I ever hear any evidence for it. I have repeated it myself, when my mother, a dedicated teacher, but also with some old fashioned ideas, announced that "English is the most complicated language in the world". I disagreed - I'm sure that I would find Mandarin or a Native American language far harder. I suspect that my mother said it to encourage learners not to give up, a sort of "Look how well you are doing, don't expect it to be easy, it's the most difficult language in the world". But I also had a feeling that we were being told it to stop racist ideas of 'primitive people speak primitive language'.

Another thing that was dismissed in very short order back when I started studying was the infamous "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis". This is the idea, expressed first in the 1920s, that a speaker's native language determines their perception of the world. In its most extreme form it suggests that the speaker's language is a mind-prison filtering their ideas, and not permitting them to think ideas outside the straight-jacket of their language. This is clearly nonsense, any idea can be expressed in any language. Our language does not prevent us from thinking certain things.

In this book the author demolishes the idea that all languages are equally complex, then he looks again at how our native language may affect our thoughts. It turns out that we can have our ideas steered in certain limited directions by our languages. Specifically, this may happen in two different scenarios. Firstly, in languages with gendered nouns, and secondly, in the assignment of the spectrum to different colour names.

Language Complexity

The first part of this book looks at different languages, and yes, they do differ considerably in complexity. Vocabulary is very much larger in literate cultures. In the first world we have borrowed words from the languages around us, because we have writing we are reminded of the words that have been used by generations before us. Speakers of languages in more isolated and illiterate societies have a much reduced vocabulary. On the other hand, there is an inverse correlation between the complexity of a society and the complexity of word structure - the morphology. Broadly speaking, in less complex societies more information is encoded into the word.

How Gender affects our Thoughts

In English we don't use gender for inanimate objects (except in a few very specific situations, boats, for example, are feminine), but most languages do use gender for inanimate objects. French, Spanish, and Welsh have masculine and feminine nouns. German adds neuter to these. These are not assigned in any obviously logical way (although they may once have been) and are seemingly random. Gender in linguistics doesn't even have to refer to sex, it just means 'type'. Some languages have a gender distinction between animate and inanimate objects, or between human and non-human animals. My favourite example was the Australian aboriginal language with 15 different genders, including two for spears - depending upon size and material.

However, it turns out, through very careful experimental design, that the genders of objects in our native language can affect our perception of that object. Speakers show differences in the attributes that they associate with an object because of the gender of that object in that language. So that German speakers will associate feminine adjectives (slender, graceful, beautiful, elegant, etc.) with a bridge while Spanish speakers will associate masculine adjectives (strong, sturdy, towering, big, etc.) with the same bridge - matching the gender of bridges in those languages. There is plenty of evidence for how this affects the thoughts of speakers of gendered languages. Obviously, it doesn't force the speaker to be unable to reason, but it does affect how they think about things.

How our Language can affect our Classification and Perception of Colour

The other way that language can affect how we perceive things is the names of colours. Deutscher explains how it came to be realised that ancient societies did not have the same descriptions of colour as we do today. They could see the same colours, but they had a much reduced range of descriptive terms for the colour spectrum, leading to what we would consider as some strange descriptions. Homer's "the wine-dark sea", for example. Rather weirdly this was noticed by Gladstone (yes, later Prime Minister), who had an obsession about Homeric poetry. For a long time there was a great deal of discussion about whether the Greeks had reduced colour vision. Finally it was found that less complex cultures also have a limited number of colour names, there is no problem with perception of colour, it's just whether your society needs to give that colour a name yet. That is hard for us to understand, in our society where colour is taught from an early age, dinning the colours of things into our children, telling them that the sky is 'blue'. The spectrum is not discrete, different cultures divide it up into different boundaries, which affects our ease at matching the colours, especially near the boundaries between each colour. 

Speakers find it easier to match colours when the colours have a recognised name in their language. Thus Russian speakers, who divide the colour 'blue' into two different colours siniy and goluboy - light and dark, have faster reaction times when matching colours than English speakers do, who see these colours as one.

An interesting book for updating my Linguistics knowledge. 

Research Methodology - Coursera and University of London

When I decided that I was going to spend some time doing some studying around my own interests instead of taking an £8K MA I did the research into what would be covered under a Masters degree because I wanted to base my studies around the core of a typical masters. It became obvious that research skills and research proposals are important nowadays. Research Methodology is a relatively new field and I knew nothing about it, so I looked on-line to see if there were any courses that could give me a grounding.

I found a free four week course offered by Coursera. Not, obviously, the same as undertaking an MA, but a basic grounding that I felt I could add to with reading. This seemed a good bet, as the course material is provided by the University of London. You are encouraged to pay £39 for a certificate that shows that you have completed the course, and which they say helps to support provision of free courses, but I could see no reason for doing so, as I will never need to prove to someone that I had done the course.

You are expected to spend a couple of hours each week watching some videos, doing some reading and producing some material. The reading material is relevant and I found it worthwhile reading. I read further, researching terms, and looking up concepts. When given the choice of one article out of three I read all of them, and made notes and mind maps. You can get quite a lot out of the course in the four weeks.

I found it interesting working through the exercises and so from that point of view you could say that it is a good course. However, as students mark and comment on each others work that you could get away with very poor understanding of the subject, added to which it became obvious that  a large number of students are cheating - which frankly isn't difficult. I have to be honest that I was disappointed in this, that both Coursera and University of London are prepared to put their names to something that is effectively worthless. No employer or college who knew this would be prepared to accept this qualification as something meaningful, it devalues it for those who have worked, and even if the certificate were free I wouldn't even both printing it out.

The Breton Language - Overview

Breton is an insular Celtic language, most closely related to Welsh and Cornish, the Brythonic branch of the languages, in contrast to the Goidelic branch of Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx. While there was a continental Celtic language in the North of France it died out under pressure from Latin by about 500 CE. Breton was taken to Brittany by speakers from Cornwall and later from Wales between about 450 and 650 CE. It has many features in common with the other Celtic languages, especially those that it is most closely related to, but has also adopted some features and vocabulary from the French language.

Breton is a language under threat and is classified as “severely endangered” by UNESCO. The French language is the only language of instruction that is legal in schools in France, so attempts at Breton language education have come up against considerable difficulties.

While half the population was monolingual in 1900, by 1950 only a tenth of the population of 1 million speakers was monolingual. By 1997 there were only about 300,000 speakers, the vast majority of whom were over 60. Very few 15-19 year olds spoke Breton. By the first decade of the 21^st C there were only some 200,000 speakers of Breton left. There is very little transmission of the languages within families, but in 2007 there were some 4 or 5 thousand adults studying Breton at evening class or via a correspondence course. There is very little official use of the language.

 

There are four dialects of Breton, but there are no clear boundaries between them, rather there is a dialect continuum. The dialects correspond to medieval bishoprics. Gwenedeg (from the Vannes region) is less mutually intelligible to speakers of the other dialects.

It seems very likely that Breton will effectively die out as a functioning language fairly soon.

A change of name, and a change of direction

I started this blog a few years back, largely to keep a record of my own studies in Welsh, and to record my thoughts about my own learning. I didn't write very much, but I have been learning Welsh, largely though Say Something in Welsh, but also by using Duolingo and by reading. I've also attended several one day courses at the London Welsh Centre as well as twice having visited Nant Gwrtheyrn, the Welsh National Language Centre for five-day immersive courses. I still have a long way to go, but in many situations I am 'functionally fluent' in Welsh now.

A few weeks ago I was speaking to my son while walking the dogs. He is considering doing a Masters' degree, and I confided to him that I had long had a hankering to do a Masters in Celtic Studies. There is one provided online by Lampeter University. However, I really can't justify spending £8K on a course for which I have no need. I'm retired, while it would be interesting I don't need a Masters' degree. My son said, "that doesn't stop you studying what interests you, though, does it?" I realised that yes, I can study what I want, I can plan my own course, and end up in much the same place. No, I won't have an expensive piece of paper, but I don't need that, I will know what I have learned, and I will know what journey I have made. I began to work out what I wanted to do. I am planning to study Celtic Studies, with a very strong emphasis on Welsh Studies, including Welsh Language and Welsh Literature. I am including some Research Methods because if I were studying for an MA that would be a fairly large chunk of the material. To that end I am currently following a four week Coursera course, and I have purchased some books for further reading. I don't expect to cover as much as I would if I were following the Lampeter course, but it will give me a grounding in Research Methods, and frankly, I'm unlikely to do any research myself as part of my studying.

I won't have anyone marking my homework, but that doesn't mean that I shouldn't do any homework, or write any notes. I have done enough studying over the years to know that I can direct my own learning. My notes will appear here, so that I can access all of them in the same place should I need them.

When I studied Linguistics back in the early 1980s we had to study "the Structure of English" and also the structure of another language. I got Hindi. The year above me were doing Welsh, so I attended their lectures as well, and learned a bit about Welsh. The aim wasn't to learn the language, but to understand how it worked, and how it compared to other languages.

As I am studying Celtic Culture, History and Languages I intend to find out something about the Structure of some Celtic Languages - at least, of those languages that I find most interesting: Breton, Cornish and Manx. I am starting with Breton.

I will also study: History and Origins of the Celts; the History of Wales; Welsh Culture; Welsh Literature; Welsh Folklore and Mythology; Welsh Folklife and Industries. Alongside of this I intend to continue to improve my Welsh, and to read some modern Welsh books, even if they are not exactly 'literature'! I will also need to revise and upgrade my Linguistics knowledge, because although I have continued to have an interest in it since I took my degree, that is now rather a long time ago!

If you are someone who has found your way to this blog, and you are interested in Celtic Studies, then welcome. If you know something about the topics I'm addressing, and you spot an error I've made, then please let me know. I'm always happy to know if I've made a mistake, because I can then correct it, and I will then know more.