Krazy Keltic or Silly Seltic?

Pic by Ontzy @ sxc.hu

As I am in the habit of doing, I found myself in an idle moment the other day musing upon why the Scottish football team (that would be ‘soccer’ to my American readers) Glasgow Celtic is pronounced with a soft c (an ‘s’, in effect) rather than following the usual convention of the hard ‘c’ (or ‘k’) sound.

I felt an article coming on, so you won’t be surprised that today’s little missive has a football theme to it. The reason for this apparent mispronunciation comes from the original Greek word keltoi, used to describe the Celtic peoples. As a little aside, you may be interested to know that what we know these days as Celtic culture (that is to say, inhabitants and Celtic speakers in the UK, Ireland, France and Spain) was once a far more widespread affair. Gaulish (including various subsets of it, including Galician) was spoken in countries as diverse as France, Turkey and Belgium. Irish, Scottish and Manx (Isle of Man) Celtic is all part of one linguistic family (Goidelic) as are Welsh, Breton and Cornish (Brythonic). So now you know.

Back to the subject, because it didn’t come to us directly from Greek, but from French (via Latin), the C is a soft one, as is customary before an E in the French language – centrale, cercle or célébration are near-English examples. Perfect, so now we know why it’s pronounced selltic, don’t we? No, in fact, we don’t. You see, the modern-day pronunciation is almost always kelltic, with the Greek hard K. This is because many scholars and educated people over time have come to accept this as ‘correct’, because the root word is Greek, the hard C is ataken as the correct form. Even today, the German language will use a K in place of a hard C when the root is Greek – Kinema, for example.

The reason for the soft C of Celtic FC is that the club was formed by an Irish Marist (devotee of Mary) brother by the name of Brother Walfrid, in order to “alleviate poverty in Glasgow’s East End parishes”. The name Celtic (selltic) was proposed by him to “reflect the club’s Irish and Scottish roots”. Because he pronounced it with a soft C, that’s how it’s always been pronounced.

While we’re here, I will tell you why it’s known as soccer and not football in certain parts of the world. In the USA and Canada, for example, it is used to distinguish the game of Association Football from American Football or Gridiron. Naturally, the Americans and Canadians refer to their game (a variation on the many forms of Rugby Football that were being played in America in the early days) as ‘football’, and thus needed a name for the other kind.

Luckily, there was a term that had been hanging around in the UK for a long time – soccer. The term is often attributed to Charles Wreford-Brown, captain of the English national team in 1894 and 1895. He allegedly (I say ‘allegedly’, as there is little or no evidence to the claim) preferred to shorten words and give them a more ‘chummy’ feel. When asked if he’d like a game of ‘rugger’ – the common abbreviation for Rugby Football – he answered that he’d prefer a game of ‘asoccer’, a contraction of Association Football. The term stuck and became shortened to soccer.

A note to all those not from the UK: We call it football. It is never, ever, called soccer.

Yours, sitting on the sideline with a meat pie and a Bovril,

Tom