We Are the Yew and Flame

Tha Gàidhlig agam.

The normal English translation is “I speak Gaelic”, but the construction is closer to “Gaelic is at me”. Aig means “at”, and agam is the form used with first-person singular reference. So, in a sense, you have Gaelic. I only have beagan at the moment, admittedly.

Scottish Gaelic — Gàidhlig na h-Alba — is the Celtic language I keep coming back to. Partly because I like how it sounds, partly because of my relationship with Scotland, and partly because learning it makes language itself feel strange again. I mean that as a compliment. English eventually became so natural to me that I rarely have to think about what it is doing. Gaelic makes me think about almost everything.

Sometimes that means discovering a grammatical idea I find genuinely beautiful. Sometimes it means staring at a perfectly innocent consonant wondering why it has acquired an h. This is apparently what we do for fun now.

Learning Language Slowly

I learnt English at a delay because of my disabilities. I have vivid memories of my mum preparing physical flashcards for me, patiently helping me build up language one word at a time. English eventually became my first language, but it was not something that arrived effortlessly or all at once.

For a while, I could not even say my brother’s name because it contained the /θ/ sound. I knew who I meant and I knew the name; I simply could not make my mouth say it. So for a long while, he became “E-who”.

That probably explains some of the affection I have for language learning now. I remember what it feels like for a word to be new, slippery and difficult to hold on to. I remember repetition, physical reminders and somebody willing to go over the same thing again. I also remember that a sound can be more than a sound when you are struggling with it: it can be a barrier between you and somebody you love.

Learning Gàidhlig is obviously not the same as learning my first language, but there is something familiar in needing language broken down into manageable pieces again. A flashcard, an example sentence, a repeated sound and a tiny moment of recognition can all matter when a language does not come easily.

I have been learning on and off for a while, lately leaning particularly on Duolingo’s Scottish Gaelic course and SpeakGaelic. They do different things for me. Duolingo is good at keeping the habit alive, giving me small exercises I can fit into an ordinary day and the brief satisfaction of recognising a word I have seen before. SpeakGaelic gives me more room to understand why the language works the way it does, with proper explanations, listening practice and enough context to stop Gaelic becoming a collection of disconnected vocabulary cards. SpeakGaelic’s curriculum was developed with Sabhal Mòr Ostaig and also connects its lessons with BBC Gaelic media.

I have also been spending time with Madra Teanga, a resource for Irish Gaeilge. My boyfriend is learning Irish, so it gives us something we can work with alongside each other while also making the family resemblance between the languages easier to see. Sometimes that resemblance helps; sometimes it is precisely what trips us up. Related languages are not interchangeable languages.

None of these resources has magically made either of us fluent. We still forget vocabulary almost immediately and occasionally stare at sentences for longer than is probably dignified. But they make it easier to come back, and that matters more than pretending every lesson sticks the first time.

A Warmth Around the Languages

There is something about the wider Celtic linguistic world which has felt unexpectedly warm to me. I do not mean that every person, institution or community connected with a Celtic language is automatically welcoming. No culture is that simple. I mean the feeling I have had while learning: of being invited to sit with something old and living, of finding humour alongside seriousness, and of encountering people who understand that learners need time, repetition and the freedom to make embarrassing mistakes before a language starts feeling like somewhere they can stand.

That warmth matters to me. I came to these languages partly through curiosity, but I have stayed because they have often felt generous. Even when I am only recognising a word or managing a very small sentence, I do not feel as though I am merely collecting facts about a distant culture. I feel as though I am being allowed to approach something carefully.

Perhaps that is connected to how I learnt English. I know what it is like to need somebody to wait while you find a sound. Learning another language has not erased those memories; it has given them somewhere new to go.

That feeling reaches beyond language for me. It also reaches into my Pagan faith.

I do not mean that Celtic languages and Paganism are the same thing. They are not. Modern Pagan faiths are diverse, and the historical religions of peoples who spoke Celtic languages cannot simply be reconstructed as one complete, untouched system. There is no single ancient Celtic religion sitting intact beneath the modern world waiting for us to uncover it.

But I recognise a similar attitude in the way I approach both. I am drawn towards relationship rather than possession. A language is not a museum object I own once I have memorised enough vocabulary, and a sacred tradition is not a costume or a collection of old-looking symbols. Both ask me to pay attention, to approach with humility and to accept that I am entering something larger than my own immediate understanding.

Living traditions survive not because they remain perfectly unchanged, but because people continue to return to them, argue about them, practise them and find ways to carry them forward. That is close to how my Pagan faith feels to me.

I am not trying to pretend I live in an ancient world. I do not. I am a modern person with modern problems, modern technology and a phone containing far too many language-learning apps. My faith is shaped by the present as much as by the past.

But the past still speaks. Sometimes it does so through a word whose grammar makes me stop and think; sometimes through a story, a seasonal observance, a relationship with a place or a moment of attention given to the living world. Sometimes it is simply the recognition that I am not the first person to look at a tree, a fire, a river or the turning of the year and understand that the world is more than a collection of useful objects.

The Yew and the Flame

The yew and the flame in my title are personal images rather than claims about one provable ancient symbolism. The yew suggests endurance, memory and rootedness to me. The flame suggests warmth, change and something passed from one person to another.

They also happen to sit quietly behind our names.

My name, Ewan, is an English form historically associated with Gaelic Eòghann and related forms such as Irish Eoghan. The name is often explained as meaning “born of the yew”, although that etymology is not completely certain; proposed explanations include older Celtic forms and possible influence from Latin Eugenius.

My boyfriend’s name, Aidan, comes from Irish Aodhán, a diminutive of Aodh, traditionally associated with fire. “Little fire” is therefore a reasonable traditional gloss, even if, as with many very old names, the historical story is more complicated than one neat translation.

I am learning Gàidhlig and he is learning Gaeilge. Even before we try to speak to each other, our names are already carrying a tiny piece of the relationship between the two languages.

Yew and flame are not a complete theology, and they are not evidence of an unbroken religious inheritance. But they are evocative. One reaches towards a tree capable of living for centuries; the other towards brightness, warmth and transformation. Together they make me think about continuity without sameness: what survives, what changes, and what can be carried between people without remaining exactly what it was before.

Learning Beside Each Other

My boyfriend and I are both native English speakers, so English remains our lingua franca. That is useful because neither of us is remotely ready to conduct the administration of an international relationship entirely in a Goidelic language.

But we can sometimes manage small exchanges without translating everything back into English. We recognise shared vocabulary and familiar grammatical shapes, and occasionally one of us says something which is close enough to the other language that the meaning lands. Other times we confidently identify a cognate which turns out not to mean what we hoped it meant.

It is not exactly fluent cross-Celtic communication. There is plenty of repetition, guessing and checking. But I love that we are learning in parallel: two people standing at the edges of related languages and occasionally finding that there is enough shared ground between them to meet.

A family resemblance is interesting precisely because the people in the photograph are not the same person. Irish is not Scottish Gaelic. Scottish Gaelic is not failed Irish. Manx is not Scottish Gaelic with strange spelling. They are relatives with their own speakers, literature, history, pronunciation and arguments about grammar.

That distinction matters. It is much nicer than treating one language as a corrupted version of another, and it gives us something to learn beside each other without requiring us to learn exactly the same thing.

Celtic Is Bigger Than Gaelic

The modern Celtic languages are commonly divided into two broad groups. The Goidelic, or Gaelic, group consists of Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx. The Brittonic group consists of Welsh, Breton and Cornish. These are historical linguistic groupings, not claims that the languages inside each branch are mutually intelligible or perfectly uniform. Cambridge’s overview of Celtic languages gives the same broad Goidelic/Brittonic division while discussing the much longer history behind it.

Cornish ceased to have a continuous community of native speakers by the end of the eighteenth century and has since undergone revival. Manx lost its last traditional native speakers in the twentieth century and has also undergone substantial revival. Even the apparently simple question of how many Celtic languages are “living” therefore comes with a historical footnote.

Then there are the languages which did not survive into the modern period: Gaulish, Celtiberian, Lepontic and others which once placed Celtic languages across a much larger area of Europe than the Atlantic fringe we tend to associate with them now.

That geographical fact still catches me occasionally. Breton is Celtic. You can cross the Channel into Brittany and remain inside the same broad linguistic branch as Welsh, Cornish, Irish and Gàidhlig. Meanwhile English, despite living alongside Celtic languages for essentially its entire history, belongs to the Germanic branch alongside German, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages.

Language families do not particularly care about modern borders, and culture rarely stays neatly inside them either.

The Celtic world is not one single culture. Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall and the Isle of Man are not interchangeable. But connections remain visible across distance: language, music, stories, place-names, artistic traditions and continuing arguments about what relationship the present should have with the past.

For me, Paganism is one of the ways I notice those connections. Not because Celtic culture is inherently Pagan, and certainly not because being Pagan gives me some special claim to Celtic identity. My faith simply makes me attentive to continuity, place and the survival of things which are often discussed as though they belong entirely to history.

The Number Four

Those histories leave little fingerprints.

Take the number four. Scottish Gaelic has ceithir, Irish has ceathair and Manx has kiare. Then look at the Brittonic languages: Welsh pedwar, Breton pevar, Cornish peswar. You can see those forms lined up directly in this Cambridge University Press excerpt from The Syntax of Welsh.

That c/k versus p difference reflects an old historical development in Proto-Celtic labiovelar sounds. It is the basis of the traditional labels “Q-Celtic” and “P-Celtic”, although those names are shorthand for sound correspondences rather than two perfectly uniform ancient blocks. In the Goidelic languages, the relevant inherited sound generally remained or developed as something k-like; in Brittonic it developed as something p-like.

Obviously, the modern words have undergone plenty of other changes since. Still, I love that you can line up one ordinary number and suddenly several thousand years of linguistic divergence are sitting there in a handful of letters.

It makes a language family stop being a diagram. It becomes something you can hear.

That is also one of the patterns I keep noticing elsewhere. A sound changes, a word travels and a language divides. Something old survives, but not untouched. Continuity through transformation.

Gàidhlig Sounds Like Itself

Of the family, Gàidhlig is the one I am actually trying to learn, and its sound system was one of the first things that properly caught me.

Gaelic spelling has a reputation among English speakers for being completely unhinged. You see something like Gàidhealtachd and, from an English spelling perspective, I understand the instinctive response of “what on Earth am I supposed to do with that?”

The mistake is assuming the letters are following English rules. They are not.

One of the fundamental distinctions in Gaelic is between broad and slender consonants. Broad consonants are associated in spelling with a, o and u; slender consonants with e and i. LearnGaelic’s guide to the Gaelic alphabetexplains the distinction and the spelling rule behind it.

Hence the traditional rule:

caol ri caol agus leathann ri leathann

Slender with slender and broad with broad.

The surrounding vowels help signal the quality of consonants, although the exact pronunciation depends on the consonant, dialect and position in the word. LearnGaelic also has a pronunciation guide where the broad and slender forms can actually be heard rather than merely described.

Once you know that, some of the spellings which initially look like somebody dropped a Scrabble bag start revealing what they are doing.

I am not claiming this means I can flawlessly pronounce every Gaelic word put in front of me. Absolutely not. There are still combinations of letters which make me feel like my mouth has received a task it did not compile successfully.

But the spelling has stopped looking arbitrary. There is a big difference between “I do not understand the rule” and “there is no rule”. Gaelic has rules. Gaelic has loads of rules. Some of them are waiting around corners with an h.

Sèimheachadh, My Beloved Problem

Lenition, or sèimheachadh, is one of those rules. It is a grammatical and phonological process affecting the beginning of a word. In modern written Gaelic it is often represented by adding an h: b can become bh, m becomes mh, c becomes ch, and so on. The exact pronunciation change depends on the consonant and its environment. The Scottish Gaelic Grammar Wiki’s article on lenition goes into considerably more detail about both the written and phonological changes.

Lenition appears in ordinary grammatical contexts after certain possessives, prepositions and particles, among other environments. This means the form of a word cannot always be recognised simply by comparing its first few letters with the dictionary form you memorised.

Which is wonderful and annoying. Mostly both.

My English-speaking brain initially wanted words to behave like little immutable objects. Here is the word, the word has a spelling, and I place the word in a sentence. Celtic languages are quite happy to interfere with that assumption.

The grammatical environment can reach into the next word and alter its beginning. Irish does this. Welsh has several mutation systems of its own. Gàidhlig does it. Suddenly the boundary between “this word” and “the grammar around this word” feels slightly less solid.

I find that genuinely fascinating because it makes grammar visible.

English obviously changes words too. We have sing, sang, sung, plurals, possessives, remnants of cases in pronouns and enough irregular verbs to annoy generations of schoolchildren. We are simply used to them.

With Gàidhlig, I get to encounter those mechanisms consciously. There are benefits to incompetence: you notice everything.

Gaelic Is at Me

Then there are the prepositions.

Gaelic has what are usually called prepositional pronouns, where a preposition and pronoun combine into one form. So aig + mi gives agam, aig + thu gives agad, and aig + e gives aige. The Scottish Gaelic Grammar Wiki’s pronoun tableslay out the wider system.

This is how we get Tha Gàidhlig agam. Similar constructions appear everywhere.

Tha gaol agam ort.

“I love you.”

Except gaol is love, agam is “at me”, and ort is the form of air used with second-person singular thu, roughly “on you”. There is love at me, on you.

Literal translations have to be handled carefully. Native speakers are not mentally constructing tiny philosophical word puzzles every time they tell somebody they love them. Tha gaol agam ort means “I love you”. Still, as a learner, seeing how the sentence is built is half the fun.

Languages are not simply separate dictionaries containing labels for the same universal set of sentences. They make different grammatical decisions.

Even saying that I am learning Gaelic gives me Tha mi ag ionnsachadh Gàidhlig. The verb comes first. Scottish Gaelic is generally described as having verb-subject-object order in its basic clause structure, unlike the subject-verb-object order English has trained me to expect.

The construction also uses the verbal noun ionnsachadh with ag after tha, so it is not simply an English sentence shuffled into a different order. Tha mi means “I am”.

That stopped feeling backwards surprisingly quickly. Now I occasionally catch myself wanting to put verbs first elsewhere, which I suppose means Gàidhlig has successfully begun vandalising the English section of my brain.

Good.

My boyfriend encounters related structures in Gaeilge, but not identical ones. The mutations are different, the verb forms are different, and the prepositional pronouns are related but not interchangeable. Sometimes we recognise the shape of what the other is saying; sometimes we do not. For anything complicated, we return to English and remain grateful that lingua francas exist.

Cousins, Rather Than Copies

Learning about the rest of the Celtic family has made me appreciate Gàidhlig more, not less.

Written Irish sometimes gives me the peculiar sensation of almost understanding something. The vocabulary looks nearly familiar and the grammar looks nearly familiar, then one spelling or construction shifts sideways just enough to remind me that, no, I do not in fact speak Irish.

My boyfriend gets the mirror image of that with Gàidhlig. Manx can feel stranger again because its spelling tradition looks dramatically different even where the underlying relationships remain. Welsh, Cornish and Breton sit further away, where similarities often become visible at a deeper historical level rather than through obvious word-for-word resemblance.

That is the interesting bit: family resemblance without identity.

The same principle is useful in thinking about Pagan traditions. There is no single “Celtic Paganism” which every modern Pagan is secretly practising under a different name. There are reconstructionists, revivalists and eclectic practitioners; people whose practice centres particular deities, places or seasonal cycles; and people whose faith would not fit neatly into any of those categories.

I am not trying to turn language learning into evidence for a religious claim. I am trying to explain why the two things feel connected in my life. Both ask me to resist flattening, and both give me reasons to care about what survives without pretending survival means preservation in amber.

I Wrote the Other Post Already

I wrote last November about Scottish Gaelic, heritage and the right to care even when your relationship with a language does not fit somebody else’s purity test. I still believe what I wrote there. I also do not particularly want to write it again.

There is a danger with minoritised languages that almost every public conversation about them gets dragged immediately towards decline, legitimacy, politics and survival. Those things matter enormously.

Scottish Gaelic had 69,701 reported speakers in Scotland in the 2022 census, while 130,161 people reported some ability to speak, read, write or understand it. Those are different measures: the first is reported speaking ability, while the second includes anybody reporting at least one of those four skills. The Scottish Government’s Gaelic overviewsummarises the census figures.

The number reporting that they could speak Gaelic increased compared with 2011 and was, according to the Scottish Government, the first increase between Scottish censuses since 1971. That is worth caring about. The figures are also self-reported measures, not perfect measurements of fluency, daily use or the long-term health of the language.

But Gàidhlig deserves posts which are allowed to find it interesting too.

It deserves somebody getting excited because ceithir and pedwar preserve the consequences of an ancient sound change. It deserves learners complaining affectionately about lenition, terrible first attempts at pronunciation, songs you only partly understand, dictionaries permanently open in browser tabs and conversations where you recognise three words and feel absurdly pleased with yourself.

It deserves two people learning related languages, managing a tiny conversation and then falling cheerfully back into English when the grammar gets too ambitious. It deserves remembering that learning language can be slow and physical, and that a sound which seems trivial to one person can be a real obstacle to another.

A language which only appears when discussing whether it is dying has already been put halfway into a museum.

Gàidhlig is a language people use. People argue in it, tell jokes in it, raise children in it, broadcast football in it, write poetry in it and send completely mundane messages in it. Learners mangle it and try again.

That matters.

Paganism, for me, deserves the same resistance to becoming merely decorative. Faith is something practised rather than displayed. It can be prayer, ritual, study, seasonal observance, ethical attention, relationship with place, care for the living world or simply the repeated act of turning towards what feels sacred.

I would quite like to be less bad at Gàidhlig. I would also quite like to become better at living my faith in the ordinary parts of my life, rather than only in moments which feel obviously spiritual.

For now, though, tha beagan Gàidhlig agam. I have a little Gaelic.

My boyfriend has a little Gaeilge. Between us, we have enough of two related languages to say a few things to each other and enough English to keep going when we run out.

Between us, we also carry a yew and a flame: not a complete explanation and not an ancient certainty, but two small images of endurance, warmth, change and what can be passed from one person to another.

There is something I really like about being able to say that.