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The Celts are commonly regarded as one of the Indo-European ethnolinguistic groups, speaking Celtic languages derived from Proto-Celtic. Numerous archaeobotanical, palaeogenetic and historical linguistic analyses demonstrate that the most ancient European pulse crops, such as chickpea (Cicer arietinum), grass pea (Lathyrus sativus), lentil (Lens culinaris), lupins (Lupinus spp.), pea (Pisum sativum), vetches (Vicia spp.) and faba bean (Vicia faba), were widely used in everyday life as early as sixth millennium BC. The Latin word denoting ‘pea’, pisum, was borrowed by both Brythonic and Goidelic languages, spoken during the first centuries AD in Britain and Ireland, and produced the words denoting ‘pea’ in their modern members. The ultimate origin of the words denoting ‘faba bean’ in all living and attested Celtic languages is the Proto-Indo-European root *bhabh-, denoting the same crop, literally meaning something swollen and imported from both the Latin faba and the Old Norse baun. The majority of the words denoting ‘grain’ in the Celtic languages are descendants of the Proto-Celtic root *grāno, denoting ‘grain’ and originating from the Proto-Indo-European *g'er[a]n-, *grān-, denoting ‘grain’ and ‘corn’.

This paper examines the evolution of aspectual formations in Insular Celtic. It is argued that the emergence of these formations and their unusual morphosyntactic structure have been determined by internal systemic factors. It is also suggested that the manner in which these formations developed is of importance for our understanding of the processes involved in the emergence of grammatical subsystems in general. It is demonstrated that the Celtic aspectual system evolves in a manner reminiscent of the concept of developmental stratification and, significantly, that it evolves in a remarkably coherent and ordered fashion. The inexorable and structured nature of this evolution would seem to provide evidence for the claim that there may exist within languages a certain teleological impulse; in other words, that rather than being simply random, language change is in some fundamental and meaningful sense goal-directed.