Celtic

[hannah333]

When is it pronounced 'Seltic' and when is it 'Keltic'?

[saxy_jag]

As far as I'm aware, 'seltic' refers only to the football club and its associated ephemera and fan base (ie. he's 'seltic')

'Keltic' is the historical term that describes the myth, history, musical genre, legend etc etc - the ethnic origin.

[redhead23]

dont u mean celtic as in irish or gaelic

[Quizmonster]

The word �Celt' comes from both Latin (Celtae) and Greek (Keltoi). It is because of the double source that the word's adjective form, 'Celtic', is pronounced in two different ways. For example, the name of the Glasgow football team, Celtic , is pronounced with a soft C...Seltic from the Latin, whereas the people named as Celts are usually pronounced with a hard C...Keltic from the Greek.
The original Celts were an Indo-European people in the Iron-Age, spread across the area from the British Isles in the north and Spain in the south to what is now Turkey. The Roman Empire absorbed them all as Britons, Gauls, Galatians and so on.
In modern-day Britain, people still described as Celts - with the hard 'k' sound - are highland Scots, Irishmen, Welshmen and Cornishmen.

[saxy_jag]

dont u mean celtic as in irish or gaelic

That too, redhead.

Interesting, Quizmonster, that I've never been taught to pronounce Latin Cs softly. For that sound, words had an S (or do you mean that our soft C comes from the Latin S?).

[heathfield]

Bit about it here

[Quizmonster]

Saxy, I cannot hope to offer a better explanation than the one given in H's link above.
As regards Latin pronunciation in general, it is often said that it depends entirely upon how your own Classics master pronounced it! Some, for example, pronounce 'v' as 'w' and 'c' as 'ch', just to give two instances, where others use 'v' and 'k'.
Thus, we hear Caesar's famous words, "I came, I saw, I conquered"..."Veni, vidi, vici" as "Way nee, wee dee, wee kee" or "Way nee, wee dee, wee chee" or "Vay nee vee dee, vee chee" or "Vay nee, vee dee vee kee". Need I go on? The plain truth is that nobody - not even the Classics professors at Oxbridge - knows for sure how Latin was pronounced in Roman times.
In modern Italian, which may well be some sort of guide, we certainly hear the 'ch' sound in words such as 'la dolce vita'. Similarly, in Wilfred Owen's poem, Dulce et decorum est the 'c' in 'dulce' is generally pronounced 'ch', which is one variant of the soft sound.