Q: Why beat a dead horse?
A: It's good exercise, and the horse doesn't mind.

The thread establishes pretty clearly that there are two competing pronunciations. Both have respectable pedigrees and a substantial number of supporters. That happens quite a lot in the history of the language. Typically, one of two things will happen. One of the forms drops out ("fore-head" displaces "forrid" at least in most of the U.S.) or there is fission. The fission may be social -- by economic or educational stratum ("tray-zhoor" vs. "treasure" in my area), by register ("I" when talking to socially distant people; "Ah" with intimates in the American Midwest) -- or they develop different meanings: bride/bird; skirt/shirt.

Someone observed that "Celt" as an ethnic term is a late borrowing from a period of cultural consciousness raising, and that's an entirely new kind of division. It involves competition for expertise, for cultural bona fides. And whereas earlier cultural masquerades had people aping upper class usage, now British politicians hide posh accents under an adopted working-class idiom (which happens already in the public schools, I'm told), just as speakers of standard American English take on a generalized, artificial folksiness when running for office or -- this is gonna hurt -- aspiring folksingers sometimes adopt a generalized "country" or "southern" dialect that's cobbled together from fragments a dialectician would recognize as coming from all over hell and back, and have nothing in common except they're not in use in the upper Ohio River valley, which is the basis for American Broadcast Standard. West Virginia forms mix with Tidewater and Bayou in a way that's not found in the ordinary language of any speaker anywhere. Olivia Newton-John had a pretty voice, but the dialect was harder on the ears than the tunes and arrangements.

Not that I'm pure here -- I'm so self-conscious about pronunciation and audiences I gave up worrying about sincerity or my "real" voice years ago.

But notice how worked up we get about the usage of "Celt," and there was no followup to the sensible counterexample offered: "keramikos" -- nobody has much stake in that, do they? My status as "insider" and "authentic" isn't affected either way. The whole conversation -- which is wonderful -- has me thinking about all the issues and arguments in my own field of verbal folklore, where it would be safer to accuse somebody of being a drunk or an adulterer than of being an academic.

Maybe it's the doctrine of the Fall: after self-consciousness, zen being is impossible. After you become aware of "folk" as a category, you can never really be entirely sure you're inside of that dividing line you've learned to draw. But the desire to draw it remains very strong, and I can't help believing there's something right about so strong an impulse, even if it's demonstrably futile and absurd.

I'm blathering. Thanks for your patience.

Adam