The Early Concept of the Celtic Colour Term glas in Welsh and Irish and its Later Semantic Diversification

Abstract

The Celtic colour term glas has been subject to a number of misconceptions over the decades, e.g.that it is a grue category, that it is untranslatable, and that the range of colour shades covered by glas is cross-linguistically rare. Coming from a diachronic perspective, this article aims to give a logical explanation of the developments of the semantics of glas, followed by an overview of the synchronic semantics of the word in both Irish and Welsh.