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variant Scottish Gaelic, an export to Britain, another). But the ones most of interest to us are those of Britain: Welsh in Wales and Cornish in Cornwall. 3 The last native speaker of Cornish died in 1891, but there is a hardy revival movement for it today.
    If English is the odd one out as Germanic languages go, Celtic languages are odd ones out as Indo-European languages go. Verbs sometimes coming last in German strikes us as weird enough, although it is actually ordinary worldwide. But in Celtic, verbs come first in a sentence, which is less ordinary worldwide, and downright freaky within Indo-European languages. There are other features in which Celtic marches to the beat of its own drum, and two of them are the way it uses do and - ing .
    Take a look at this in Welsh. Nes means “did.” Welsh puts words in a different order than English, and so nes is always first. What’s interesting is that it is there, just as in English:

    Welsh uses do in the same meaningless way that English does. Do just sits there taking up space, not contributing any meaning to the sentence.
    Note that Welsh is different from English in one way: it uses do in “normal” sentences, affirmative ones as well, as we see in that third sentence. When a Welshman states Nes i agor , they are using the words that come out in English as “I did open,” but not with an emphatic meaning as in our I did open . They mean it as if we were speaking English in the Elizabethan period and said, “Since it was so hot out, I did open a window for you.”
    But in that people still said things like that then, English was more like Welsh than it is today. Even further back in Middle English, one might say for “You wept” Thou dudest wepe . Our sense that to speak fake “Olde English” means sticking “dosts” and “doths” all over the place corresponds to a Middle English reality, which persisted for centuries afterward. Here is Gertrude in Hamlet , addressing same:
     
    Alas, how is’t with you
    That you do bend your eye on vacancy,
    And with th’incorporal air do hold discourse? (III, iv, 120-22)
     
    Upon which he answers (147-48):
     
    My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time,
And makes as healthful music.
     
    English has gone its own way since and dropped this do usage in affirmative (“neutral”) sentences, keeping it in the negative and question contexts. But there was a time when English was even more like Welsh on this score than it is now.
     
     
    Or how about English’s progressive construction, as in Mary is singing . In English, - ing leads a double life. In one guise, it makes a verb into a gerund, which means that it makes the verb into a noun. One sings, and one may enjoy that which is known as singing , a noun: Singing is fun. As a matter of fact, gerunds are sometimes called “verb-nouns.”
    Then, - ing has a second identity, when it is used in the progressive construction: Mary is singing. Here, singing is not a verb-noun— Mary is singing does not mean “Mary embodies the act of rendering song.” Singing in Mary is singing is just a verb, specifically what is called the present participle form of a verb. Our - ing is two things.
    The important point is the fact that in English, as we have seen, this progressive Mary is singing construction is our present tense. If someone asks you what you’re doing as you warble “Just the Way You Are,” your answer must be “I’m singing,” not “I sing.” Interestingly, in Welsh as well, to answer that question you must use a progressive construction: Welsh and other Celtic languages have the same - ing fetish as English. Remembering that Celtic word order is odd to our eyes and ears, in Welsh, if someone asks, “What’s our Mary doing?”, the answer is not “Mary sings” but “Mary is in singing”:
     
    Mae Mair yn canu.
is Mary in singing
     
    Canu is the verb-noun for sing in Welsh: “Mary is in the act of singing.”
    Now, to be sure, in Welsh the present is