The Germans appear to have called the Celts Wolah, a name derived from the Celtic tribe the Volcæ, who were so long their neighbours, out of which appellation came the Anglo-Saxon Wealh and the modern English "Welsh." There is one curious characteristic distinguishing, from its very earliest appearance, the Celtic language from its Indo-European sisters: this is the loss of the letter _p_ both at the beginning of a word and when it is placed between two vowels.[7] This dropping of the letter _p_ had already given to the Celtic language a special character of its own, at the time when breaking forth from their earliest home the Celts crossed the Rhine and proceeded, perhaps a thousand years before Christ, to establish themselves in the British Isles. The Celts who first colonised Ireland said, for instance, _atir_ for _pater_, but they had not yet experienced, nor did they ever experience, that curious linguistic change which at a later time is assumed to have come over the Celts of the Continent and caused them to not only recover their faculty of pronouncing _p_, but to actually _change into a p_ the Indo-European guttural _q_. Their descendants, the modern Irish, to this very day retain the primitive word-forms which had their origin a thousand years before Christ. So much so is this the case that the Welsh antiquary Lhuyd, writing in the last century, asserted, and with truth, that there were "scarce any words in the Irish besides what are borrowed from the Latin or some other language that begin with _p_, insomuch that in an ancient alphabetical vocabulary I have by me, that letter is omitted."[8] Even with the introduction of Christianity and the knowledge of Latin the ancient Irish persisted in their repugnance to this letter, and made of the Latin _Pasch-a_ (Easter) the word _Cásg_, and of the Latin _purpur-a_ the Irish _curcur_.