Mind your P's and Q's

Now when the Celtic social and cultural groups reached the northwestern most tip of the continent, they faced the ocean. To the west was water for as long as you could go. To the north and northeast was a number of islands that had yet to be settled by the Celts. Their language had, pretty much, been uniform until the migration across this water generated a branch. There were those who used their lips versus those who used their hard palate to form their sounds and words. The sounds "B" and "P" became dominate in the group that moved to the southwestern tip of the larger island. The sounds "Q" and "Mu" dominated among those who migrated to the smaller island. As these Celtic cultures settled and soon dominated the folks already there, this branching came to be called P-Celtic (Brythonic) and Q-Celtic (Gaulish) by the linguists who study such a thing today. The P-Celtic then moved along the western coastal area northward, and the Q-Celtic settled among the folks on the island to become Ireland. The Scots who first arrived at the smaller island picked up this dialect, and continued to form the Gaelic tongue. The bilabial folks (who used opposing lips to make sounds) formed the Brythonic tongue; these also formed, on a return trip to the continent, the Breton tongue. There was another branch of the Celtic language to form on the smallest island in the Irish Sea, The Isle of Man. This language root called Manx is extinct today.

Now the Germanic groups that remained north of the Danube formed their northern and western language branches. It was the western branch that became the root for English, Flemish, Dutch, Afrikaans,Low German, and High German.

Again, understanding this distinction between the two language roots is the beginning to really understand the true origin of our JONES surname.