Why is the music"Keltic" but the basketball players "Seltic?"
Is there a radio equivalent of the AP Stylebook?
The AP Stylenook says that one should refer to someone in the manner they choose to name themserves. Thus, when Cassius Clay changed his name, news stories immediately started referring to him by his new name, although stories usually mentioned his former name. Cherilyn Sarkasian became Cher, not using the surname Bono after a while, nor the surname Allman at all, and Roseanne Barr dropped her surname through a series of marriages to Tom Arnold, Mr Thomas, and if I recall right, others.
And the policy became strained when Prince Rogers Nelson became just Prince, then for a while referred to himself as a one character name not found in the Latin-V charset, and which he himself could not pronounce. I presume the financial burden of being impossible to search by name in order to stream his music played a part in his decision to once aghain be Prince.
But why is celtic pronounced kell-tick except when referring to a member of the Boston basketball team founded in 1946? Presumably, that's because that's because team ownership has always referred to themselves that way, and at this point, it'd be difficult to change the pronunciation.
But why was it pronounced that way in the first place? Was the founder ignorant of the pronunciation? Did he choose to pronounce it that way to attract attention? Were there others using that pronunciation? Did the front office hope to "sell tick(et)s"?
And is there a stylebook for the spoken language that says to use the pronunciation that is used by a person or entity in referring to itself?
Under the Common Law, one is allowed to call oneself anything one desires, as long as there is no intent to commit fraud, without court approval. It is my contention that the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act, in curtailing that right, is unconstitutional under the 9th Amendment of the COTUS. There is much about that law that I find disturbing, and in violation of Amendment IX, but without that limitation on name canges, much of the rest of the PA becomes unworkable.
So why aren't we referring to the Boston Kell-tix? Is this something that comes from reading a word many times before hearing it spoken? (I struggle with embryro, tending to make it em-Bry-row mentally and having to struggle to vocalize it as EMB-bree-owe publicly, because of that initially-text introduction to the word.)
Both pronunciations are correct. the soft "c" for Celtic has older roots and also a longer history in English. English speakers started using the hard "c" about 30 to 40 years ago. The basketball team began about 100 years ago so they used the only pronunciation they knew at the time.
The "Keltics" pronunciation is what would be correct when speaking in a Celtic language. So, many English speakers have switched to that.
But sports teams like the Boston Celtics and Celtic F.C. of Glasgow have been known as "Seltics" for so long, it would be too strange to change their pronunciation.
I recall in the early or mid 1990s, NPR's "All Things Considered" did an April Fools Day story about the Boston Celtics signing a star prospect from Ireland who signed on the condition that the team change the pronunciation of its name to "Keltics."
I wish I could remember where it was – I recently heard a linguist who pronounced Celtic SELL-tik. Most dictionaries seem to give both pronunciations. It seems that the Celtic peoples did not call themselves Celts, and that the term may have entered English by way of French, where the c had the s sound, and was browbeaten by scholars into the k sound; or it may have come in from both the French (s) and Greek/Latin (k). I don't know which is right, but it seems that neither is wrong. I learned the s version, but was browbeaten by scholars into using the k, which I still use.