'Celtic' Pronunciation: Is It 'Seltik" or "Keltik'?

My family loves basketball, and from my name, you may have guessed that I have some Irish heritage, so I grew up hearing about Boston’s team, the Celtics. That’s spelled with a C, but I also know many academics refer to the language as “Keltic” (which can be spelled with a C or a K, but is pronounced like a K). So I started wondering: What’s the deal? What’s right? Is it “Seltic” or “Keltic”? 

Modern dictionaries say both pronunciations are acceptable. All the dictionaries I checked put the “Keltic” pronunciation first, but contrary to what you may have been told, the first pronunciation listed in a dictionary isn’t necessarily the correct or the most common pronunciation.

Is the first dictionary pronunciation the best one?

From what I can tell, it seems like this rule was more common in the past. In some dictionaries, especially older ones, the first pronunciation may be considered to be the preferred one, but it’s definitely not a universal rule. 

So for our “Seltic/Keltic” debate, it doesn’t really matter that most modern dictionaries list the “keltic” pronunciation first.

The argument for the ‘Keltic’ pronunciation

The argument for the “Keltic” pronunciation is that it comes from the Greek word "Keltoi," but although the people the Greeks called the Keltoi may have spoken an early form of Celtic, they didn't inhabit the British Isles — the lands we think of as Celtic today. Instead they lived in a large region of Western Europe called Gaul, which, from what I could gather included France, Spain, Luxembourg, Belgium, and parts of other regions.

The American Heritage Dictionary has a particularly interesting usage note on the pronunciation and says that “The introduction of the (k) sound is a linguistic change started by scholars, contravening the historical development of the word.” In other words, it doesn’t match the real history.

The argument for the ‘Seltic' pronunciation 

The argument for the “Seltic” pronunciation is that the word didn’t come from Greek. Instead, it came into English in the early 1700s, in the way we use it today — to refer to certain peoples of the British Isles — from the French word "celtique."

"Celtique" made its way into French from Latin, and nearly every other English word we got from Latin-derived French that starts with C-E-L is pronounced with...

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