--- In cybalist@..., guto rhys <gutorhys@...> wrote:
>
> Most sources with which I am familiar place the linguistic boundary
between Celtic and Germanic around the present Dutch border with
Germany but the situation does seem unresolved, because, as you
mention, there does seem to be some evidence of Celtic spoken more to
the East.
Tacitus' Germania has Celts both east and west of the Germani,
indicative of a recent expansion of the latter. Most agree that the
Romans did not know the Germani before Caesar, earlier than that
Greek writers placed Celts and Scythians as neighbors in eastern
Europe. I think that an expansion by the Germani into present-day
Germany at that time is the consensus today, the only difference
being that my idea is that they came from the southeast, not from
Scandinavia (Some people may think I'm a nationalist. Obviously I'm
not doing a very good job of it).
>
> I doubt very much if 'Cimbri' is related to Cymru/Cymry (both being
the same word, only quite recently spelt differently to differenciate
between the country and the inhabitants). Cymry (being the
more 'correct' form is the plural (<*com+brogi) while
Cymro 'Welshman' is from the singular (<*com+brogos) meaning 'of the
same area'. At the time of Tacitus, the word is likely to have been
pronounced 'combrog-'. As I see it, one would then have to explain
not only 'o>i' in the first syllable, 'o>i' in the second but also
the loss of final 'g'. I admit it is very tempting to see a
connection. Does 'Cimbri' have and proposed Germanic etymologies?
No. not to my knowledge, and suddenly I recall that this was
discussed earlier in this list. But consider this: <Cymru> has an
etymology. Neither <Cimbri> nor <Cimmerian> do. Perhaps we might let
that etymology do service for all three? But that would make the
Cimmerians Celtic too. Eg:
700 BCE Cimmerians are forced to leave Pontic area north of the Black
Sea.
700 - 500 BCE The Hallstatt culture
500 BCE What was once called "Celtic Iron Age" (now "Pre-Roman Iron
Age") begins in Denmark. Invasion of Cimbri/Cimmerians?
Question: Is Hallstatt = the Cimmerians?
Schmidt mentions that Celtic shows signs of very early contact with
Eastern Europe, with Indo-Iranian languages in particular.
>
> Very interesting about the dialects of the area. Would a Celtic
substratum (itself having masculine, feminine and neuter genders)
have caused the confusion you mention? I can think of a few examples
in Breton where the gender of a noun has apparently changed to
conform with that of French, but do other languages (French for
example) follow a similar pattern caused by a linguistic substratum?
There is nothing particularly Celtic about the confusion. Any
monolingual English, eg., faces the same problem when he learns
French: there are few clues in the nouns themselves as to which
gender they are, so he will make frequent mistakes in gender, or
decide to forget the whole thing and make all nouns "la" or "le". The
difference is, with a conquering population picking up the language
of the subjugated natives, he won't face censure for making mistakes;
his pronunciation is right by definition.
So what causes the confusion is this: a linguistic group is learning
another group's language which
1) is sufficiently different from their own that they can't construct
rules of "folk linguistics" to identify nouns of the foreign language
with those of their own (in other words, you can't call them dialects
of the same language anymore), and
2) doesn't have overt markings for gender in nouns (as do Spanish,
Italian and Russian).
With a Celtic population learning a Germanic language, as in England
and, as I claim, Jutland, both criteria would met after the loss of
unstressed vowels in Germanic (happened in all its branches).
As for French: Latin nouns are easy to gender-determine based on
their endings (at least in the first two declensions).
>
> Guto
>
Torsten