Re: Lepontic

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 110
Date: 1999-10-26

Attachments :
Lepontic is routinely classed as Celtic mainly because it was assigned to the Celtic branch in M. Lejeune's pioneering and influential Lepontica (1971). It does show affinities with that branch (such as similar case endings beside dissimilar ones, or a preterite in -tu), but its phonology is "Celtoid" rather than Celtic. It doesn't display some of the diagnostically Celtic developments, such as the the change of the PIE syllabic liquids into ri, li, or the loss of PIE *p. It has been grouped together with Gaulish (or more generally Gallo-Brythonic) on account of being a P-Celtic language (with Proto-Celtic *kw > p, which is assumed to be a Gallo-Brythonic innovation). This feature, however, is so commonly found as an independent development among the kentum languages (Oscan, Greek) that its diagnostic value is close to nil.
 
The "cladogram" of the languages in question would look as follows (extinct groups marked with a cross +):
A-+-- Lepontic +
  |
  B-+-- Hispano-Celtic +
    |
    C-+-- Goidelic
      |
      D-+-- Gaulish +
        |
        Brythonic
A="Celto-Lepontic" (whatever this may be), B="Celtic", C="Neo-Celtic" (= the most recent ancestor of Irish and Welsh with all its descendants), D="Gallo-Brythonic".
Central and north-western Europe must have been home to more IE language groups than survived till historical times. For example, Germanic can't have emerged out of nothing--indeed, a layer of "Old European" words showing features like the preservation of initial p, with the syllabic liquids yielding uR/oR, and with a merger of a and o (in other words, anything BUT Celtic) can be detected e.g. in the hydronymy of the North European Plain and of the British Isles (the Lusitanian language of ancient Iberia may also have been a survival of that northern branch). The existence of fragmentarily attested languages only loosely related to the major groups (e.g. Venetic, Messapic, Lusitanian), whose status within the family was like that of Albanian, Armenian or Tocharian, shows that even as late as 2000-2500 years ago the IE languages of Europe were still quite strongly differentiated.
 
Piotr Gasiorowski