Re: [tied] celtic

----- Original Message -----

From: guto rhys

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2002 11:22 AM

Subject: [tied] celtic

> Piotr recently mentioned that a Celtic dialect survived in Switzerland (long?) after other dialects had been replaced by Latin and Germanic. From what source is this theory deduced? I would be very interested.

 

I did not wish to imply that "Swiss Gaulish" survived _long_ after other varieties of continental Celtic. I just remember having read some papers on Swiss toponymy which suggested that a Celtic dialect survived there into _fairly_ late times (presumably in mixed Gallo-Roman communities), developing phonologically in a way that partly parallelled the evolution of Brittonic. I can't give you the exact references now but perhaps I'll be able to locate them later. I am sure the Alemannic and Frankish conquests in Switzerland put an end to whatever traces of Celticity may have survived there, and that by the sixth century or so there were no Celtic-speakers in Helvetia.

 

> Again - initial mutations occur in all Goedelic and Brythonic languages. There appears to be no evidence for this prior to the 5th century or so. By then these two dialects had long diverged, apparently. Are these features homologous. Do they have there origin in the common grammar which ultimately resulted in these changes or do they represent a feature of ´classical´ Celtic which simply has not been recorded? Or could there have been influence from one language to another. It seems strange, or perhaps intriguing that two independant languages develop such a rare feature independantly of each other even though there common morphology (suffixes especially) could facilitate this.

 

Chris Gwinn certainly knows a lot more about these things than I do, so I hope he finds the time to comment. All I can say is that partly convergent developments can occur in related languages either because of the inner dynamic of phonological systems (independent drift in similar directions because of shared initial conditions) or because "the seeds of change" already existed in the ancestral language as low-level phonetic tendencies. A good example is i-umlaut in NW Germanic. It occurs throughout the group (to varying extents) but it's easy to prove that it was phonologised independently in the various subgroupings of NW Germanic, even if non-distintive fronting of back vowels was an allophonic tendency in Proto-NWG. In the case of Old English, umlaut belongs to the preliterate phase of the language but must be dated after the palatalisation of velars before front vowels. In Celtic, the positional weakening of consonants (cf. the loss of *p > *f > *h > 0, which, to be sure, is unconditional) and the presence of sandhi phenomena may have begun in common Celtic, setting the stage for the morphological utilisation of consonant mutations in the individual dialects. One would think that, as in Germanic, the syncope of unstressed vowels and the erosion of inflectional endings accelerated the process. Under this scenario, the Gaulish, Celtiberian and Ogham systems would have had low-level phonetic lenition which was not yet fully phonologised and functionalised, and therefore went unrecorded.

 

Piotr