From: Bhrihskwobhloukstroy
Message: 69940
Date: 2012-08-05
> With characteristic modesty, I submit that Ligurian substrate theory may be*Bhr.: or simply 'the other land', without any reference to language
> capable of explaining the voiced onset of <gladius>, <glo:ria>, and the West
> Romance *gattu- 'cat' which largely prevailed outside of central Gaul. My
> working hypothesis is that Gallia Propria was conquered by P-Celts,
> originating in N Iberia, who passed through Aquitania and poured across the
> Garonne in search of greener pastures. The pre-Celtic IE-speakers in S and
> SE Gaul were principally Ligures; those in NW Gaul were principally Veneti.
> To the north, the Belgae had superposed themselves upon the Veneti and
> Ligures. The eastern Belgae in NE Gaul were Gallicized in pre-Roman times;
> the western Belgae in Belgica Propria were not.
>
> The immediate pre-Latin substrate in most of northern Italy was Gaulish, but
> this language had not been established here as long as it had been in
> central Gaul. Milan itself was established by Gauls, but the pre-Gaulish
> substrate in NW Italy was Ligurian. The characteristic Lig. suffix *-asca:
> is frequent in the French departments east of the Rhône as well, indicating
> that here too Ligures preceded Gauls. The notice by Livy (5:34) makes the
> Bituriges the de facto leaders of the expanding Gauls during the reign of
> Tarquinius Priscus (early 6th cent. BCE). That is, Bourges was the
> effective capital of Gaul at the time, and this area had presumably been
> Gallicized in the 7th cent. or earlier. But east of the Rhône, Ligures kept
> their identity for several more centuries, and Gaulish settlement occurred
> at a much slower pace. Even today, Provence is a notoriously poor part of
> France, and incoming Gaulish settlers would be likely to grab lands west of
> the Rhône if they could. Indeed, the Provençal Gaulish tribal name
> Allobroges 'Otherlanders' suggests that for a considerable time most Gauls
> regarded Provence as 'the other land' across the Rhône, inhabited by poor
> and backward Ligures rather than Gauls.
> Nevertheless Gaulish settlers did*Bhr.: How do You explain <gabaré> and <gabriolé>? They cannot have
> trickle in to create a new tribe, the Allobroges, defined by geography
> instead of ancestry.
>
> It is reasonable to suppose that here, to the west and south of the western
> Alps, Ligurian exerted a significant influence on the local Gaulish, which
> we might term Liguro-Gallic, just as we use the term Gallo-Latin to denote
> the Latin which was significantly influenced by Gaulish. Now, French
> <cabaret> and <cabriolet> (obviously not inherited the usual way from Latin)
> have been borrowed into Milanese as <gabaré> and <gabriolé>. French is
> noted for allowing very little aspiration with word-initial tenues. I
> hypothesize that the borrowing of Fr. /k/ as Milan. /g/ in word-initial
> position reflects a phonetic discrepancy going back to pre-Roman times.
> That is, central Gaulish dialects, which due to rapid conquest had undergone*Bhr.: Independent evidence required, please.
> very little Ligurian (or Venetic) influence, allowed very little aspiration
> with word-initial tenues, particularly /k/. But Ligurian allowed
> considerable aspiration here, initial /k/ being sounded as [kH],
> so that*Bhr.: Gamkrelidze - Ivanov 1984: 599-601 = 1995: I 513-515 analyze
> Gaul. /k/, a pure [k] even initially, sounded more like /g/ than /k/ to
> Ligurian ears. Thus when the Ligures east of the Rhône and south of the
> Alps borrowed words from the first wave of Gaulish settlers, *k- became *g-,
> but of course native Ligurian words retained *k- (pronounced [kH-]). As
> more Gauls settled among these Ligures, effecting a slow conquest over
> several generations, their own Gaulish became Liguricized as Liguro-Gallic,
> with *k- in words corresponding to those in which Ligures had maintained
> native *k-, but *g- in words which Ligures had borrowed from Gaulish words
> with *k-.
>
> With this explanatory mechanism, I can dispense with my earlier makeshift,
> Late Greek *káttos as an intermediary between (Gallo-)Latin <cattus> and
> WRom *gattu-. Instead, I presume that *kattos m. and *katta: f. 'cat',
> whatever their ultimate source, were established in central Gaul, and
> introduced to Ligurian (and Liguro-Gallic) as *gattos and *gatta:, whence
> (several centuries later) Vulgar Latin *gattus and *gatta, at home in
> Provence, and otherwise spreading from NW Italy (perhaps on Genovese ships
> for rodent control), but not overcoming the /k/-forms entrenched in central
> Gaul. Late Latin <cattus> and <catta> in this view were borrowed (as
> literary terms) from central Gallo-Latin, and the epicene usage in Baruch
> 6:21 might not be genuinely archaic, but simply analogical after the
> behavior of <damma> 'fallow deer'. (...)