Re: Celtic languages?

Hallo!

On Wed, 29 Sep 2004 07:13:02 +0100,
Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:

> On Tuesday, September 28, 2004, at 11:04 , Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
> > [...]
> >
> > I was once taught (well, I read in a textbook) that shared innovations,
> > never
> > shared retensions, make genetic groups.
>
> Yes.
>
> >  Labels such as Q-Celtic or Q-Italic
> > would thus be meaningless
>
> I agree.
>
> > (which is not to say that the groups so called might
> > not be valid genetic groupings due to shared innovations in other areas).
>
> I haven't seen any evidence of these.
This means that "Q-Celtic", like "centum IE", is merely a label
attached to a bundle of languages which in no way constitute a
genealogical group - but even with "P-Celtic", we cannot be sure
because that kind of innovation might have spread by diffusion,
or even happened independently twice or more.

Nor are "Continental Celtic" and "Insular Celtic" well-defined
genealogical groupings.  The "Insular Celtic" languages have
some peculiar features (e.g., initial mutations) in common,
but most of them cannot be reconstructed for any proto-language
that could be reconstructed from the Insular Celtic languages,
and we are most likely dealing with an areal phenomenon here.

> > [snip]
> [snip]
> > FWIW, my encyclopaedia says that the Balkanic and Minor Asiatic Celts
> > probably
> > consisted of a warrior elite of Western or Central European extraction
> > ruling
> > over peoples speaking non-Celtic languages.
>
> _probably_ is, I think, an important word. It is making the assumptions:
> (a) that Galatai = Keltai
> (b) that Celts were essentially a western warror people.
>
> There are IMO far too many assumptions made concerning 'Celts' (both
> ancient & modern) and too little actual evidence.
Very true.

> > It doesn't say anything about
> > whether these aristocrats retained a Celtic language for any considerable
> > length of time.
>
> I believe there is anecdotal evidence from the ancients that the Galatai
> of Asia Minor retained their language till about the 4th or 5th cent CE -
> at least some of them. St Paul chose to write to them in Greek. But I have
> not been able to discover any concrete evidence what the language was.
Does that mean that we don't know whether Galatian is "Celtic" in any
meaningful sense at all?

> > Is Gaulish, BTW, a monolithic entity? Its range seems very large for an
> > Ancient
> > language spoken by a settled population without a central political
> > authority -
> > cf the umpteen languages of Italy before Latin took over.
>
> Absolutely! I'm darn sure there was no such thing as 'common Gaulish' from
> the Channel (La Manche) to northern Italy. One of the 'three divisions' of
> Gaul, Aquitania, spoke a language related to Basque & there were
> Greek-speaking enclaves in southern Gaul. Caesar names different peoples
> inhabiting Gaul; it is very likely IMO that that there were similarly
> umpteen languages of Gaul just as there were in Italy.
Including some pre-IE languages!  And the Belgae might still have
spoken "Nordwestblock" languages - an independent IE branch which
was neither Germanic nor Celtic.  But nobody knows whether something
like "Nordwestblock" ever existed at all.  At any rate, there is
enough stuff for the League of Lost Languages to explore ;-)

And as we are at it, the British Isles are also likely to have been
as linguistically diverse as Italy in pre-Roman times, including
pre-IE languages.  (ObConlang: Albic...)

> The Celtae, according to Caesar, were one of the peoples making up the
> Galli.
Yes, and at least one of the other peoples, namely the Aquitani,
spoke a language that was uncontradictably and utterly non-Celtic.

> [...]
>
> On Tuesday, September 28, 2004, at 04:58 , Joe wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > But the thing showing it as Q-celtic was
> > the '-cue' ending.  Gaulish, AFAIK, has '-pe'.
>
> Only if there is sufficient evidence to link it with the IE languages of
> Gaul, Britain & Ireland. It could, for example, be cognate with the
> Etruscan -c (and) and, despite the efforts of many, that languages resists
> all credible attempts to connect with IE or, indeed, any other known
> linguistic group.
Some people consider it likely that Etruscan is related to IE, but
apart from the fact that the evidence is too tenuous, if "Celtiberian"
is most closely related to Etruscan, it is definitely not "Celtic"
in any linguistically meaningful sense of the word - even if Etruscan
was related to IE.

Greetings,

Jörg.

Replies