Re: Celtic languages?

On Tuesday, September 28, 2004, at 11:04 , Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:
[snip]
>> If all the languages are related, the Q versions surely represents the
>> oldest forms; P is an innovation. It could well be that Brittonic &
>> Gaulish changed to P, and that proto-Irish remained Q, and other
>> continental forms also remained Q. But without far more evidence than we
>> have, I fail to see how we can certain.
>
> Sounds rather "satemic" to me - the central members switch *q>*p, the
> outlayers
> retain *q.
>
> 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.

> [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.

> 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.

> 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.

The Celtae, according to Caesar, were one of the peoples making up the
Galli.

> Livius.org claims that Celtic languages were spoken on the east bank of
> the
> Rhine well into the Christian Era. No details beyond that they used
> clusters,
> such as /gb/, ill tolerated by Latin phonology.
Again, one would like to know the _evidence_ used by Livius.org
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On Tuesday, September 28, 2004, at 04:58 , Joe wrote:

> Ray Brown wrote:
>
>>
>>> The Celtiberian language is fairly sparse, it's true, but it
>>> also has a few larger texts.
>>
>>
>> Where are they published? What do they show?
>
> http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/didact/idg/kelt/keltibbs.htm
>
>
> That's one of them - the biggest known one.
>
Right - thanks. I'll follow that up.

[snip]
>> The loss of IE /p/ is common to both Q and P 'Celts'. If _uer_ is cognate
>> with Latin _super_ we also have a loss of /s/.
>> That's very slight evidence.
>
>
> Well, okay.  Those are just a few examples.  I'm sure wiser people than
> I have done it in more detail.
I'd would like to discover them  :)

> 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.

But I will follow up the URL above.

Ray
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http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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