Re: Reasonable sound changes.

On Sun, 9 Jan 2005 22:52:25 +1100, Tristan McLeay
<conlang@...> wrote:
> On 9 Jan 2005, at 10.47 pm, Carsten Becker wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 7 Jan 2005 23:01:53 -0800, bob thornton <arcanesock@...>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> /k_w/ -> /p/
> >
> > I don't know much about sound changes, but this feels a little
> > strange. "QU"
> > changes into "P", doesn't it?
>
> Perfectly normal, in fact. Happened in the P-celtic languages (hence
> the name), something similar happened in Greek, I think there were some
> Italic languages it happened it, and it happened in Føtisk, too :)
Romanian, too, AFAIK; ISTR the correspondance "aqua" (Latin) ~ "apa"
(Romanian). Or possibly apă.



On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 18:19:55 +0100, Carsten Becker
<naranoieati@...> wrote:
> BTW, I've always wondered why there is P and Q-Celtic. So
> it's because on the Isle, people changed /k_w/ -> /p/ and
> on the continent they didn't?
Not as simple as that -- there are P-Celtic and Q-Celtic forms in both
Insular and Continental Celtic. For example, Welsh and Cornish
(Insular) are P-Celtic while Celtiberian (Continental) was Q-Celtic.

For more information, see
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_languages (with a discussion of
the P/Q vs Insular/Continental nomenclature)
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goidelic (one reference of the term "Q-Celtic")
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brythonic_languages ("P-Celtic", similarly)

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
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