Re: USAGE: USAGE north-west IE diffusion (Re: USAGE:Yet another few questions about ...

On Thursday, July 8, 2004, at 03:29 , Joe wrote:

[snip]
> How about an Italo-Celtic dialect continuum?  Is that at all possible?
> It doesn't seem too much of a stretch to me...
...nor, in theory, to me.  Indeed, I have often pondered that possibility.
   But the fly in the ointment is Germanic. However you look at it, there
is a set of words common to Germanic & 'Celtic' but not found in Italic, e.
g. landa, comba.  Any general theory of the diffusion of these language
groups has got to account for this as well as IMO square up with current
archaeology.

> We have Q-Celtic, P-Celtic, P-Italic, Q Italic.  Now, since they were
> all originally 'Q', as it were, we can have the central Italo-Celtic
> dialects having the *kw>*p change dispersing throughout them, but the
> extreme ends of both are unaffected.  On the other hand, a feature found
> only in the 'Celtic' dialects, have a *p>0 sound change.  Those are just
> two features, but they give a general idea.
I know the the p ~ kw divide of Brittonic & the Gaelic langs is also found
in Italic dialects, but I'm a bit wary of making too much this; after all,
  kw --> was also attested in certain environments in Proto-Greek and is, I
believe, not unattested in non-IE langs.

But the diffusion and/or development of these langs is interesting & IMO
needs looking at more carefully in the light of current archaeological
thinking.  Maybe something to occupy me when I retire on 31st August  :)

Ray
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