Re: Brithenig

At 3:20 am -0400 2/4/00, John Cowan wrote:
>Padraic Brown scripsit:
>
>> I don't think anyone's done any work on early midieval Brithenig.
>
>Not much.  However, Brithenig is not pro-drop, almost the only Romance
>language save French that isn't (Rumansh doesn't count, as it has been
>mugged by German).  This suggests to me that it passed through a V2
>period, as the Germanic languages did (German is still in it, of course),
>and Old French did too (doubtless under Germanic influence).  If so,
>and if the influence was also Germanic, then undoubtedly it was Old
>English that was the culprit.
This is an interesting observation.  I'd assumed Brithenig was non-drop
because phonetic attrition of final syllables, hence morphological endings,
made it necessary to have pronoun subjects to avoid ambiguity.

The question is whether the use of subject pronouns hastened the attrition
of endings, or whether the attrition of endings triggered the mandatory use
of subject pronouns.  If the former is correct, then I guess the V2 phase
theory is compelling and the only possible influence has to be Old English.

But I have to question whether this must be so.  The modern French custom
of always putting an article, or some other determinant, before a noun
phrase was clearly triggered by the loss of final -s marking the plural in
speech.  Welsh has shown a similar loss of endings; it is noteworthy that
spoken Welsh is also not pro-drop.  Clearly this cannot be attributed to a
V2 phase as the pronouns come _after_ the verb & Welsh remains VSO object
language in unmarked sentences.  The move to add the pronouns in speech was
to add clarity & avoid ambiguity.  I feel this is likely to be so in the
case of Brithenig which shows clear signs of its Celtic substrate but
little evidence AFAIK of any noticeable effect from English.

>
>In America there has been further convergence, with all languages
>including English and Brithenig adopting the uvular r.
Why?  And which uvular r?  The uvular trill sometimes encountered among
north Walians, or the modern Parisian uvular approximant?

I'd always assumed the Brithenig /r/ was a trilled apical r as in Welsh,
Latin, Italian, Occitan etc.

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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