Re: CHAT: Is there a conlang inspired in Old English?

Quoting Eamon Graham <robertg@...>:

> "Thomas R. Wier" wrote:
>
> > I know this may sound vaguely like heresy 8P, but I do
> > find the borrowing of initial mutation a little odd. It
> > strikes me as the kind of feature a language would borrow
> > only under truly *massive* sociolinguistic pressure from
> > some other language that has it, and usually that much
> > pressure leads to language obsolescence and even language
> > death.  (A very cool idea, but still...)
>
> That leads me to the question: what does the group think of the
> theory that the insular Celtic languages borrowed mutation from a
> substrate language (Pictish, for example)?
>
> There are of course other theories to explain why the insular Celtic
> languages use mutation.  I'm not pretending to be qualified enough
> to answer my own question, I'm curious to know what others think. :)
Considering that almost nothing is known about said substrate
languages, what grounds are there to claim that there is any
link between the language that we see here now, and that distant
inhabitant of the same space?  This is always a problem in historical
linguistics, not so much from actual professionals, but from
nonspecialists, and from amateurs who have agendas to push. The
classic case is among Romance linguistics, where some people have
tried to claim that some peculiar features (the which I forget
off the top of my head) of French and Italian are the result of
interactions with continental Celtic substrate, which are only
slightly better known than Pictish, and invading Proto-Romance
speakers .  (Curiously, there is almost no overlap between the
set of linguists who advocate these particular theories and
linguists working outside France and Italy.)

Concerning this particular claim about Pictish substratal
influences, all I can do, beyond repeating the fact of near
total ignorance about the structure of this/these language(s),
is quote something Ray Brown (an esteemed member of this list)
once said about the arguments used to support them:

  "[Such arguments] seem to occur most readily when the substrate
  language is poorly known and often take the circuitous form:
    (a) Professor Abel shows that Zedish 'hl', where its neighbors
    have /s/ or /S/ is due to the influence of the Wyvian substrate
    as Dr Baker lists this sound among the known features of Wyvian.
    (b) Dr Baker is found to give a list of Exian features which
    have been discovered through the painstaking scholarship of Dr
    Charlie.
    (c) Dr Charlie's work turns out to be an attempt to reconstruct
    Wyian from evidence found in Zedish & related sources.  Zedish
    has a perculiar sound 'hl' which it uses where related languages
    have a sibilant; this is obviously a substrate effect: therefore
    Wyvian must have had this sound!"

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

Replies