Re: New Brithenig words, part Deux.
| From: | andrew <hobbit@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Saturday, June 2, 2001, 8:44 |
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Am 05/29 21:51 kam@CARROT.CLARA.NET yscrifef:
> I shouldn't worry about this, as I said, this degree of palatalisation is
> found in SE Brittany, which is the Brittonic dialect most in contact with
> Romance. Interestingly, it also has final stress as does Brithenig. Whether
> this is the Old Welsh/C/Breton stress retained (it shifted to the penult
> elsewhere) or a "recent" switch back to final stress influenced by French is
> something of a moot point.
>
Well, I'm leaving that feature as is for the moment. I should go find
out how such dialects treated palatalisation in orthography.
> Allophonic in other words? In WCB "here" the distinction is phonemic, both
> sounds can be either stressed or unstressed, long or short.
>
Allophonic, yes. I guess I grasped allophonic distinction easier than
phonemic distinction at the time I was working on vowels. I tend to
grab these things as I go.
> > The orthography has become another intrenched feature. Oh, well.
>
> Again, I don't see this as a fault or a problem, it just suggested to me that
> you had Welsh in particular in mind.
>
It has much to do with the fact I use self-depreciation as a form of
defense. :)
> >> gwers << versus with
> >> the meaning "lesson"; gwallt "head of hair" with an /a/ which is a Welsh
> >> irregularity, C, B and Irish all having /o/; "bring" and "take" translated
> >> as gweair cum and gweddir cum exactly paralleling Welsh do^d a^ and mynd a^.
>
> > That one removed a dilemma that threatened to become a minor headache.
>
> Sorry, I don't understand, pray explain.
>
At the time I had discovered pr+ener to mean take, but not a verb to
mean bring. I knew it was a problem that I was going to have to
resolve. When I discovered do^d a^ and mynd a^ I knew that they were
the liferopes that I was looking for and slotted their calques in to
fill a gap.
> So what's your final position re nasal+voiceless stop groups? In Cornish
> they remain (the t sometimes goes to s -- that's a special Cornish thing);
> in Welsh they remain finally, otherwise /mp nt Nk/ >> /mh nh Nh/ which in
> turn give /mm nn NN/ the /h/ only remaining when it begins a stressed
> syllable. eg.
>
> C. fenten W. 'ffynnon pl. ffyn'honnau "spring" << L. fonta:na
>
Brithenig: ffon'han.
NC -> Nh when stressed, else -> NN, except when final.
Oh, that's what you're said above. Yes, Brithenig in this detail
imitates Welsh.
> >> Here BTW you've used -in to make
> >> a singular from a collective. Also with glaserfin "blade of grass",
>
> > Yes, I know. This ending originally started as a familiar diminutive,
> > but I have since made use of it as singular from collective marker.
>
> /-ig/ might be a useful diminutive, although it's commoner in C&B than in W.
>
/-ith/ is the most common diminutive, /-in/ is used in special cases,
/-ig/ is used to create adjectives, /-un/ is used as an augmentive.
Bookmarked for further reference.
> > I think WD Elcock says in _The Romance Languages_ that there are 300
> > such [Latin] loans in Welsh. I may never know if I have collected the set.
>
> There are certainly quite a lot, mostly from the time of the Roman occupation
> of Britain. They are thoroughly naturalised. The standard work in Welsh is
> "Yr Elfen Ladin yn yr Iaith Gymraeg" Henry Lewis, Univ. of Wales Press 1943,
> reprinted 1980 ISBN 0 7083 0769 8. I don't unfortunately have a copy and as
> far as I know it's never been translated, pity, I'm sure it would be of
> interest to Romance linguists. I can reel off a string of examples if you're
> interested.
>
Definitely interested. Reel off, reel off! I think that that's the
source that Elcock quotes on such loans.
> > I think you just about covered it. If you want to know the origins of
> > Brithenig find a copy of _Celtic: A Comparative Study_, by DB Gregor and
> > turn to page 52, footnote 11. I think that is the page that contains
> > the text that is the germ of Brithenig. I merely developed it from
> > there.
>
> I've seen that book, good as far as it goes, but I don't have a copy to
> hand.
>
Neither do I (good university libraries were a gift from God in my
opinion!) but I have made a photocopy of the pages on Brythonic Romance
which I quote:
[page 37]
...elements would no doubt have evolved as they did on the Continent,
without the features peculiar for special reasons to Rumanian, but
possibly closer to Carnic (Celtic) Friulan than to Italian. [I have
looked at DB Gregor's book on Friulan, but found nothing distinctly
'Celtic' to the language.] Its syntax could hardly have owed anything
to the totally different Brythonic. It is from the phonetic system of
Brythonic that we can dimly see what might have emerged when Latin words
began to be used daily on Brythonic lips.
In the first place, the Brythonic borrowsing show that Vulgar Latin or
the ordinary speech of the middle classes (halfway between sland and the
literary language) had phonetic peculiarities of its own in Britain, due
partly to the 'scholastic' nature of the Latin taught to the elite which
wished to learn it in the class room; and it was from these that Latin
filtered down. It was a more old-fashioned form of Latin that would
have evoleved, with even the old system of syllabic quantity preserved,
and V still pronounced as W long after it had become labio-dental V
elsewhere; whence Welsh _gw_ as in _Gwener_ (Friday) from (dies)
Veneris; _gwir_ (true) from _verus_, - a change which was effected by
the eighth century (later [page 38] in Cornish and Breton). Secondly,
there where idiosyncrasies such as the insertion of W between U and
another vowel (e.g. _destruo_ wsa pronounced _destruwo_, whence Welsh
_distrywio_ 'to destroy', and _posuit_, 'he placed was pronounced
_posuwit_ (cf. W. _clywed_) which produced _posiit_ in some
inscriptions). Even more remarkable, the same W was inserted between E
and O and between E and U. _Leo_, for example, was pronounced _lewo_,
whence Welsh _llew_ (lion), _oleum_ became _olewum_ W. _olew_ (oil),
_deus became _dewus_, W. _duw (god; cf. the Gaulish prefix _Devo-_ seen
in the name of the Galatian king whom Cicero defended, Deiotarus).
Thus, if Brythonic had borrowed the word for boy, _puer_, Welsh would
have had a word like _pewyr_.
Again, Welsh _plwm_, from _plumbum_ (lead) and _ffydd_ from _fides_
(faith) show that short stressed U and I did not become respectively O
and E, as on the Continent; cf Italian _piombo_ and _fede_. (_Fedes_ on
a coin of the Belgic usurper Carausius, who set up an Empire in Britain
in 286-293, perhaps shows his non-British origin). The palatalization
of _ti_, _di_, etc. also seems not to have taken place in the Latin of
Britain; e.g. _ratio_ and _diurnus_ which evolve into _ragione_ and
[page 39]_giorno_ in Italian, become in Welsh _rhaid_ and _diwrnod_, with
unimpaired dental. (The _od_ represents the Latin syllable _at_
generalized into a collective suffix). Similarly, L and N resisted
palatalization, i.e. there is no L _mouille_ as in French and the group
_li_ affect the preceding vowel instead (e.g. _solea_ 'sole' through
_solia_ became _seil_ in Middle Welsh), just as did the group _ni_ (e.g.
_cuneus_ 'wedge', through _cunius_, became _cy^n_). Nor at first was
there voicing of P, T, C intervocally or before L and R, though later it
occured in all Welsh words, whether borrowed or not. It is significant
too that L after A did not become U as in French (e.g. _palf_ from
_palma; F. _paume_, and _mn_ remained unassimilated (e.g. _colofn_ from
_columna_; cf. F. _colonne_, and, this time, also Italian, _colonna_).
Apart from these specific peculiarities of British Latin, which Celtic
orthography enables us to identify, changes in the pronunciation of
Latin common to the whol Empire, such as are reflected in the
orthography of British inscriptions, must also be taken into account;
e.g. E for I (_ella_), N fog Gn (_sinum_), S for Ns (_libes_), D for T
(_capud). There must also have been sounds with which the Britons could
not cope; [page 40] e.g. the group _nct_ as in _sanctus_ holy, where the N was
dropped and the C pronounced as a fricative. (Hence W. _Sant_, C.
_Sans_ must be an importation from Italy).
Thus the interaction of a specifically British form of Latin and a
specifically Brythonic form of Celitc couls have produced a distinct
Romance language, as different from French and Italian as they, thanks
to the specifica qualities of Gaulish and the Latin of Tuscany, were
from each other*.
It was not to be...
*If we can imagine an earlier equivalent to the Strassburg Oaths, which
marked the birth of French, i.e. a Brython and a Saxon swearing an oath
of alliance against a third party, as Charles the Bald and Louis the
German did against their brother Lothair in 842, a romanized Cadwallon,
using the same chancellery-language, might have sworn as follows on
allying himself with King Penda of Mercia in 632:-
Per amur dy Dew ed per salwament dy pobol cristiane ed dy nus tuts, dy
yst di inawant, in cant Dew saber ed poder mi duna, sig eo salwerai yst
mew fradre Penda, sig cum hom dy drieff sew fradre salwar debe, in ho
che ill altertan face, ed cun Edwyn nul plegit nunche prendrai, che
willy mewe a yst mew fradre Penda damnuse si^.
unquote; the rest, as they say, is pseudo-history.
I have this site bookmarked. You mentioned it previously on
Celticonlang. I probably need to go through it again and track down all
the OC stems that it has shared with Welsh.
> It does, please forgive the sermons!
>
All is forgiven, but if you take up a collection then I probably going
to sneak out through the vestry!
- andrew.
--
Andrew Smith, Intheologus hobbit@griffler.co.nz
http://hobbit.griffler.co.nz/homepage.html
Your voice has been heard.
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