Re: Genitives NPs as Relative Clauses

Ar 22:11 17/11/01 -0500, bhac John Cowan le scríobh chugam:
>Keith Gaughan scripsit:
>
> > Ok. Before I go offlist, could you explain how? I'd be quite interested in
> > this. I've always thought of prepositional pronouns as being rather an
> > anomaly. I'd say though that this has prompted more than one person to put
> > forward a monogenesis hypothesis or two...
>
>Check out the old Conlang thread archived at
>http://groups.yahoo.com/group/conlang/message/40603 for more details.
>Overall, informed list sentiment is against the Celtic/Semitic theory
>(if it's an adstrate effect, how did it become so pervasive in insular
>Celtic?), but I still cling to the notion.
Seems rather a dodgy notion to be honest. As far as prepositional pronouns go,
they seem just a little to, how can I put this, divisible to really work. I
mean, the prepositional forms in OI seem just too closely related to more
closely related IE languages like the Teutonic branch and particularly the
Italic branch (though I here the Slavic branch is closely related but comment
on that with even the slightest degree of knowledge). The closest I can come to
a connection is the sons-of-moses hypothesis, which isn't exactly verifiable.

The theory of influence from the pre-celtic Picts seems more likely, but
there's no way of proving that as all that's left over from that language are
a few scraps of Ogham. However, there seems to be enough of their language in
my opinion to rule them out as being celtic at least. And you can eliminate
any fancyful Basque influence unless the Picts' language was closely related
to that of the Basques. Of course, if there was a decent amound of
Celtiberian, we could test this, but there isn't unfortunately.

Off to bed with me, I think...

K.

--
Keith Gaughan <kmgaughan@...>
http://homepage.eircom.net/~kmgaughan/
I can decide what I give / But it's not up to me / What I get given -=Bjork=-