Laryngeal Realism and the Prehistory of Celtic

Eska, Joseph F.

doi:10.1111/1467-968x.12122

Cited by 8 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 47 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Phonetically, the contrast between the D-series and the T-series may rather have been that between ‘lenis’ voiceless consonants and ‘fortis’ aspirated voiceless consonants (cf. Stifter, 2017 : 1191; similar Van Sluis, 2019 : 3–36; sceptical Martinet, 1952 : 201) or, in Eska’s (2018) framework of Laryngeal Realism, a contrast in the feature [spread glottis]. Since the sound changes in this article are understood as arithmetic abstractions, notations of reconstructions can usually be transferred easily between alternative frames of references.…”

Section: Preliminariesmentioning

confidence: 98%

The rise of gemination in Celtic

Stifter

2024

Open Res Europe

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This study investigates systematically the emergence and establishment of geminate consonants as a phonological class in the Celtic branch of Indo-European. The approach of this study is comparative historical linguistics, drawing on diachronic structuralism combined with aspects of language contact studies and functional approaches to language usage. This study traces the development of geminates from Proto-Indo-European (fourth millennium B.C.), which did not allow geminate consonants, to the Common Celtic period (first millennium B.C.), when almost every consonant could occur as a singleton or as a geminate, and on to the earliest attested stages of the Insular Celtic languages (first millennium A.D.). Although they were prominent in the phonology of Proto- and Ancient Celtic (Gaulish, Celtiberian), ultimately geminates were gotten rid of as a phonological class in the individual Insular Celtic languages. This is probably due to the fact that the contrast between lenited and unlenited sounds took on a central role in Insular Celtic phonology, making gemination a phonetically redundant category. Most instances of geminate consonants in Celtic can be explained by regular sound change operating on inherited clusters of consonants. Each sound change will be discussed in a separate section in a rough chronological order. Effectively, gemination is largely a strategy to reduce the number of allowed consonant combinations. To a limited degree, gemination also had a morphological function, especially in the formation of personal names and in the creation of adjectival neologisms. However, there is a residue of words, especially nouns, in the Insular Celtic languages that defy any attempt at etymologising. They are prime suspects of having been borrowed from prehistoric, substratal languages.

show abstract

Section: Preliminariesmentioning

confidence: 98%

The rise of gemination in Celtic

Stifter

2024

Open Res Europe

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For decades, philologists have been searching for Celtic words or names in the southwestern ones and have retired defeated, and Koch (2019) seems to be the only Celtic linguist who still argues that ‘Tartessian’ is Celtic, on the basis of what some call ‘circular reasoning’ (Valério 2014, 446 & 458). It is therefore strange that in 2018 Cunliffe followed Koch and ignored the negative conclusions expressed between 2007 and 2017 by James Clackson, Javier de Hoz, Jürgen Zeidler, Oliver Simkin, Alberto Nocentini, Joaquín Gorrochategui, Eugenio Luján, Joseph Eska, Blanca Prósper, Peter Schrijver, Tatyana Mikhailova, Jesús Rodríguez Ramos, Joan Ferrer, Noemí Moncunill, Javier Velaza, Sebastián Celestino and Carolina López-Ruíz (see Sims-Williams 2016, 14 n. 47; 2017a, 421 n. 3; and now Correa & Guerra 2019, 122, 134–6; Eska 2017; 2018, 326–7; Hewitt 2018; Stifter 2019, 120). The state of the question is summed up by de Hoz (2019a, 11): J.…”

Section: Celtic From the Westmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Alternative to ‘Celtic from the East’ and ‘Celtic from the West’

Sims-Williams¹

2020

CAJ

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article discusses a problem in integrating archaeology and philology. For most of the twentieth century, archaeologists associated the spread of the Celtic languages with the supposed westward spread of the ‘eastern Hallstatt culture’ in the first millennium bc. More recently, some have discarded ‘Celtic from the East’ in favour of ‘Celtic from the West’, according to which Celtic was a much older lingua franca which evolved from a hypothetical Neolithic Proto-Indo-European language in the Atlantic zone and then spread eastwards in the third millennium bc. This article (1) criticizes the assumptions and misinterpretations of classical texts and onomastics that led to ‘Celtic from the East’ in the first place; (2) notes the unreliability of the linguistic evidence for ‘Celtic from the West’, namely (i) ‘glottochronology’ (which assumes that languages change at a steady rate), (ii) misunderstood place-name distribution maps and (iii) the undeciphered inscriptions in southwest Iberia; and (3) proposes that Celtic radiating from France during the first millennium bc would be a more economical explanation of the known facts.

show abstract

Contact and the Celtic Languages

Eska¹

2020

The Handbook of Language Contact

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Laryngeal Realism and the Prehistory of Celtic

Cited by 8 publications

References 47 publications

The rise of gemination in Celtic

The rise of gemination in Celtic

An Alternative to ‘Celtic from the East’ and ‘Celtic from the West’

Contact and the Celtic Languages

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About