Hallo!

On Sun, 27 Jun 2010 13:36:48 +0200, Lars Finsen wrote:

> Den 26. jun. 2010 kl. 22.42 skreiv R A Brown:
> 
> > The connexion between the languages was not recognized till the  
> > 18th century when the term 'Celtic' was also coined to denote the  
> > sub-family of IE that these two were thought to form.
> 
> On the other hand, it seems the ancient Irish were aware of a  
> relationship, and were able to reconstruct Q-Celtic versions of words  
> that must have been loanwords, e.g. Pretani -> Cruithni (if I  
> remember the spellings right). This has always struck me as a weird  
> phenomenon. Did the Irish really such a level of linguistic knowledge  
> more than 2000 years ago?

The explanation I have read is that Early Irish lacked /p/ (the loss
of PIE */p/ is a common feature of all Celtic languages; the P-Celtic 
languages created a new /p/ from */k_w/; also, the Ogham script, in its
earliest form, lacks a letter for /p/), and therefore, /p/ in loanwords
was adapted as /k_w/, which was perceived as the closest to /p/ the
language had (well, /b/ would have been at least equally close, but
apparently, the Early Irish speakers considered the voicelessness of
/p/ salient enough to equate it with /k_w/ rather than /b/).

> If so, was all of this knowledge utterly lost by the 12th century?
> 
> The relationship between various P-speaking groups seems to have been  
> widely accepted too, in ancient times. Not surprising, I guess, as  
> their migrations were recent.

Sure.  Welsh, Cornish and Breton are similar enough that the
relationship can be easily spotted by a non-linguist, and in the
Middle Ages, their similarity was yet stronger than today.  But
the gulf between them on one hand, and Irish and Scots Gaelic
(which were considered a single language for long, and are still
to some extent mutually intelligible today, I have heard) on the
other, is much greater.

> [...]
> Den 27. jun. 2010 kl. 00.08 skrev Jörg Rhiemeier:
> 
> > The notion that
> > the substratum responsible for this was Semitic is popular, but the
> > only thing Insular Celtic and Semitic have in common is VSO word
> > order (and a few typological correlates of it), but that is not all
> > that rare that it couldn't have happened independently twice in the
> > Euro-Mediterranean theatre, and otherwise Insular Celtic and Semitic
> > are utterly different; and rightly, the Semitic substratum theory
> > has been ostracized as crackpotry.  Unfortunately, it has blemished
> > the sheer concept of a prehistoric substratum language responsible
> > for the typological aberrancy of Insular Celtic to the point that
> > Celticists tend to react on the word "substratum" similarly as
> > astronomers tend to react on the word "horoscope" ;)
> 
> Indeed, that is unfortunate. Such notions tend to impede science  
> seriously. But they are all too common, also in other fields.
> 
> I take it Old Albic is VSO and mutating?

Yes.  Old Albic is VSO; the initial mutations are also there, though
only at a subphonemic "fortis vs. lenis" level, and develop into
fully phonemic mutations later.

> When deciphering the hitherto undeciphered Pictish stones one should  
> take this into account. In my conworld I have considered Urianian as  
> a northern branch of this non-Celtic Pictish. But Urianian is not VSO  
> or mutating, so I may reconsider this.

Pictish is still a mystery.  Some people consider it non-Indo-European;
others say it was just an aberrant British Celtic language, perhaps one
with many loanwords from a non-IE substratum.  The attested names in
Pictland, of both places and people, seem to be overwhelmingly British
Celtic, with only few exceptions that do not make sense that way.

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