Talk:Botorrita plaque
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Lambert (2003:20) dates the discovery of Botorrita III from oct.1992, not 1979. Could there be here a confusion with a possible Botorrita II? -- Jouitteau. Lambert, P.Y 2003. La langue gauloise. ed. errance, Paris.
I don't know about "Celtic art". It's an unadorned text document, very official, probably a contract. dab (ᛏ) 18:17, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Has the tablet been translated? If not how do you know it's Celtic? If it has some details would be interesting. -- Mongvras
- It's "Celticity" is undisputed, although, if you really press the question, dependent on very few features. A few words can be identified, and a lot of grammar (morphology), but the sense of the texts is not understood. dab (ᛏ) 08:42, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- of course, a discussion of the text should follow. I don't think I can do this anytime soon, so feel free to dig up the literature yourself, anyone :) dab (ᛏ) 08:43, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Is it p- or q-Celtic? If Q, is there any evidence of /ej/ > /e:/ and /ow/ > /o:/ (filling in the missing long vowels that were lost through merger in CC). This happened in the branch that led to Irish, so if found here it would support the idea that "insular" q-celtic was derived from "continental" q-celtic, as native Irish legend has always maintained. I.e. that the P/Q split is primary. In p-Celtic there was further merger of the remaining long vowels which set the scene for the loss of phonemic vowel length in Late(?) Brittonic. -- Mongvras
- you cannot prove anything based on the p/q split. The proto-Celts lost p. This was a major gap in the phonemic system, and it was a very trivial change to shift from kw to p. Celtiberian is Q-Celtic, as is e.g. demonstrated by the -kue "and" particle. Note that even in Gaulish, remnants of q remain, as evidenced by the -c, in Lepontic I believe, i.e. "early Gaulish", for -kue. As for the monophtongisation, afaik this is considered a Gaulish innovation, but I don't know how conclusively this can be proven for Celtiberian. We pretty much have the Celtiberian corpus on this page, so you can start looking for examples :) dab (ᛏ) 07:22, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- this is the best online resource I could find. It has a short grammar, and transcriptions of almost the entire corpus. There are a few etymologies on pages 6-7. E. g. nouiza < *nowiya "new" seems to suggest that diphtongs were preserved, but I do not know if that is a good example (since y follows). There is even a translation of Botorrita III, but that is of course highly speculative. dab (ᛏ) 07:49, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- /ei/ > i, this is surmised from robiseti, ambitiseti. dab (ᛏ) 11:20, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I agree that once IE /p/ was lost the change from /kw/ > /p/ was "an accident waiting to happen", and that in principle it could have occured several times independantly. However as far as I know (correction?) the only p-celtic we actually have is Gaulish, British, and the modern languages that derive from British, and since it is generally agreed that Gaulish and British were closely related, I would maintain that p-celtic remains a valid cladistic sub-group (although Gallobrittonic might be a better name, just in case some other unrelated p-celtic turned up elsewhere). Indeed, I'm rather surprised to find the old insular/continental classification resurrected. You might as well group English and Icelandic as Insular Germanic, after all both preserve /ð/ :-)
I think this is going off-topic. Please move this last comment to somewhere more appropriate, thanks Mongvras 12:26, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
hm, we could continue this discussion on Talk:Celtic languages. Anyway, AFAIK, Brythonic and Gaulish were formerly considered closely related, precisely on grounds of the q > p change. This is certainly not a generally accepted view today, and, afaik, Insular Celtic is the communis opinio, i.e. British is genetically closer to Irish than to Gaulish. dab (ᛏ) 13:16, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
