Italo-Celtic
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| Hypothetical Indo-European phylogenetic units |
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Balto-Slavic |
Italo-Celtic refers to the hypothesis that the Italic languages and the Celtic languages are descended from a common ancestor, Proto-Italo-Celtic, at a stage post-dating Proto-Indo-European, making them genetically related more closely to each other than to any other language outside that group. The hypothesis is now generally considered obsolete, since most arguments forwarded to support it have turned out to be archaisms rather than common innovations. A close areal proximity of Proto-Celtic and Proto-Italic during some time is however still likely.
One argument for Italo-Celtic was the thematic Genitive in i (dominus, domini). Both in Italic (Popliosio Valesiosio, Lapis Satricanus) and in Celtic (Lepontic, Celtiberian -o), however, traces of the -osyo Genitive of Proto-Indo-European have been discovered, so that the spread of the i-Genitive must have occurred in the two groups independently (or by areal diffusion). Calvert Watkins (1966) recognizes that "the community of -ī in Italic and Celtic is attributable to early contact, rather than to an original unity." The i-Genitive has been compared to the so-called Cvi formation in Sanskrit, but that too is probably a comparatively late development. The phenomenon is probably related to the feminine long i stems (see Devi inflection) and the Luwian i-mutation.
Another argument was the ā-subjunctive. Both Italic and Celtic have a subjunctive descended from an earlier optative in -ā-. Such an optative is not known from other languages, but the suffix occurs in Balto-Slavic and Tocharian past tense formations, and possibly in Hittite -ahh-.
Both Celtic and Italic have collapsed the PIE Aorist and Perfect into a single past tense. In both groups, this is a relatively late development of the proto-languages, possibly dating to the time of "Italo-Celtic" language contact. Since both Proto-Celtic and Proto-Italic date to the early Iron Age (say, the centuries on either side of 1000 BC), a probable time frame for the assumed period of language contact would be the late Bronze Age, the early to mid 2nd millennium BC.
[edit] References
- Oettinger, Norbert, Zur Diskussion um den Lateinischen ā-Konjunktiv, Glotta 62 (1984) 187–201.
- Schmidt, Karl Horst, Contributions from New Data to the Reconstruction of the Proto-Language. In: Edgar Polomé and Werner Winter, eds. Reconstructing Languages and Cultures. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter (1992), 35–62.
- Watkins, Calvert, Italo-Celtic Revisited in Birkbaum, Puhvel (eds.) Ancient Indo-European dialects, Berkeley (1966), 29–50.
