Talk:Italo-Celtic

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[edit] moved from Talk:Indo-European languages

I see you are warming up now, Angr :) Italo-Celtic, however, has much much fewer supporters than Balto-Slavic ever had, if anyone was ever even positively postulating it. Here you have a group that linguists will shrug off as spurious. I don't object to mentioning it, though (but it should at least have a stub article), but it has nowhere near majority support. dab (ᛏ) 16:18, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

That wasn't Angr; that was me. Anyway, Italo-Celtic may not have majority support (which is why I didn't list it in the same manner as Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian), but there are a non-trivial number of mainstream linguists who believe in it, right? Anyway, I felt it was worth mentioning, since it is a well-known meme anyway; and I'll write up a stub article as soon as I can find exactly what the shared features of Italic and Celtic are that lead linguists to posit this family. (I know one is the assimilation of *p...kw to *kw...kw; and they both retain 3sg mediopassive endings in *-tor rather than *-toi, though the latter isn't positive evidence.) AJD 16:34, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

sorry, I just saw the A :)

sure it's ok, I was not objecting. The p/q stuff has ceased to be evidence, since both branches have both, I think. Quite important was the i-Genitive, but that's out of the picture too. Not sure about the r endings, they may still be a point. I couldn't name a scholar who was convinced of Italo-Celtic, but I reckon there were a few. Would be nice if you hacked together an article on it. I just wanted to point out that I-C acceptence is nowhere near Balto-Slavic acceptence, among Indo-Europeanists (not to you in particular, but to the world at large, including the balts:) dab (ᛏ) 16:42, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, AJD, but the Italo-Celtic hypothesis has been dead since the discovery of Hittite and Tocharian, which showed that mediopassive *-tor goes all the way back to the proto-language. Two branches keeping the same archaism doesn't prove anything; you have to prove a shared innovation to prove a common ancestry, and there's just no convincing evidence that Italic and Celtic have any shared innovations. --Angr/_comhrá 16:46, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

DAB: I'm not sure what you mean by "both branches have both". Anyway, according to this PDF I also find 1pl mediopassive in *-mor, which is more probative than *-tor; subjunctives in *-ã-; and the development of laryngeals following syllabic sonorants into ã. I'm pretty sure Don Ringe of Tandy Warnow are reasonably convinced of Italo-Celtic, by the way. AJD 16:52, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

okay, let's take this to Talk:Italo-Celtic. My memory is not too fresh on this, yes there was the a subjunctive, and the r endings, even though inherited from the Proto-Language may still point to some common innovations by their distribution. By the way, Angr, since you seem to be on top of this, do you remember this r form Jasanoff discovered in both Tocharian and Hittite? What was that exactly, I forget the details, but it was rather impressive. Shall we go and write a section on the verb over at PIE?

I don't think Jay discovered it. I learned about it from him, and as I remember it, as soon as Hittite and Tocharian were discovered they were found to have passives in -r. I can't remember what he had to say about the ā-subjunctive, though. The 1 pl. in -mor and the development of CrHC to CrāC aren't convincing to me; they both could have arisen in both branches independently (the first one by analogy, the second by sound change). Tandy Warnow isn't an Indo-Europeanist (or even a linguist), and Don seems to have given up on the comparative method a number of years ago. I remember hearing him give a talk at an Indo-European conference ten years ago or more that left everyone scratching their heads and wondering who this man was and what he had done with Don Ringe. --Angr/_comhrá 17:16, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

no, I didn't mean to say JJ discovered there are r forms in Hitt. and Toch. :) There was one particular irregular form, some 3rd person in one of those Tocharian paradigms, which has a parallel in Hittite and must be a striking archaism. He wrote about it in TIES in the 80s, and expanded on that (single form....) since then. dab (ᛏ) 18:18, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

No, I don't remember, and the TIES paper isn't among the papers of his I have. I can write him and ask if you like. --Angr/_comhrá 19:11, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

I do have a paper of Jay's from 1983 where he talks about the ā-subjunctive of Italic and Celtic; it isn't a common innovation either; it's there in Tocharian and is related to a preterite suffix in Baltic and a sort of grab-bag verbal suffix in Slavic. --Angr/_comhrá 19:42, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

I'll try to find the TIES paper, it'll be a matter of half an hour, not reason to write him, we can do that once we have a good question :) well, the fact that a suffix is grundsprachlich doesn't preclude common innovation. It'd be a common innovation already if the suffix was used in a peculiar way or meaning different from the use as reconstructed for the proto-language. let's talk about this on Italo-Celtic, I'll get to dig into it more tomorrow, I think. dab (ᛏ) 08:57, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

I don't want to talk about it at Italo-Celtic since that article (and its talk page) do not exist yet, nor should they IMHO. Since the suffix is used for the subjunctive in Tocharian as well, I don't think it can be an Italo-Celtic innovation to use it for the subjunctive. --Angr/_comhrá 09:32, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

I will create that article, sometime. Not because I believe in the group, obviously, but as an article on a historical theory, precisely to have a place to discuss these things. I do believe in some areal contact between early Italians & Celts, but not quite at a genetic level. See also our discussion on Talk:Vates. dab (ᛏ) 09:18, 19 May 2005 (UTC)

for the record, the Jasanoff article I was looking for above appeared in TIES 2 (1988), and the forms in question are the s third person singular endings in both the Tocharian s-preterite, and the Anatolian preterite. dab (ᛏ) 10:49, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)