Celtic closer to Anatolian?

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>ECOLING at aol.com writes:

>For Celtic, is there any argument that on balance the geographic position of
>Celtic in the earliest stages of PIE dialect network would put it closer to
>Anatolian, or Tocharian, or Armenian, or etc., >>

-- whether or not one goes so far as to posit a post-PIE "Italo-Celtic" unity
(along the lines of Balto-Slavic) there are undoubtedly some shared features.

Eg., both Celtic and Italic assimilate *p...kw to kw...kw -- PIE *penkwe,
'five' > Latin 'quinque', Old Irish 'coic'.

Then there's the optative in -a-, and some uniquely shared vocabulary (Old
Irish 'tir', 'land', and Latin 'terra'), and so forth and so on.

On the whole, Celtic seems to have separated from the main bulk of PIE rather
early, but later than Anatolian, and to have been "near" proto-Italic in the
dialect continuum.

That would mean, geographically, it was 'always' the southwesternmost fringe
of PIE.