Dating the final IE unity

[Christopher Gwinn]

> I am willing to be corrected. I believe we have fragmentary evidence of
> Gallic Celtic, Lepontic and Celtiberian and many centuries later we have the
> more substantial evidence of the Celtic of the British Isles.  I do not
> believe either Lepontic or Celtiberian demonstrate what anyone has called
> "striking uniformity."  Gallic is specifically limited to only a third of
> Gaul by Caesar and I am not aware of actual evidence of it being found
> anywhere else - with the possible exception of an accountable presence in the
> British Isles.  Once again I may be wrong, but I do hope there is specific
> evidence that I can look to.

For the Gaulish  material try Wolfgang Meid "Gaulish inscriptions," Pierre
Yves Lambert "La Langue Gauloise," Michel Lejeune (ed) "Recueil des
Inscriptions Gauloises 1, 2," Joshua Whatmough "Dialectc of Ancient Gaul,"
and especially Pierre Billy "Thesaurus Linguae Gallicae." For Celtiberian
try Meid "Celtiberian Inscriptions" as an intro and for Lepontic try Lejeune
"Lepontica."

For Ogam - there is an excellent web site by Jost Gippert featuring several
hundred Ogam inscriptions on the TITUS site.
http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/ogam/index.html (you will need to get the
TITUS font OGAM to see the site properly).

The corpus of Continental Celtic can no longer be considered small - though
we are not sure about many aspects of grammar - especially verbal forms - as
well as proper etymologies for many words, there are literally thousands of
attested words (I am in the process of creating an alphabetical Gaulish
glossary - I already have 2,652 words and I have only just finished the i's)

> You are saying that here is Celtic was unchanging for 700 years.  But then
> Celtic changes very quickly in the eyes of literate observers.  Well perhaps
> literate observers would have observed the same rate of change earlier, but
> they weren't there and we have no record of them.  (And of course the
> Galatians were identified by both the Greeks and by Cicero as being Volcae
> and from the tribe of the Gallic Volcae - and I believe the observer,
> mentioned in Renfrew, did not know Celtic and merely said they sounded the
> same.   And the ogham use of a word for women - what about the rest of the
> words in ogham? is "the women" the only match? - does not prove a lot
> geographically  and I'm not sure it is particularly strong proof of 'striking
> uniformity from Ireland to the Danube.")

Obviously the Celtic languages underwent change - I think what the original
poster might have meant was that the languages underwent minimal change
between their first written attestations on the continent (the oldest of
which may be 6th century BC) and the oldest Ogam inscriptions. Irish and
Celtiberian are more conservative branches of Celtic, retaining the PIE -kw-
whereas Lepontic, Gaulish and Brittonic transform it into a -p-. There is a
lot of uniformity within the Celtic branches, however, in the ancient period
which did seem to survive somewhat into Old Irish and Welsh - for example,
the Gaulish phrase Bnanom Brictom "Spells of women" matches the Irish phrase
Brichtu Ban "spells of women." From Gaul we find a cognate of Welsh Annufyn
"hell" in Antumnos (*Ande-dubnos "under-world") - from a Gaulish
curse-tablet discovered in the '80's

> <<This requires either no change, or perfectly synchronized change, in
> pre-Celtic across thousands of miles, for 4000 years.  Which is in blatant
> violation of everything we know about languages and how they develop.>>

well, we do see a very important change in the P/Q split prior to the 6th or
7th century BC, as well as the Irish and Celtiberian treatment of vowels,
which seem to differ in some cases from Gaulish, Lepontic and Brittonic.
It is interesting to note that the characteristically Celtic loss of PIE -P-
seems to be reaching its completion by the earliest Lepontic inscriptions -
which have a letter -v- where we might expect a PIE -P- (ex: UVAMO- possibly
from PIE *UP-eM-O). The value of the -v- is unsure - perhaps it is a
consonantal -w- or an -f- sound.