No Proto-Celtic?

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Thomas McFadden" <tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu>
Sent: Friday, June 01, 2001 7:58 PM

[snip]

> Again in Bavarian German (and a number of the
> dialects and even to a certain extent in colloquial forms of the standard
> language) the 1sg. pronoun in the nominative is mia,

[Ed Selleslagh]
Isn't that just an Anglo-Saxon perception of the pronunciation (cf. British
English pronunciation -a < -er)?

> clitic ma both < mir
> in place of standard wir.  This is transparently from the case where it
> appears postverbally.  Since the 1pl personal ending is -en, the following
> wir assimilated to the nasal (and this pronunciation is common even in
> fairly standard spoken forms when the pronoun is postverbal).  Crucially,
> this nasal-initial pronunciation was extended to all positions in the
> relevant dialects, so that even sentence-initially this is what you get.

[Ed]
I have serious doubts about this explanation: isn't w<v<m , cf. the 1sg marker?
Cf. Eng. 'with' <> Ger. 'mit', Du. 'met'.

I don't mean that the assimilation you describe doesn't actually happen in the
modern language, only that it is not related to the problem of the genesis of
the 1pl marker.

BTW, e.g. Latin and Greek have a m-type 1pl verbal marker: habeMus, echouMe .

In Brabant Dutch dialects, e.g. 'Wat doen we?' (What do we do?) is pronounced:
[watu:~ m@]. (~ = nasalization of [u]). This is very similar to German.