No Proto-Celtic?

[Thomas McFadden]

>> 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)?

works on the Bavarian dialects generally say that coda r and l have been
vocalized (and in all but stage speech coda r has vocalized in standard
spoken German as well).  you can debate how the current pronunciation of
what was MHG -ir should be represented orthographically, -ia is just an
approximation (and is the usual one i think in representing the dialect
when special characters and diacritics arent used).  anyway it doesnt
matter here since im not talking about the coda of the word, but just the
initial consonant.

>> 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.

i wasn't being as clear as i should have.  i didnt mean to say that this
had any role in creating the 1pl agreement marker, i only meant to show
that variants of grammatical forms that are created by phonological
processes that are triggered only in marked word order configurations can
spread outside the environment where they are phonologically regular and
be generalized to all environments.  that is, an m-initial pronunciation
of the 1sg pronoun is only phonologically justified when the verb is
immediately preceding.  while examples VS are rather common in modern
forms of German, the unmarked order is SVO in main clauses and SOV in
subordinate clauses.  nonetheless, in some dialects, the pronunciation
of this pronoun that is at home in VS clauses has spread to ones that are
SVO and SOV.  if that can happen, it's not implausible that an agreement
affix created by phonological processes (ultimately from reduction of
subject clitics) operating in just such a marked VS environment could
have spread to the more common SOV/SVO orders.  and the only reason i gave
this example is that the only two i could come up with where we actually
had personal endings being affected in that environment admittedly have
other explanations.

> 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.

yeah, just to be clear, im not arguing that the example of the 1sg pronoun
affected the 1sg agreement affix in this example, rather the opposite,
that the final -n of the agreement affix triggered assimilation in the
initial consonant of the pronoun, just as you point out has happened in
Brabant Dutch.