Proto-Celtic - An Exploration: Celtic ICM & Q/P Words Function IE Roots

[anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi]

[Larry Trask:]

Fourth, Kalevi Wiik has not established anything at all, least of all about
Basque.  What he does is to draw pretty maps showing Uralic-speakers wandering
all over the solar system zillions of years ago. He has built a career out of
this simple party piece.

[A.A.]

I would like to add that I completely agree with Larry's view on the quality of
Kalevi Wiik's research in comparative linguistics. This is the view shared by
almost all Uralists, and other specialists acquainted with Wiik's theories.
Wiik's claims have been rejected for good reasons, as he has not been able to
produce a single piece of evidence in support of his views that has been able
to stand scrutiny. (Despite of this, he has actively publicized his wild
speculations as a linguistic breakthrough outside the field, and still
continues to do so - which, I think, should be considered unforgivable.) Wiik's
ideas have been thoroughly criticized by researchers such as e.g. Juha
Janhunen, Johanna Laakso, Eve Mikone, Jorma Koivulehto, Asko Parpola, Petri
Kallio, Cornelius Hasselblatt etc.

As for mr. O'Keefe's reply to my posting, my reaction to it is that it contains
too many misunderstandings and factual errors (concerning e.g. the so-called
consonant gradation in Uralic) to warrant any thorough commentary. So I only
comment the following passage:

[David O'Keefe:]

The ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, 15th ed., 1994,Vol. 22, in an article entitled
Languages of the World, p. 690, states "the Sami languages exhibit similar
alternations, but the process applies to all consonants......"  Presumably,
this means that alternation applies to initial consonants, too.

[A.A.]

Regrettably, this demonstrates all too well why no one should mistake to
consider Encyclopaedia Britannica a sufficient source of data on Samic (or,
indeed, any language) for the purpose of linguistic research. To me, a native
speaker of Sami, a suggestion of "initial consonant gradation" related to the
Celtic initial mutations sounds as reasonable as if someone claimed on the list
that English is polysynthetic and thus related to Eskimo.

What was meant in the quoted passage is that the process applies to all
consonants in the phoneme inventory, not to all the actual occurences of the
phonemes. Moreover, "initial consonant gradation" is a theoretical
impossibility. The term "consonant gradation" refers to a very specific type of
morphophonological phenomenon, which is, or historically was, conditioned by
either 1) the phonological structure of a following unstressed syllable
(whether it was *CV or CVC; the so-called radical gradation), or 2) the
prosodic structure of the word (whether the consonant occurs on the border of a
syllable with secondary stress and an unstressed syllable, or on the border of
two unstressed syllables; the so-called suffixal gradation). There is no way
that consonant gradation could ever occur in initial position.

Regards,
Ante Aikio