about rix:
Yes, but it doesn't make any difference whatsoever : k → χ before s is a purely Celtic lenition process, Grimm's Law has nothing to do with that. Moreover, this is "allophonic" as you mentioned, thus only a variant of the same sound. *ē > *ī is Celtic too, hence I don't see why this word should be a pre-Grimm's Law borrowing from Celtic.
[/FONT]
It doesn't, but I'd be interested to hear it anyway
Maybe we can open a thread devoted to Grimm's Law.
I checked thoroughly this (very short) list, and I cannot see any word there proving your point (ie that there have been borrowings from Celtic to Germanic before Grimm's Law).
Rix, as stated above, has all the regular Celtic features in Germanic. Same for Volcae →
*walhaz , which shows another Celtic lenition (after r and l, k → x, see Pedersen's Comparative Grammar of Celtic §50), and same for ambactos → *ambahtaz (lenition of k before t).
The only word which would prove your point is *leagis → *lēkijaz, but even Ringe is not sure about this one, with good reason since the only cognate is Irish, and the alleged proto-Celtic etymon is not even listed in Matasovic's dictionary. I would add that *leagis does not sound very proto-celtic to me, it's more Old Irish I would say.
And even if the correspondance was correct, I would say that these cognates have inherited from a common source, not that there was a borrowing.
Lenition in Proto-Celtic only occured if a plosive was located before another plosive or /s/. Hence clusters like *kt, *ks, *pt, *ps became *χt, *χs, *χt, *χs. In so far, I agree for *ambaχtos (but we can agree with Ringe that this is a Celtic loanword in Germanic?). But *rīgjo- and *wolkos are a different matter, as elsewhere, /g/ remained (or /k/), this includes when *rīχs was declensed (hence "Vercingetorix" but "Bituriges" and "Rigomagus"... and the example of *rīgjo-. This is why I said "allophonic". And frankly, I'd be curious to hear how Pedersen justifies his statement, because I don't see the evidence. From my perspective, these are both instances where the outcome of *k and *h in Germanic can be only attributed to Grimm's Law.
In my opinion, *rīkjaz, *walxaz and *tūnaz cannot be common inheritances but are old Celtic loanwords.
I don't say it is impossible, I say it is impossible to spot. If Grimm's Law apply it is Germanic, if not it is not Germanic. Ringe challenges indeed the concept of pre-proto-Germanic saying that this is an hypothesis which is not proven and which doesn't exclude other scenarios.
Can't we just agree to disagree? :redface:
There is a big deal of a difference : we know there has been a stage between Proto-Germanic and OHG. In the case of Grimm's Law, we are not sure about anything. For me, there was no pre-proto or pre-ante-proto, there was, as Meillet suggests, a direct adaptation of the sounds by the indigeneous populations. This is, IMO, the only realistic scenario. The other one is, to me, no more than a phonetic game for linguists (as is the laryngeal theory by the way).
Yeah, but why would there be such a wholesale sound shift? In my opinion your instant adaptation does not really explain it, either. The peculiarity of Grimm's Law is that most of the sounds existed in the language before and after, in so far the idea that the substrate language did not have these sounds doesn't explain anything. If your hypothetical language already had *p, *b, *t, *d, *g, *k, why did you have such an elaborate chain shift? In my opinion its much more logical to assume that the shift occured in time.
Well, you know, I am not the kind of linguistic rebel who support all the possible weird theories. I am just looking for the best and most realistic explanations, and they are always the simplest. Hence I agree with you, Hallstatt is Celtic. My claim is, that previous archaeological culture could also be connected with the Celts, as well as older cultures than Harpstedt and Jastorf could be connected with the Germans.
I'm not ruling out that there is an older, common "pool" of Celtic and Germanic vocabulary, and the way I see it, this is not a contradiction of my hypothesis, rather it fits rather well with the idea of language contact between Celtic and Germanic before Grimm's Law was executed. In fact, I would go so far and say that this common vocabulary contradicts your hypothesis, as the Celtic and Germanic languages had a
very different phonetic evolution. One of the examples that Ringe gives, *bhrgh-, shows the different dissolution of the old syllabic resonants of PIE in Celtic and Germanic.
Ringe is prudent enough to title this section "Words which might be Celtic loans or shared inheritances", which shows that, if they are loans, it is impossible to prove - and none of his example proves it.
In my opinion, the Celtic *dūno- is etymologically related with Latin "fūnus" (the English word "funeral" derives from this). Now, *dʰ- regularly becomes *d- in Celtic, and *f- in Italic, while the *t in Germanic is entirely unexpected. The only way this could have happened, in my opinion, is that it was borrowed from Celtic
before the execution of Grimm's Law.
I agree, changes may occur within a language. I just claim that when they occur they are triggered by articulatory habitudes, which come from the substratum. Note that the substratum is an internal source, not an external one, let's leave the Indians where they are
See, I would argue that in fact this is the norm, and that most sound changes are internally-conditioned.
These changes are too huge to be internally driven in such a short time span. Once again, this is unrealistic. And even if it was, it still doesn't answer my question : why ?
I disagree for that. There are three historically attested examples where such huge sound changes happened that can only be internally driven:
- changes in Goidelic (from Primitive Irish to Old Irish)
- changes in Brythonic from Antiquity to Middle Ages (about the same time frame)
- the Upper German consonant shift
For all three cases (which in my opinion are just as drastic as Grimm's Law - the Upper German consonant shift is, in fact, a very comparable sound shift where the set of plosives is shifted wholesale compared to the parent language). Each time, we do know that there
was a language stage before the radical changes in the phonology occured. I don't see a reason why this should not have occured prehistorically in Proto-Germanic, either. I might also say, that way, I really don't see the "exclusivity" of Grimm's Law. I might also mention that Proto-Armenian made a similar sound shift.
Languages are very old, and language variation is extremely slow, contrary to what is predicted by the mainstream indo-europeanists (although less and less); it goes for the words as for the sounds. I accept the idea of slow and progressive changes, and yet they are driven by ancient habitudes. Brutal sound changes (and it is the case of Grimm's Law) can occur only when there is a change of substratum, ie an IE tribe settling in Denmark among indigeneous tribes.
Take French, which is interesting because the substratum is documented : French is much "softer" than Spanish or Italian, and obviously than latin, which are more distinct languages from the articulatory point of view. The cause of this is the laxness of Gaulish. This laxness has triggered almost all the important features of modern French. Later, the Germanic aristocracy modified slightly this tendancy by hardening a few phonetic features, but it was marginal.
I disagree about that, and vehemently so. Most language families are
comparably fairly young: Proto-Indo-European itself is from the Copper Age, and the major daughter branches of Indo-European that we have today (Germanic, Romance, Slavic and Indic) are all themselves ~1500-2000 years old. Proto-Semitic and Proto-Austronesian, for example, date both from the Neolithic, the only language family that is substantially older would be Proto-Afroasiatic (early Neolithic, in my opinion, or Mesolithic if you ask Ehret), but I would argue that the conservativism in these Afroasiatic languages is mainly driven by their unique structure (consonantal roots).