This is my point : there are changes (in a time span of 3500 years the contrary would have been surprising), but, as you said, they are not drastic. There is no comparison with the huge amount of sound changes which occurred from Latin to Old French in no more than 5 centuries.
Yes, you have a point. This is quite a difference in the mode of language evolution. One must add, such sudden changes make any attempts to make an "absolute dating" are completely screwed up (I'm talking about so-called concept of "glottochronology", which you may have heard about, and which has produced bewildering results, most drastically the claim by Forster and Toth 2003 that Proto-Celtic diverged from PIE in 6000 BC!
). What is possible, though, as can be demonstrated, is that it's verymuch possible to do
relative chronology in regard for whether words entered a language before or after a sound change.
This change is probably mechanistic, I agree. As for the question of the PIE labiovelar in Greek, Oscan and P-Celtic, I have no opinion yet, but this is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating problems in the field of historical phonetics.
Yes, this treatment in Greek, Osco-Umbrian and P-Celtic is certainly fascinating. Especially the question of why it happened there. Was there a common influence that caused this, or did this really happen independently?
I wouldn't say that; several words considered by the etymological dictionaries (TLF and FEW) as Germanic may be in fact Celtic, and many words considered as "Dutch" are in fact not. Just one example : the word "chouette" (owl) is supposedly from old Frankish *kawa (which incidentaly designates a completely different bird), while there is an attested Gaulish caouanos (kaouenn in Breton). The same for blet and blesser, suposedly from Old Frankish *bleizza, saule from *sahla, and others. I am currently writing a paper about that.
Yeah, you have a point there. The list is
probably larger, and in addition I would think we must also not rule out the possibility of Gaulish loanwords in Old Frankish, to add confusion to the whole situation. Regarding Breton, one interesting question is if Breton has borrowings from Gaulish. I mean, I'm not necessarily arguing that Gaulish was still a living language at the time the Bretons arived in Aremorica (that would probably be a stretch to argue), because those words might have been transmitted to Breton via Vulgar Latin, instead.
Very good question. I don't know :indifferent:. I would say it is originally Celtic (don't believe I am a Celtomane : I am definitely not !) because I find it hard to believe that the superstratum language of an aristocratic elite could influence the phonetics of a language so deeply (the change of articulation is huge in this case). Phonetics is mostly inherited from substrata.
Yes, I absolutely agree there! It would seem far more likely for this to be inherited from the Gallo-Romans than from the Frankish aristocracy.
However, this is not a definitive opinion (in fact I have no definitive opinion at all) and it could be originally Germanic. In Breton you have the same uvular R as in French and Germanic. Is it inherited from Gaulish or is it a borrowing from French or Germanic ? I asked to old peoples in Brittany of they could remember anybody using another sound than the uvular one and the answer was no. On the other hand, in Cornish you have an alveolar flap (as in English) which is probably a borrowing from English, thus the Breton R would be a borrowing from French, and that would contradict my first point. But a borrowing from when ? In Old French, you have (supposedly) an alveolar trill, as in Spanish...
Or maybe the English alveolar flap r is substratic, that's why you have it in English and Cornish (not in Welsh though), and maybe the french R is substratic too. I don't exclude any hypothesis. At the moment, I just don't know.
An why do you have a trill in Norwegian (not in Stavanger though... nothing is simple...).
in Swedish and in Icelandic ? Even in Faroese they have a trill...
Well yeah, it gets confusing there. What has to be added is that the Uvular Trill is far from ubiquitous in German, because there's a number of dialects which have a very different "R" sounds: some southern dialects have the alveolar trill, and certain dialects in the west (the region around the town of Siegen, specifically) even have an alveolar approximant!
You certainly know this theory according to which the first Celtic language spoken in Ireland was P-Celtic...
Yes, I heard about that theory, but honestly, it makes much more sense to assume that the British Isles as a whole were originally Q-Celtic. In particular, a cognate of the word "Britain" (recorded as "Pritennike" in the ancient Greek sources, and also the Welsh word "Prydein") also exists in Irish as "Cruithne". Hence, the root word can be reconstructed as something akin to "Kʷritani". In my opinion, Britain was subsequently P-Celticized (or, participated in the P-Celtic sound shift, if you wish to call it that), whereas seemingly, Ireland was left out of this innovation.
However, what definitely is conceivable - even likely - is that there were P-Celtic peoples who arrived later in Ireland. Specifically, Ptolemy mentions a tribe in Ireland called the "Manapi", which sound very similar to the Menapi of Gallia Belgica, which lived in the region of Cassel (Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France). We know that Belgic tribes migrated into Britain (the Atrebates, for instance, are found on both sides of the Channel), so it's conceivable that Belgic tribes also migrated into Ireland.
That's Vennemann's theory I guess ? Unfortunately, all the papers and books I've found by him were written in German, and I must confess that I cannot read German. If you know something in English, I would be glad to read it and to know more about his theory.
Yes, Vennemann, amongst other people. But principally Vennemann, because he's been the loudest advocate of it. In regard for you being not able to read his works, I am kind of afraid to say that you have not missed much. Basically, he started out with a good idea but he interpreted too much into it, and much of his later works (for instance, he argues that the Phoenicians colonized the North Sea!) are outright crazy! :startled:
One problem is that Vennemann explicitly argues that there was a
Semitic substrate on the British Isles. I mean, I could see how there might have been an
Afro-Asiatic language in the Atlantic region, which may have arrived there in the Neolithic. But I genuinely doubt that any Semitic-speaking peoples reached the British Isles before the Phoenician traders who may have arrived there in the early 1st millennium BC.