13
votes
When did the Celtic languages die out in Spain?
Actually, there are good chances that a Celtic language was spoken in the 6th century in the Iberian Peninsula, not the ones you would expect but a Brittonic one.
We know for sure that a group of ...
- 261
12
votes
Excepting Romanian, is "Wales" ever translated/transliterated in modern languages with the same term as that meaning "Gaul" or "Gauls"?
This may sound weird, but it's not. Well, in fact, it is very weird indeed.
–– With equal right one might say that Romania should correctly be called Wales. ––
If that joke is lost on you, read the ...
- 237
9
votes
Which Romance Language retains the most words from Celtic?
When a modern Romance language shows some influence of a Celtic language it replaced it is a consequence of language contact and not of common inheritance. It is generally hold that the Rhaeto-Romance ...
- 29k
9
votes
Accepted
c- in Irish clann "offspring"
You have to a large degree answered the question yourself, really: clann is indeed a very early loan word.
Like Common Celtic, Common Insular Celtic had no /p/, but it had /kʷ/.
The Brythonic branch ...
- 2,925
9
votes
Accepted
Are Germanic languages closer to Italo-Celtic languages or Balto-Slavic languages?
The best answer is: There is no consensus about this. In the big tree of Indogermanic languages there are only two intermediate groupings that are generally accepted: Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic. ...
- 29k
7
votes
Accepted
What are these "unexplained similarities" between Celtic languages and languages from North Africa?
The similarities usually cited between Insular Celtic and the Semitic languages and those of North Africa are the following:
VSO as basic word order.
"Conjugated" prepositions, where ...
- 6,116
7
votes
Does French retain more Celtic words than English does?
Not really, modern French has preserved only very few Celtic words not counting geographical names. The loss of Celtic words already happened in Gallo-Romance, the Frankish takeover had indeed little ...
- 29k
7
votes
Were there any Celtic Languages being spoken in the early years of Rome?
Proto-Celtic was spoken well before the foundation of Rome in 753BC; it is heavily associated with the Hallstatt culture which was developed by 800BC. Proto-Celtic branched out to several distinct ...
- 1,484
7
votes
Accepted
How did these feminine mutations originate in Welsh?
Long ago many words ended in sounds which were for some reason lost. It was those now lost sounds that triggered different kinds of assimilation and other consonant changes in the words that followed ...
- 17.3k
6
votes
Which Romance Language retains the most words from Celtic?
Just to supplement jknappen's excellent answer, we don't see a lot of inherited vocabulary shared between Italic and Celtic, simply due to the timescales involved. When there are cognates between the ...
- 60.1k
5
votes
Accepted
Where did Irish "-acht" come from?
A quick look at Stair na Gaeilge yields this (in Kim McCone’s chapter An tSean-Gaeilge agus a réamhstair — “Old Irish and its prehistory”)…
21.2 … It can be seen that use is made of the suffix *-(i)...
- 278
4
votes
Accepted
Lingustics Problem about Breton Number System
The data which is the base for the problem (plus experience with many other languages) tells you that big numbers are often combinations like "five tens" i.e. 5x10. The similarity in form ...
- 76.8k
4
votes
Did Common Brittonic use /ṽ/?
This phoneme /ṽ/ appears to be common to both Common Brittonic and Old Irish, and shows the difficulties that the contemporary scribes for Old Irish had with notating nasalisation. As of January 2021, ...
- 6,743
4
votes
How different were proto Italic and proto Celtic?
The languages were probably very close and most likely mutually intelligible at least to some degree, which is why we postulate the Italo-Celtic branch of IE languages. Of course neither of these ...
- 2,333
3
votes
Accepted
How did French lose the Latin -v-?
It's probably not a substrate effect, but a phonetically caused deletion, seeing as the sound was not lost in all contexts but only in specific conditions.
A substrate-based loss would presumably be ...
- 10.7k
3
votes
Were there any Celtic Languages being spoken in the early years of Rome?
You could also just use a Gaulish dictionary. It's the earliest continental Celtic language we actually know a lot about.
I'd suggest Xavier Delamarre's "Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise". It's not ...
- 31
3
votes
Accepted
How did this soft mutation happened?
The theory is that "soft mutation" is the result of intervocalic lenition. This paper on Celtic in general may help you to navigate the details of the branches of Celtic, plus gives references for ...
- 76.8k
3
votes
Is Welsh an isolating, an inflectional or an agglutinative language?
"Analytic" and "synthetic" are ends of a continuum regarding morphological versus syntactic means of combining elements, where "more morphology" is on the synthetic end ...
- 76.8k
2
votes
Accepted
Is Welsh an isolating, an inflectional or an agglutinative language?
A language can be both “analytic” and “synthetic”, the two categories are the polar points in the analytic–synthetic spectrum (or call it ‘continuum’) on which you position languages, that's why some ...
- 17.3k
2
votes
Accepted
Bugarth - Celtic, Old Norse, both or neither?
Could these two words:
stem from the same PIE root, and survived relatively unskathed
have been borrowed one from the other, making one or both of the etymologies dubious
have been ...
- 60.1k
2
votes
Are consonant mutations in Indo-European languages specific of the Celtic group?
A similar phenomenon to Irish eclipsis exists in Modern Greek, although more limited in terms of the number of consonants it applies to. According to Wikipedia's article on "Modern Greek Phonology":
...
- 17.3k
1
vote
How did French lose the Latin -v-?
Why might the Latin -v- have been lost in French?
Why were the Latin intervocalic -v- and -b- lost in Romanian as well?
alleger from alleviare; neige from nivea; jeune from juvenis.
Notice that ...
- 311
1
vote
What is the origin of Russian барин ['bа:rʲin]?
I would argue for the possible connection with word "baron" actually.
The word "baron" itself comes from Old French, which at the time preserved still some forms of declension and "baron" was the ...
- 2,333
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