ITALO-CELTIC

“Da das altirische Verbum in vielen Fällen einen italo-keltischen Zustand besser repräsentiert als das Lateinische, liefert es nicht selten Vorstufen lateinischer Verhältnisse.” (Wagner 1956: 171)

The analysis presented above has important consequences for the reconstruction of Italo-Celtic. The latter must be based on the combined evidence of Insular Celtic (especially Old Irish) and Continental Celtic (especially Celtiberian, cf. Villar 1997) on the one hand and on the reconstruction of Proto-Italic and Venetic (for which see Euler 1993 and van der Staaij 1995) on the other. Thanks to Meiser’s thorough and detailed analysis of the Italic languages (cf. 2003: 27-166) we have now reached the stage where a reconstruction of Italo-Celtic becomes feasible. In the following I shall not give a full account of Italo-Celtic as the westernmost branch of Indo-European and its differentiation from the central languages (Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Armenian, Greek and Indo-Iranian) and from the other peripheral branches (Tocharian, Anatolian) but limit myself to an identification of its principal features. It is clear from Lachmann’s law that the sounds which are usually reconstructed as *b, *d, *g, *gw differed from both *p, *t, *k, *kw and *bh, *dh, *gh, *gwh in the presence of a feature which in some positions merged with the reflex of the Proto-Indo-European laryngeals in Latin but was lost in Celtic. I presume that this feature was glottalization because it is reflected as glottalization in Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Armenian and Indo-Iranian (cf. Kortlandt 1985). It follows that *bh, *dh, *gh, *gwh may have been plain voiced stops, in agreement with their reflexes in Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Albanian, Armenian, Phrygian and Iranian, and that the voiced aspirates in Indic and the voiceless aspirates in Greek originated from local developments under the influence of substratum languages (cf. Kortlandt 150 Italo-Celtic origins and prehistoric development of the Irish language

2003a: 259). The plain voiced stops developed into voiced fricatives under certain conditions in Celtic, Germanic, Albanian and Iranian, and the same can be assumed for Venetic and the Italic languages. This scenario is supported by the dissimilation of *m- to *bh- in Latin formīca ‘ant’, which shows that *bh- was a voiced bilabial fricative at the time of dissimilation (cf. Meillet 1918, Kortlandt 1978a: 109).

The latter argument is not duly appreciated by Stuart-Smith (2004: 158), who reconstructs voiced aspirates of the Indic type for Proto-Indo-European, in spite of the comparative evidence. She proposes that in Italic the voiced aspirates became voiceless aspirated stops in word-initial position when they became voiced fricatives in word-internal position. This is highly improbable because, contrary to her own analysis (2004: 198), it implies a phonemic split into distinctively aspirated voiceless stops, differing in a single feature from the unaspirated voiceless stops, and voiced fricatives, which were minimally opposed to the voiced stops by a different feature. Her loose reference to the wide variation of English /t/ is quite out of place here because this reflects an entirely different situation (cf. Kortlandt 2003b). The apparent phonemic split was subsequently eliminated by the development of the alleged voiceless aspirates into fricatives, which restored the possibility of their phonemic identification with the word-internal voiced fricatives, until the late Proto- Italic development of the voiceless fricatives into f- and h- destroyed the system and left the voiced fricatives without word-initial phonemic counterparts (cf. Stuart-Smith 2004: 223). This peculiar unbalanced system allegedly survived until after the split between Latin and Faliscan (cf. Stuart- Smith 2004: 63f.). In my view, the original plain voiced stops *bh, *dh, *gh, *gwh became fricatives when *b, *d, *g, *gw lost their glottalization after Lachmann’s law in early Proto-Italic. The resulting typologically rare system was regularized by devoicing the fricatives in word-initial position. The system was simplified in the Sabellic languages (but not in Latino-Faliscan) by the merger of *bh, *dh and *gwh both word-initially and word-internally, maintaining the variation between initial voicelessness and internal voicedness. The Faliscan merger of *bh and *dh may have been a recent development under Sabellic influence while the preservation of word-internal *gh as an obstruent in this language shows that the Latin reflex -h- is recent.