Re: Plural Problems

["Raymond A. Brown" <raybrown@macline.co.uk>]

At 12:39 7/11/97, Padraic Brown wrote:
[.......]
>> The progessive or continuous tenses in English are IMO likely to be
>> influenced by native Celtic practice, but the influence must be Brittonic.
>> Apart from peculiarities in AngloIrish which are not found elsewhere, I can
>> think of no bits of Irish grammar in English.
>
>These are what I was thinking of.  I wasn't aware they were Brythonic in
>origin.

There common to all the insular forms of Celtic, and to Breton which was
insular Celtic taken across to the Brittany peninsular.

It's interesting to note that they're also found to a lesser extent in
Iberian Romance (estaban trabajando - they were working) and Italian (
stavano lavorando - they were working); Celtic influence cannot be
discounted in these areas so it may be that similar forms were used in
continental Celtic.  But the absence of such forms in French such make us
wary of this assumption.

A similar construction is found in modern eastern Armenian, cf. berum em =
at-bringing I-am, where 'berum' has the locative ending -um.  We can
certainly discount Celtic influence here.

>>
>> No, not a just a fiat of Andrew's - he's thought the system out.  Indeed, I
>> think Andrew's done a very good job of developing a "Brittonicized" Romance
>> tongue in a credible way.
>
>I understand that the system is well thought out.  (My original attempt at
>a Romanoceltic language only included nasalisation, which is, truth be
>told, the easiest of the three.)  I was simply commenting on the fact that
>it ended up in a Romance language at all.

Not so unlikely.  The western Romance langs clearly show changes comparable
to Brittonic soft mutation internally, cf. Latin patre(m) --> Spanish
padre, Old French /pEDdr@/ (mod. French père).  It's not implausible that
under stronger Celtic influence this should have affected initial
consonants also and then, as word endings were lost, the mutations became
fixed in a similar way to that which find in the modern Celtic langs.

>By the way, where is the fourth
>mutation?  You mention softening, nasalisation and lenition (spirant).
>Are you counting umlaut, or is there some other deviously concealed
>mutation I'm unaware of?
>

No - sorry, my mistake: I mis-counted.  AFAIK Andrew hasn't added the
fourth mutation of Breton or Cornish!

Or rather I was including the original unmutated form in my thinking.
Tables in Welsh grammars are normally set out in four columns.  But the
first is, of course, unmutated. These are three: soft mutation, nasal &
spirant mutation.

The Gaelic-langs work a little differently, having only two mutations;
nasalization is often termed 'eclipsis', and  lenition which in fact has
more in common with Brittonic soft mutation, tho the voiceless plosive
behave like Welsh spirant mutation.

Ray.