Re: General RFI

[Geoff Eddy <geoff@morven.compulink.co.uk>]

On Thu, 14 May 1998, I wrote:

> don't think it'd be very easy to derive a Q-Celtic language from
> Brithenig without taking a substantial amount directly from
> Latin/Romance as well.

and Padraic Brown wrote:

> I'm not entirely certain what you mean by this.  I shouldn't think it were
> at all possible to derive _any_ Celtic language from B.

I wasn't very clear, was I?!

What I meant was that deriving Breathanach purely from Brithenig, rather
than from Latin/Romance, would mean the language going through two sets
of Celtic evolutionary rules rather than one, which is probably
overdoing things a bit (not to say making it unnecessarily complicated,
rather like this sentence!). 

Breathanach thus derives mostly from Latin/Romance, so it's more of a
cousin to Brithenig than a dialect, although there's obviously room for
considerable Brithenig influence.

Here's a thought which has just popped into my head, regarding a
hypothetical situation which may well be pertinent: How would
*mutations* be borrowed from P-Celtic into Q-Celtic? If a P-Celtic word
causes, say, nasal mutation, how would the voiceless consonants /p t c/
be affected, since Q-Celtic does not have the resulting voiceless nasals
/mh nh ngh/ ? Would the Q-Celtic "eclipsis" (voicing, as in P-Celtic
soft mutation) be used for these, resulting in /b d g/? Similarly, if
eclipsis were borrowed into P-Celtic, what would happen?

[Sound changes caused by eclipsis: /p t c f b d g/ become /b d g v m n
ng/]

Geoff
-- 
[] Anna laughed with delight         <> Geoff Eddy, somewhere in
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