Italo-Celtic languages
Hypothetical grouping of the Italic and Celtic language families
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Interpretations
The traditional interpretation of the data is that both sub-groups of the Indo-European language family are generally more closely related to each other than to the other Indo-European languages. That could imply that they are descended from a common ancestor, Proto-Italo-Celtic, which can be partly reconstructed by the comparative method. Scholars who believe that Proto-Italo-Celtic was an identifiable historical language estimate that it was spoken in the 3rd or 2nd millennium BCE somewhere in South-Central Europe, possibly the Bell Beaker culture.
That hypothesis fell out of favour after it was re-examined by Calvert Watkins in 1966. Nevertheless, some scholars, such as Frederik Kortlandt, continued to be interested in the theory. In 2002 a paper by Ringe, Warnow and Taylor, employing computational methods as a supplement to the traditional linguistic subgrouping methodology, argued in favour of an Italo-Celtic subgroup, and in 2007, Kortlandt attempted a reconstruction of a Proto-Italo-Celtic.
Emphatic support for an Italo-Celtic clade came from Celtologist Peter Schrijver in 1991. More recently, Schrijver (2016) has argued that Celtic arose in or close to northern Italy as the first branch of Italo-Celtic to split off, with areal affinities to Venetic and Sabellian, and identified Proto-Celtic archaeologically with the Canegrate culture of the Late Bronze Age of Italy (c. 1300–1100 BC).
The most common alternative interpretation is that the proximity of Proto-Celtic and Proto-Italic over a long period could have encouraged the parallel development of what were already quite separate languages, as areal features within a Sprachbund. As Watkins (1966) puts it, "the community of -ī in Italic and Celtic is attributable to early contact, rather than to an original unity". The assumed period of language contact could then be later and perhaps continue well into the first millennium BC.
However, if some of the forms are archaic elements of Proto-Indo-European that were lost in other branches, neither model of post-PIE relationship must be postulated. Italic and especially Celtic also share several distinctive features with the Hittite language (an Anatolian language) and the Tocharian languages, and those features are certainly archaisms.
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Forms
The principal Italo-Celtic forms are:
- the thematic genitive singular in ī (e.g. Latin second declension dominus, gen.sg. dominī). Both in Italic (Popliosio Valesiosio, Lapis Satricanus) and in Celtic (Lepontic -oiso, Celtiberian -o), traces of the -osyo genitive of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) have also been discovered, which might indicate that the spread of the ī genitive occurred in the two groups independently (or by areal diffusion). The ī genitive has been compared to the so-called Cvi formation in Sanskrit, but that too is probably a comparatively late development. The phenomenon is probably related to the feminine long ī stems and the Luwian i-mutation.
- the formation of superlatives with reflexes of the PIE suffix *-ism̥mo- (Latin fortis, fortissimus "strong, strongest", Old Irish sen, sinem "old, oldest", Oscan mais, maimas "more, most"), where branches outside Italic and Celtic derive superlatives with reflexes of PIE *-isto- instead (Sanskrit: urús, váriṣṭhas "broad, broadest", Ancient Greek: καλός, κάλλιστος "beautiful, fairest", Old Norse rauðr, rauðastr "red, reddest", as well as English "-est").
- the ā-subjunctive. Both Italic and Celtic have a subjunctive descended from an earlier optative in -ā-. Such an optative is not known from other languages, but the suffix occurs in Balto-Slavic and Tocharian past tense formations, and possibly in Hittite -ahh-.
- the collapsing of the PIE aorist and perfect into a single past tense. In both groups, this is a relatively late development of the proto-languages, possibly dating to the time of Italo-Celtic language contact.
A number of other similarities continue to be pointed out and debated.
- The r-passive (mediopassive voice) was initially thought to be an innovation restricted to Italo-Celtic until it was found to be a retained archaism shared with Hittite, Tocharian, and possibly the Phrygian language.
- Development of *CRHC sequences to *CRāC. Though this particular development is shared between Italic and Celtic, both language families also show divergent treatments of *CRHC clusters in other situations. For instance, Italic may showcase a development of *CŔ̥HC to *CaRC or *CaRaC, a development known as the palma-rule. Likewise, Celtic occasionally showcases a development of *CRHC to *CRaC, as in Old Irish flaith ("lordship, sovereignty, rule"), which reflects PIE *wl̥Hti-. According to the philologist Michael Weiss, these differing sound changes imply the resolution of *CRHC sequences must not be a common Italo-Celtic development.
- The assimilation of *p to a following *kʷ. This development obviously predates the Celtic loss of *p:
- However, the development of PIE perkʷu- to Latin quercus (< PIt. *kʷerkʷus) appears to show that the Italic assimilation of *p to *kʷ precedes the development of *kʷu to *ku. However, the Celtic term Hercynia (< *perkunia) appears to showcase the opposite; it requires that the change of *kʷu to *ku occur prior to the assimilation, thus allowing the initial *p to remain, which was eventually regularly lost as part of a later Celtic sound change. Alternatively, it is possible that the dissimilation of *kʷu to *ku was already a PIE development, in which case Italic must have regularly undergone the assimilation in the oblique cases (i.e. gen.sg. *pr̥kʷéw-), which then spread analogically to the other case forms. If this theory is accepted, then this particular lexical item provides no information regarding the relative chronology of these sound changes.