Re: Celtic initial mutation

On 31 May, 01:15, edie...@xxxxxxx wrote:
I am an complete amateur who has become interested in the Celtic
languages. I am fascinated by the initial consonant mutations and how
they evolved. Wikipedia waves a hand at issues. I have been googling
and none of the information I have found has been that helpful. The
books I have found are way too expensive for me. Can anyone point me
to a resource?

I haven't found any really detailed online resources, but the basic
cause is clear enough; earlier forms of the relevant Celtic languages
had final syllables ending in a variety of sounds, including vowels
(maqi/mapi, "son's"), nasal consonants (e.g. in genitive plurals), and
oral consonants (maqos/mapos, "son" in the nominative singular).
Wikipedia's article on Gaulish gives you some idea of the sort of noun
endings the precursor languages would have had, with the proviso that
it is not the direct ancestor of any existing Celtic language.

In connected speech, the initial consonants of following words were
affected by the phonetic environment, with e.g. /b/ after a nasal
becoming /m/, /b/ after vowel becoming /v/, and /b/ after some other
consonants remaining unchanged.
The very common lenition/soft mutation after a feminine singular noun
or article is a consequence of the old vowel ending -a.
(The detailed changes are of course very different in the Goidelic and
Brythonic branches).
Such changes are very common linguistically and parallels can be found
in the development of Romance languages. Where Celtic is somewhat less
mainstream is that the trigger environments - the final syllables -
disappeared without trace in words longer than one syllable, while the
sound changes they had caused remained, becoming distinctive for the
first time. (Beforehand, speakers may hardly have been aware of the
differences as they were completely conditioned by the environment).
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Random Name Generator
    ... in languages the speaker knows. ... they both map to that same Japanese phoneme. ... Consonants are formed by blocking the airflow from the lungs. ... Here's a table of English consonants: ...
    (rec.games.roguelike.development)
  • Re: India free education bill tabled
    ... I have seen that Ranjit takes pains to use upper and lower case letters to distinguish consonants and long/short vowels. ... Easier would be to adopt one "lipi" for all Indian languages - Malayalam covers the waterfront in terms of sounds :-) ... Hmmm, maybe Sanskrit should be language of the US too, or maybe residents here will work towards getting the US to adopt Devanagari to write American. ...
    (soc.culture.indian)
  • Re: Armenian, Sumerian, Burushaski, and Turkic languages
    ... Spanish to the other Romance languages to derive Proto-Romance. ... consistently looking at the first two consonants and require them both ... finding similarity that arises randomly. ... or sequences of sound changes (palatalization of k to tS/ts followed ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Three conversions from belief here (due to science)
    ... to make sure your culture differs from Germanic as much as possible? ... I think the ratio of consonants to vowels in Finnish isn't really all ... that weird when compared to most Indoeuropean languages. ... Also in Czech language there are names without vowels. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Celtic initial mutation
    ... I am an complete amateur who has become interested in the Celtic ... languages. ... I am fascinated by the initial consonant mutations and how ... Wikipedia waves a hand at issues. ...
    (sci.lang)
Loading