# French: Gaulish substratum theory



## Cilquiestsuens

*Moderator note: Split from here.

*Well, the problem with words like carrus, is that Le Petit Robert gives it as deriving from latin carrus, with no mention whatsoever of Gaulish. Its Gaulish etymology might be 'widely accepted' among diachronic linguists, but even educated people from other fields wouldn't know about that. 

 In any case, I have found the link to the said article: here, it is called: ''_Pour une réévaluation du substrat celtique et pré-indoeuropéen du lexique français_'' by Gilles Quentel, Université de Gdansk.

My query was about 'chien' and I have read your interesting link, that could explain the change historically, since the shift seems to be accepted as a pattern observed in other words. 

As a linguist, do you think it is worth give a thought to that substratum theory?


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## berndf

The fact that the Latin _carrus _is itself a Gaulish loan does not alter the fact that the French _char _is inherited from Latin. Whatever merits the the Gaulish substratum theory for French might have, _char _is not a valid example.


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## CapnPrep

Cilquiestsuens said:


> Well, the problem with words like carrus, is that Le Petit Robert gives it as deriving from latin carrus, with no mention whatsoever of Gaulish. Its Gaulish etymology might be 'widely accepted' among diachronic linguists, but even educated people from other fields wouldn't know about that.


Educated people who are interested in etymology understand that dictionaries like the Robert or Petit Robert usually only give the immediate origin (Latin in this case) and have to leave out most of the details. They also know that Latin words themselves have an etymology (and that a dictionary of French like the Robert is not the right place to look for that).


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## Cilquiestsuens

As a linguist, do you think it is worth give a thought to that substratum theory? What are the pros and the cons?


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## CapnPrep

I think that most linguists agree that French has elements of a Celtic substrate. We know very little about Gaulish, so many claims about its influence on French remain speculative. There's nothing wrong with speculating, but I find many of Quentel's examples to be poorly argued and misinformed about existing work, and the suggestion that there has been some kind of conspiracy to minimize Gaulish/Celtic etymologies in French in favor of Latin borders on crackpot territory.


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## fdb

CapnPrep said:


> the suggestion that there has been some kind of conspiracy to minimize Gaulish/Celtic etymologies in French in favor of Latin borders on crackpot territory.



I agree totally.


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## Cilquiestsuens

*Moderator note: From the original thread (here).
*


CapnPrep said:


> Quentel did, in the article that lead you to start this thread:
> So he thinks that the Latin etymology could be wrong and that a Celtic  source could be better. But he provides no solid arguments here, either  against Latin or in favor of Celtic. He just points out that _chien_ looks pretty different from _canis_ while _c'hi_ looks kind of like _chien_. (Does he know that Breton _c'h_ is not the same sound as French _ch_?)



I thought you meant to say I had said that. 

Whatever Mr. Quentel's article's worth, I was interested by two things in it:

1.  He says that the Gaulish substratum has been underestimated. I would  agree and I don't think he mentions any conspiracy. The reason for this  state of affairs is that Celtic languages are the underdogs of  linguistic studies (No offense meant to linguists, this is just the  logical outcome of the Celts' history and their present condition. They  had their days of glory long long ago, I guess). Just out of curiosity:  How many Celtic languages do you, professional linguists, know fluently?

2. I thought the idea of the double negation _*(ne...pas) *_of  French being due to substratum influence is interesting. What is  unfortunate with Mr. Quentel's research on that is very scanty and far  from being able to lead to any conclusion.

Overall he touches on a  number of interesting (but a bit random) facts without presenting any  research or data to back up his claims. But that, in itself, doesn't  disprove his theories. Overall his article looks more like the final  draft of a quick brainstorming session.

<...>


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## berndf

Cilquiestsuens said:


> Just out of curiosity:  How many Celtic languages do you, professional linguists, know fluently?


This is about Gaulish and not about Insular Celtic languages. It would be impossible to "know them fluently". We only know a few words of Gaulish from mainly Roman sources and from toponyms* that have survived. The Celtic languages of the continent became extinct before anybody developed a writing system system for them. The Druidic culture was very much based on privileged knowledge they jealously guarded to themselves and this once dominant culture of central and Western Europe never left anything written. We even don't know how similar Insular and Continental Celtic really were.
___________________
* E.g. we know that the root _hal _must have meant_ salt_ from all the place names _Reichenhall, Hallein, Hallstatt_ in the area around modern _Salzburg_, a region famous for salt mining and the cradle of the Celtic culture.


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## CapnPrep

Cilquiestsuens said:


> The reason for this  state of affairs is that Celtic languages are the underdogs of  linguistic studies (No offense meant to linguists, this is just the  logical outcome of the Celts' history and their present condition.


On the contrary, Celtic languages have received a tremendous amount of attention from philologists, precisely because of their history (in particular because of the textual records and other linguistic evidence they have left). The Celtic peoples' present condition doesn't really have much effect — either positively or negatively — on etymologists…


Cilquiestsuens said:


> 2. I thought the idea of the double negation _*(ne...pas) *_of  French being due to substratum influence is interesting.


I thought this statement was interesting: "Une chose est certaine : aucune autre langue indoeuropéenne, pas même le latin, n’utilise systématiquement la négation en deux parties." The same structure can be found in varieties of Occitan and Catalan, and I believe in some Italian dialects, and the Latin origin of the reinforcing elements (_pas_, _point_, _mie_, _goutte_, etc.) presents no phonetic or semantic difficulties. Bipartite negation is also found in Germanic, for example in the history of English and German.


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## Cilquiestsuens

CapnPrep said:


> I thought this statement was interesting: "Une chose est certaine : aucune autre langue indoeuropéenne, pas même le latin, n’utilise systématiquement la négation en deux parties." The same structure can be found in varieties of Occitan and Catalan, and I believe in some Italian dialects, and the Latin origin of the reinforcing elements (_pas_, _point_, _mie_, _goutte_, etc.) presents no phonetic or semantic difficulties. Bipartite negation is also found in Germanic, for example in the history of English and German.



You are just confirming what I said about Mr. Quentel and his quoted paper.

You wrote: ''I believe in some Italian dialects''. Which dialects? When? If you are talking about Northern dialects, then we never left the Gaulish linguistic area (covering Catalan, Occitan, Provençal and Oïl languages and including some Germanic territory too). To dismiss this theory shouldn't we rather look at other areas outside of Celtic influence?

Or maybe you think that this double negation is a much later addition to the language? When did that occur?


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## Cilquiestsuens

berndf said:


> This is about Gaulish and not about Insular Celtic languages. It would be impossible to "know them fluently". We only know a few words of Gaulish from mainly Roman sources and from toponyms* that have survived. The Celtic languages of the continent became extinct before anybody developed a writing system system for them. The Druidic culture was very much based on privileged knowledge they jealously guarded to themselves and this once dominant culture of central and Western Europe never left anything written. We even don't know how similar Insular and Continental Celtic really were.
> ___________________
> * E.g. we know that the root _hal _must have meant_ salt_ from all the place names _Reichenhall, Hallein, Hallstatt_ in the area around modern _Salz__burg_, a region famous for salt mining and the cradle of the Celtic culture.



So you claim that knowledge of 'Insular' Celtic languages is completely useless !!! There is a simple fact you overlook, the knowledge of Continental Celtic is so scanty that the only other (secondary but not 'useless') source are Insular Celtic languages.

In the example you give above (hal = salt), in Modern Breton salt is still *Holen*. It illustrates how the Celtic vocabulary hasn't changed much over centuries and the strata of borrowing are well charted (1. Latin 2. Middle French / English)

Breton, and this might be actually the most interesting point raised by Mr. Quentel, and its numerous dialects, due to its historical position, is the surviving Celtic language which has the closest relationship to Gaulish. It is thought that some Gaulish element (vocabulary, syntax, phonology) have survived in some Breton dialects; there were heated arguments between specialists on this topic. It was initially thought that the dialect of Gwened (Vannetais) was the one having maintained a Gaulish element, this was François Falc’hun’s theory, but Kenneth H. Jackson tried his best to discard it. Another expert in this field was Léon Fleuriot.

So according to you all those eminent Celtic linguists were crackpots?


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## CapnPrep

Cilquiestsuens said:


> Or maybe you think that this double negation is a much later addition to the language? When did that occur?


Not before the 12th century, and definitely long after Gaulish had died out. And it appears at around the same time in Occitan, so there is no evidence of gradual diffusion from areas in contact with Breton.


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## JeanDeSponde

Cilquiestsuens said:


> 1.  He says that the Gaulish substratum has been underestimated. I would  agree and I don't think he mentions any conspiracy.


Indeed he didn't say "there is a conspiracy."
Yet many sentences tend to cast a shadow over the honesty, impartiality or competence of philologists:





> The results of comparative etymology *assume *that most French words have a Latin origin and that most features of the French syntax and phonetics come from Latin. This fact is acknowledged and *generally little debated*.





> Cette *sélectivité *qui consiste à ne retenir une étymologie celtique que pour des mots où aucune solution latine n’a été trouvée est *quasi-systématique.*





> Enfin, il existe une catégorie de mots pour lesquels *on s’est contenté* de l’étymologie latine sans aller chercher d’autre explication.





> *Le postulat* selon lequel tout remonte au latin sur lequel s’appuient ces règles *devrait suffire à les rendre suspectes*.


 His general idea is clearly "I wonder why philologists refuse to consider non-latin substratum".
And note that all his examples are in the line of "why did they deny a possible Breton origin?".


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## berndf

Cilquiestsuens said:


> ...François Falc’hun’s theory, but Kenneth H. Jackson tried his best to discard it. Another expert in this field was Léon Fleuriot.
> 
> So according to you all those eminent Celtic linguists were crackpots?


Falc’hun obviously had a political (French nationalist and anti-separatist) agenda that casts serious doubts on his scientific objectivity. Fleuriot, to my knowledge, never admitted more that a possibility of _some _Aremorican influence on Breton.That is exactly the problem: We simply don't know how similar the groups really were. This all remains dreadfully speculative.


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## Cilquiestsuens

CapnPrep said:


> Not before the 12th century, and definitely long after Gaulish had died out. And it appears at around the same time in Occitan, so there is no evidence of gradual diffusion from areas in contact with Breton.



If indeed this double negation appears when you say it did, the argument of a Gaulish substratum having some kind of influence in that process should be completely ruled out... (except if that was a much older phenomenon that started being recorded in written very late?)

Do you have any good link to suggest about the historic appearance of this phenomenon in the languages affected?


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## Cilquiestsuens

JeanDeSponde said:


> Indeed he didn't say "there is a conspiracy."
> Yet many sentences tend to cast a shadow over the honesty, impartiality or competence of philologists:   His general idea is clearly "I wonder why philologists refuse to consider non-latin substratum".
> And note that all his examples are in the line of "why did they deny a possible Breton origin?".



A Breton origin???Who said that?? How is that possible ? Are you misquoting?

Breton here is mentioned for possible parallels deriving from a common heritage. No one ever spoke of Breton origins... The whole thing is about Gaulish origins. Are you following?


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## Cilquiestsuens

berndf said:


> Falc’hun obviously had a political (French nationalist and anti-separatist) agenda that casts serious doubts on his scientific objectivity. Fleuriot, to my knowledge, never admitted more that a possibility of _some _Aremorican influence on Breton.That is exactly the problem: We simply don't know how similar the groups really were. This all remains dreadfully speculative.



You're making a case against Falc'hun who was disliked by all the extremists and crackpot elements of the Breton movement. 

He had the respect of the moderate ones because he was an eminent linguist and Fleuriot had accepted a number of his views relating to the survival of Old Celtic (pre-Insular) forms in Breton dialects. What he never accepted was that Vannetais (Guenedeg or Gwenedeg in peurunvan spelling) was the descendant of Gaulish.


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## JeanDeSponde

Cilquiestsuens said:


> A Breton origin???Who said that?? How is that possible ? Are you misquoting?


Here are a few "I wonder about _breton_" from M. Quentel:





> On peut se demander comment un mot issu du latin juridique a pu s’imposer à une population essentiellement rurale qui n’avait probablement que de distants contacts avec les tribunaux ou l’administration judiciaire, surtout quand on sait que le *breton *pour le même mot est « e-pâd ».





> En *breton*, « mais » se dit « met », avec le même sens : bien entendu, on peut imaginer une influence du français sur le *breton*, mais cela n’expliquerait pas l’écart sémantique entre « mais » et « magis »
> [...]Prétendre qu’il a une origine celtique serait aller trop vite en besogne, mais la parenté avec le *breton *laisse perplexe.





> Le *Breton *dit « ki » pour « chien » (« cy en gallois »), qui mute en « c’hi », on est donc en droit de s’interroger à la fois sur l’origine du mot et sur les règles qui nous font passer de l’étymon latin à sa version finale en français contemporain.





> Et le *breton *nasalise lui aussi, il y a sans doute là plus qu’une coïncidence. La même question se pose pour le son [y] du français, une autre caractéristique que le français partage avec le *breton *mais pas avec ses soeurs romanes.





> Bien entendu, il n’est pas exclu que le *breton *ait emprunté ses nasales au français, mais cela n’explique toujours pas ce particularisme. [...] il est tout à fait possible que le substrat pré-indoeuropéen ait exporté ses éventuelles nasales vers le français et le *breton *via le gaulois. Ce qui rendrait caduque la règle de phonétique historique associée aux nasales du français.


Can you name another dialect / language as abundantly quoted in the article as _breton_...?

I'm not a philologist (by far). I'm a (hard) scientist. When opponents to Darwin say, "There is no proof that an eye could naturally evolve from some light-sensitive cell", I can just say "where are you speaking from...?"


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## Cilquiestsuens

JeanDeSponde said:


> Here are a few "I wonder about _breton_" from M. Quentel:Can you name another dialect / language as abundantly quoted in the article as _breton_...?



Is there anything wrong about Breton being the most quoted language in the article ???

I quote your post above (#13):



> And note that all his examples are in the line of "why did they deny a possible Breton origin?".



The word in contention here was ''Breton origin'' not ''Breton''. In your previous post you were not able to prove that the author of the article was saying what you wrongly attributed to him ("why did they deny a possible Breton origin?").

As you should have understood, the point of quoting Breton is that it is the surviving language which the closest relationship to Gaulish.  It is not about Breton origins, but parallels. What might be confusing, is that some of the parallels quoted in the article seem to be a tad far-fetched and extremely debatable or even pointless (such as 'e-pad' as a possible explanation of 'pendant')


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## JeanDeSponde

Cilquiestsuens said:


> No one ever spoke of Breton origins... The whole thing is  about Gaulish origins. Are you following?


Please be consistent :





Cilquiestsuens said:


> Is there anything wrong about Breton being the most quoted language in the article ???


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## Cilquiestsuens

JeanDeSponde said:


> Please be consistent :



I don't understand your misunderstanding, but I understand it is persisting.

Please, get back to the main topic and set those trifles aside.


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## CapnPrep

Cilquiestsuens said:


> Do you have any good link to suggest about the historic appearance of this phenomenon in the languages affected?


It will be discussed in any grammar of Old French or Old Occitan/Provençal, etc. The chronology has also been mentioned in a couple of threads here on WR:
Why were negative reinforcers used in Old French
FR: Qui ne dit mot consent


Cilquiestsuens said:


> As you should have understood, the point of quoting Breton is that it is the surviving language which the closest relationship to Gaulish.


As berndf already pointed out, it is impossible to say how similar Breton and Gaulish were, so Quentel's suggestion that examples from Breton (especially _modern_ Breton) can be taken as a kind of stand-in for Gaulish is really hard to take seriously.


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## JeanDeSponde

Cilquiestsuens said:


> I don't understand your misunderstanding, but I understand it is persisting.
> Please, get back to the main topic and set those trifles aside.


Practical "Gaulish substratum" examples mentioned by Quentel are taken from (modern) _breton_, this language being supposed as a kind of "intermediary though authentic" medium.
As you fail to admit it, I'm unsuscribing from this thread.


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## Kentel

I read a few weeks ago this very interesting discussion about this paper  "Pour une réévaluation du substrat celtique etc.", which, as  Cilquiestsuens pointed out, is a kind of "final draft after a quick  brainstorming session" which occured during a conference I attended some  years ago. 

You are right to emphasize its methodological flaws :  there is no method there in fact, and when I wrote it my idea was more  to elaborate a blueprint, the general axis of my new research and to  spot the problems revolving around it. Thus,there is no "discovery"  there, no conclusion, no new method and I didn't have any political  agenda either. I have written more interesting (at least I hope) papers  since. For copyright reasons, I couldn't put them on my page, but if  some of you are interested I'll gladly send them some copies.

I  agree with several remarks made by contributors here (Capnprep  especially), and Cilquiestsuens has very well answered to many  objections already, and he's also right to say that all this has been  done "a bit a random". So, to put it all back in order, here are the  general ideas underlying this paper - and all my research so far. 

1- Substrata  : my claim is, in a nutshell, that the influence of substrata is  undervalued. Not only in French, in all the IE languages. I have been  working especially on Romance, Germanic and Celtic, but the problem is  true everywhere else. There has been, in historical linguistics,a myth, which says that* a new language imposed by conquerors eradicates completely the language(s) spoken by the indigeneous population(s). *

This  goes not only for French (= the invasion of Gaul by the Romans and the  eradication of Celtic), but also for English, Scandinavian, Spanish,  Sanskrit and it is especially true for the alleged Indo-European  conquest of Europe. No substratic influence remains. My first statement  was that it couldn't be true, because it is not realistic.

Take  French (I guess most of you here can speak french since you were able to  read my paper): French speakers have specific articulatory habitudes.  When you listen to a Frenchman speaking English, you can hear that the  phonetic distorsions are huge, that he/she uses syntactic calques all  the time. In other words, that his/her use of the English language is  heavily distorted by the influence of his mother tongue. When the Romans  conquered Gaul, the same process certainly occured, as well as it  occurred in India when the Aryan population settled upon the Dravidian  one, as well as it occurred in England when the Germans settled in  Celtic speaking areas, and so on.

2- Innovation vs. Inheritance  : historical linguistics' mainstream theory claims that all these  phonetic/morphologic/syntactic changes are the products of later  evolution. For example, we are supposed to use nasal vowels in French  because the sequence vowel + nasal consonant yields a nasal vowel. This  process is called *innovation*. You get a new sound which  didn't exist previously - or a new grammatical feature (the article,  the compound tenses, the -bo future in Latin or the internal past  structure of the Germanic verbs f.ex.). I don't believe in innovation, I  believe in *inheritance*, which is the exact opposite.  We have nasal vowels in French because there has always been nasal  vowels in the area (eg Northern France). Innovation is the product of  structuralism : the system evolves independantly from any external  influence, by the random interactions between its internal structures.  This has led to many false conclusions in historical linguistics and in  several other fields (see Dumézil's theory f.ex).

Hence we have a debate *inheritance vs innovation*.  But innovation is in most cases unrealistic; if you take Mycenean Greek  and Modern Greek, you have the longest observable time span of  linguistic evolution in Europe (3500 years), and you can observe that  the words have very little evolved phonetically. So, why believe that  from Latin to French (ie. 1000 years), the evolution was so huge and so  sudden ? Why believe that from PIE (3000 BC) to Mycenean Greek so much  changes occured in 1500 years only, and that afterwards everything went  so slowly during 3500 years ?

For me, the explanation is:  inheritance of the ancient substrata. Greek did not evolve because from  1700 BC to modern time, Greece has been (more or less) populated only by  greek-speaking populations. Therefore the slow evolution: there is no  substratal influence after 1800 BC. On the contrary, Latin was spoken  until the 5th century AD on Celtic (and Iberian, Thracian etc) speaking  areas, which explains the considerable and sudden amount of alterations  in both morphology and phonetics. And the lexicon has undergone the same  substratic influences.

I don't deny that innovation played its  part in the process, but inheritance was probably the key element of the  story. And my research is about that. Now if you have questions about  more specific points, or remarks or critics, I'll try to answer them


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## Kevin Beach

What fascinates me about etymology generally is that one can find ancient secrets "hidden" right in the open. As in comparing North-east English speech rhythms with those of Scandinavia, or listening to (mainly rural) North American accents and spotting the British/Irish regional accents that sired them.

When considering the substrata of Romance languages, it's also valid to look at what Italic languages apart from Latin may have been prevalent in and around Italy before Roman supremacy took hold. The gradual conquest of other regions took Latin to places where similar languages were spoken. The imposition of Latin by the Roman conquerors would have caused a melding of similar tongues (as with Old English and Danish in the 10th and 11th centuries in England), creating the varieties that were left after the Roman empire fell. French pronunciation may well be the product of that process as well as of the influence of non-Italic languages.


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## Cilquiestsuens

Many thanks, Aotrou Kentel, ha mersi bras deoc'h for taking part in this discussion. 

The obvious question that comes to my mind is : were you able to make any further research in this field and have you found anything that might substantiate your assertion about the underestimation of the Gaulish substratum? In other words, are they any words about which it can comfortably be asserted now that their traditionally held Latin origin should be discarded for a Gaulish one?

 I am also curious to know about the nasal vowels of French. Can any kind of research prove anything in that matter?


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## Kentel

Cilquiestsuens said:


> Many thanks, Aotrou Kentel, ha mersi bras deoc'h for taking part in this discussion.



Mann ebet, plijout a ra din komz war-benn yezhoniezh gant tud a zo dedennet gant an traoù-se



Cilquiestsuens said:


> The obvious question that comes to my  mind is : were you able to make any further research in this field and  have you found anything that might substantiate your assertion about the  underestimation of the Gaulish substratum? In other words, are they any  words about which it can comfortably be asserted now that their  traditionally held Latin origin should be discarded for a Gaulish  one?



As a matter of fact yes; I compiled a list of  words which etymologies are unlikely. There are many. However, pointing at absurd etymologies is not enough, you  have to propose new explanations or new methods to deal with them, which  implies invalidating the previous ones.

I have written two  papers specifically devoted to the substratic origins of some French words; in  one of them I have first tried to demonstrate that the echoic theory (= you make a word out of a sound, like "tomber"  imitating the sound of a fall) was a nonsense. Once you have invalidated and etymological process (echoism here), then many words are left without etymologies, and there you  can propose something new - which I did for the following words :

- *petit*, from Gaulish "pettia" and not from an expressive root "pitt-", *pépin* has the same origins. 
- coq (rooster), from Gaulish "caliaco" and not from the sound of its cry. The etymology of coquelicot is connected to this one.
- *marmotte* (marmot) and *marmonner *(mumble),  probably from Gaulish marunata "dirge", and not from the sound of... of  what by the way ? we don't know, but the word is allegedly "echoic".
- *murmurer* (to whisper), certainly from the same root and not from the Latin "murmur"  which has exactly the contrary meaning (to rumble).
- *pic* (peak), from Gaulish "picos" (peak), and not from an expressive root.
- *pinson*, from Gaulish "pincio" (same meaning, ie. "chaffinch") and not from Vulgar Latin *pincionem
- *traquer* (to hunt down), from Gaulish "tragula" (track), itself from "trago" (to walk) and itself from tragos (foot). *Trace* is certainly connected, as well is obviously the English "*track*".
- *vanneau*  (peewit), from Proto-Celtic *vanello-, and not from Latin vannere (the  same statement have been made by Pierre-Yves Lambert in "La Langue  Gauloise - Errance 2003", as well as for "petit").

As for pre-Celtic substratic origins, I have listed the following words (but I have many others at hand): *canard, tombe*r and *toucher*. You can add safely *trouver* and *tuer*, at least. I've published these results in the _Revue Romane_  (at Benjamins) in a paper titled "La Néologie Expressive et  onomatopéique dans l'étymologie du français".

To put it fast, I have written another one "Le  Substrat Celtique dans l'étymologie du français" which publication is  scheduled for spring 2015, with many other words. 

I have also written a paper about the common  pre-IE lexicon of Celtic and Germanic, and another one focusing on the  specific pre-IE lexicon of Scandinavian (not shared with Western nor  Eastern Germanic). And I have proposed a new method in order to check these  lexical items. 

Right now I'm working a book on the proto-IE origins of  the verb in Celtic, and this book will have highly substratic-friendly  contents, if I can put it this way - especially as far as the compound  tenses are concerned. I am also working on a paper about the substratic  origins of the postponed article in Scandinavian and about an  etymological device named "endocentric composition" which I will try to  discard. I stop there, my post is already too long I fear...


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## Kentel

Cilquiestsuens said:


> I am also curious to know about the nasal vowels of French. Can any kind of research prove anything in that matter?



This is a very complicated matter. Little research has been made about that recently as far as I know. Historical linguistics is an almost dead field of research now unfortunately. Anyway, the common view on the nasals is structuralist : *oral vowel + nasal consonant = nasal vowel*, under certain conditions.

What I think is pretty different : oral vowel + nasal consonant does not yield a nasal vowel in Spanish nor in Italian: you have FR "penser" ([pãse]) but ES "pensar" ([pensar]). Thus I ask the question which is never asked : why a nasal vowel in French and not in Spanish nor in Italian ? Structuralists have no answer to that. Or yes, they have: it's the result of internal evolution, by dissimilations and assimilations (you don't know exactly which ones and you dont' want to ask).

For me, whichever are the internal evolutions, the dissimilations and the assimilations, a language does not create a completely new set of sounds out of the blue. If in Northern France people began to use nasals, while they did not in Southern France nor in Italy nor in Spain, there must be a good reason. And if you think about it, there are not many possible answers...

The Celtic influence has been proposed, because you have many nasals in Breton and in Gaelic, and because Portuguese, (which has possibly a Celtic substratum), also has nasal vowels. But I am not so sure : we cannot demonstrate so far the presence of nasals in Gaulish, and there's no nasals in Welsh nor in Cornish - not even in Old Welsh. Hence it's difficult to claim that nasal vowels are typically Celtic. I think it's older, it goes back to pre-IE languages.

 The same question could be ask for the French "r" and "u", by the way.


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## Kentel

Kevin Beach said:


> When considering the substrata of Romance languages, it's also valid to  look at what Italic languages apart from Latin may have been prevalent  in and around Italy before Roman supremacy took hold. The gradual  conquest of other regions took Latin to places where similar languages  were spoken. The imposition of Latin by the Roman conquerors would have  caused a melding of similar tongues (as with Old English and Danish in  the 10th and 11th centuries in England), creating the varieties that  were left after the Roman empire fell. French pronunciation may well be  the product of that process as well as of the influence of non-Italic  languages.



That's a very good question indeed, because it  underlies the problem of proto-Romance. We know that the Romance languages do not come from classical  Latin, but from a heavily altered form of Latin named Vulgar Latin. We  have no traces of this language though, and we don't know if it is a sister or a daughter of classical Latin.

Among  the most striking differences between Classical and Vulgar Latin, you  have a great part of the lexicon which makes an extensive use of  diminutive affixes (solicullum, avicellum, instead of solem and avis,  f.ex), and many words of non-Latin origins. You have also the compound  tenses and the articles, which do not exist in Classical Latin, you have  no -bo future nor -bam imperfect, probably no morphological passive  either, etc.

The influence of the neighbouring languages could  have played its part, but it is hard to tell which one: the sabellic  languages have been absorbed by Latin at a very early stage, and they  are very archaic (= close to PIE). You have traces of Oscan in Latin,  like f.ex. the word "bos" (the outcome of PIE  *gwos should have been "vos" in Latin). 

Etruscan  certainly has influenced Latin, but it's difficult to measure this  influence since very little is known of it. The lexicon  especially, is almost unknown : most of the epigraphic documentation is extremely repetitive, and although we have a lot of  inscriptions they say almost the same thing with the same words all the  time. 

Etruscan and the Sabellic languages played their part at a very early stage during the formation of Latin. Did they influenced Vulgar Latin too is impossible to tell, but until now it seems quite unlikely. The most realistic is that the Roman soldiers who conquered Gaul spoke a relatively homogeneous lingua franca called Vulgar Latin. 

But the question of the origins of Vulgar Latin still remains, and therefore remains the question of the substratic influence of Sabellic, Etruscan, Illyrian, pre-IE on this language.


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## Cilquiestsuens

Kentel said:


> Mann ebet, plijout a ra din komz war-benn yezhoniezh gant tud a zo dedennet gant an traoù-se



Plijadur vras am eus bet o lenn ho respontoù, ha trugarez dezho ha deoc'h em eus bet tro da zeskiñ ur bern traoù dedennus-kenañ!


Getting back to the main topic, I had a few questions to start with about two facts I had taken so far for granted.

1. Is the partly vigesimal counting system of French attributed to Celtic influence?

2. Another example: the word '_*temps*_' (undoubtedly Latin) means both 'time' and 'weather'. Don't we have here an example of Celtic semantics in Latin attire ??? (Cf. Breton _*amzer*_, Irish *aimsir*) 

To be honest with you I have been extremely interested by all your examples, including the ones about Pre-Indo-European (very fascinating).

Would it be possible for you to elaborate more about the word _*petit*_ and how you managed to discard its alleged onomatopoeic etymology and how you then connected it to the Gaulish word _*pettia*_ (a 'piece' or 'chunk', which Breton speakers will recognize in the word _*pezh*_) ? And by the way, isn't the French word* pièce* likely to come from _*pettia*_ too???


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## fdb

Cilquiestsuens said:


> the word '_*temps*_' (undoubtedly Latin) means both 'time' and 'weather'. Don't we have here an example of Celtic semantics in Latin attire ??? (Cf. Breton _*amzer*_, Irish *aimsir*)



Italian and Portuguese tempo, Spanish tiempo also mean “weather”. Russian время is “time” and “weather”, and similarly in other Slavic languages. Modern Greek καιρός again has both meanings.


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## Cilquiestsuens

fdb said:


> Italian and Portuguese tempo, Spanish tiempo also mean “weather”. Russian время is “time” and “weather”, and similarly in other Slavic languages. Modern Greek καιρός again has both meanings.



Thank you very much for your input! So it looks more like pan-Indo-European, I guess. I still have two questions.

1. It seems to me Latin didn't have this feature? Nor Greek? Sanskrit? Avestan?
2. Do we know of any ancient Indo-European language having this feature or if it is not the case, that could be thought of as a something that might be pre-Indo-European?


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## CapnPrep

Cilquiestsuens said:


> 1. It seems to me Latin didn't have this feature?


Check out _tempestas_. Also, on a different forum:
Is there a single origin for the connection between time and weather?


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## Cilquiestsuens

CapnPrep said:


> Check out _tempestas_. Also, on a different forum:
> Is there a single origin for the connection between time and weather?



Thank you very much for these very interesting and eye-opening links.

What about the vigesimal system?

What do we know about it concerning old languages? We know it is widespread in Modern Celtic languages but do we know anything about its usage in antiquity? Any hints at a vigesimal system in Gaulish?

It seems it exists in Basque too.


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## Ben Jamin

fdb said:


> Italian and Portuguese tempo, Spanish tiempo also mean “weather”. Russian время is “time” and “weather”, *and similarly in other Slavic languages.* Modern Greek καιρός again has both meanings.


But not in Polish.


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## CapnPrep

Cilquiestsuens said:


> What about the vigesimal system?


Here's a quote from Vennemann:


> In my view Celtic should not even be mentioned as a possible source for western Indo-European vigesimality because (a) Celtic is Indo-European and therefore originally decimal; (b) historical Insular Celtic started out decimal, becoming vigesimal only during the Middle Ages; and therefore, (c) Gaulish lying chronologically between Proto-Celtic and Insular Celtic, must be assumed to have been decimal, a conclusion supported by the fact that "the only known relevant Gaulish form,  tricontis '_thirty_', fits clearly into the decimal system" (Price 1992: 466).


Vennemann of course thinks the origin is Basque.


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## berndf

_Quatre-vingt(s)_ didn't occur in French before the 12th century. Wherever it came from, it doesn't appear to belong to a Gaulish substratum inherited directly from Proto-French but either to be a loan translation or an independent innovation in Old French. It might be taken from a Celtic language but it might well also be of Normanic origin as it probably is in English (e.g. _threescore and ten_ for 70 in the KJV of the Bible).


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## Kentel

Cilquiestsuens said:


> Thank you very much for these very interesting and eye-opening links.
> 
> What about the vigesimal system?
> 
> What do we know about it concerning old languages? We know it is widespread in Modern Celtic languages but do we know anything about its usage in antiquity? Any hints at a vigesimal system in Gaulish?
> 
> It seems it exists in Basque too.



This is a very good question (I don't say that rhetorically). You have indeed a 20 base counting system in Celtic and Basque, probably in Gaulish too (uoconti = 20, see Delamarre's dictionary), from which French has inherited its own counting system. You find it in many languages in fact (Georgian, Persian, Maya and many North Amerindian languages including inuit). Even the latin "viginta" (possibly a borrowing from Celtic), so it's not uncommon. 

Here is a little material for thinking :

The Danish counting system is the only one with a 20 base counting system in Germanic :

ti = 10
tyve = 20 (note that English has a 10 base system)
tretti = tre (3) x ti (10)
fyrre 
halvtreds = 50, litteraly 3 x 20 - (20/2), or *halvtreds*indstyve ("*the half part* of twenty substracted to *three times twenty*)
treds = 60, litteraly 3 x 20, or tredsindstyve (three times twenty)
halvfirs = 70, litteraly 4 x 20 - (20/2), or *halvfirs*indstyve (see 50)
firs = 80, litteraly 4 x 20
halvfems = 90, litteraly 5 x 20 - (20/2) or *halvfems*indstyve
hundrede = 100

Compare with Norwegian :

ti = 10
tyve = 20
tretti = 30
førti = 40
femti = 50
seksti = 60
sytti = 70
otti = 80
nitti = 90

Another mind-challenging one :

Breton :

6 = c'hwec'h
18 = tri-c'hwec'h (so-called "senary counting system", like the one on a clock)

Another one :

Gaelic :

1= ceann ("head"), or "a haon" for the classic version

1 people = duine (= "person")
2 people = beirt

Polish :

1 = jeden (classic) but also "raz", which is more common in many situations.

Note also the discrepancies between cardinal and ordinal counting systems for the two first numbers :

1= one/first/premier + Breton kentañ + Scandinavian først
2 = two/second + Scandinavian anden

I don't claim that everything there is substratic; there is an agreement to consider the Danish counting system as very archaic, but how archaic is the question. Numbering was probably invented with trade, or a least with farming, not before (many aborigenal populations have no counting systems at all, or only 1-2).

There is another matter for thought is you want to investigate substratic influences : the names of the four cardinal points and the names for right and left (especially left...).


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## Kentel

berndf said:


> _Quatre-vingt(s)_ didn't occur in French before the 12th century. Wherever it came from, it doesn't appear to belong to a Gaulish substratum inherited directly from Proto-French but either to be a loan translation or an independent innovation in Old French. It might be taken from a Celtic language but it might well also be of Normanic origin as it probably is in English (e.g. _threescore and ten_ for 70 in the KJV of the Bible).



Innovation would mean in this case that people suddenly decided not only to change the system, but also to use a more complex one. Why ? 

If a loan, a loan from which language ? Old Icelandic has a 10 base counting system.

the XIIth century sounds a very early date to me : 20 itself is only attested at the end of the XIth. There is much to say about the counting system in Old French, by the way.


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## berndf

Kentel said:


> The Danish counting system is the only one with a 20 base counting system in Germanic :


What about Old, Middle and Early Modern English? The origin of the score-based counting system is clearly Nordic.


Kentel said:


> Innovation would mean in this case that people suddenly decided not only to change the system, but also to use a more complex one. Why ?


Mentioned this mainly for completeness. I assume it is a loan translation.


Kentel said:


> If a loan, a loan from which language ? Old Icelandic has a 10 base counting system.


See above in this quote.


Kentel said:


> the XIIth century sounds a very early date to me : 20 itself is only attested at the end of the XIth. There is much to say about the counting system in Old French, by the way.


Attestation mentioned here. The Dicionnaire de l'académie francaise says the same.


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## fdb

Kentel said:


> You find it in many languages in fact (.... Persian ...)



Persian no, Ossetic yes (presumably from the Caucasian substratum)



Kentel said:


> The Danish counting system is the only one with a 20 base counting system in Germanic



Other than English ("three score years and ten"). Since English "score" is clearly a Norse loanword it is not surprising to see the same phenomenon in Danish.

PS.: Overlap with Bernd.


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## Kentel

CapnPrep said:


> Here's a quote from Vennemann:
> Vennemann of course thinks the origin is Basque.



Of course.


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## Kentel

fdb said:


> Persian no, Ossetic yes (presumably from the Caucasian substratum)



You got the point  I don't know much of Persian, I confess.




fdb said:


> Other than English ("three score years and ten"). Since English "score" is clearly a Norse loanword it is not surprising to see the same phenomenon in Danish.



It is in my opinion, because you don't have it in old Norse; the score = 20 is very rare, I have never seen it in sagas (I confess I havn't read them all - far from it) nor in Beowulf as far as I can remember. But yes, you're right, the word is borrowed from Scandinavian; the 20 base system does not appear to be Germanic whatsoever, because most Germanic languages do not use it.


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## CapnPrep

Kentel said:


> You have indeed a 20 base counting system in Celtic and Basque, probably in Gaulish too (uoconti = 20, see Delamarre's dictionary)


What is your evidence for saying "probably in Gaulish too"? The form of the word "20" tells us nothing (in fact, if it is derived from roots meaning "double ten", it is a decimal form…) There is no indication that it was used in the formation of larger numbers, and as mentioned above, there is an attested form for "30" that is clearly decimal.


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## berndf

Kentel said:


> Moreover : the Old English counting system is a 10 base one, as modern English has.


There is an uninterrupted history of 20-based counting in English that goes all the way to the early 20th century where the word _hundred_ is "defined" in the OED as _fivescore._


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## Kentel

CapnPrep said:


> What is your evidence for saying "probably in Gaulish too"? The form of the word "20" tells us nothing (in fact, if it is derived from roots meaning "double ten", it is a decimal form…) There is no indication that it was used in the formation of larger numbers, and as mentioned above, there is an attested form for "30" that is clearly decimal.



If not from Gaulish, from where ? Old Norse has an attested 10 base system (with "score", I got it). Celtic has an attested 20 base system. And Basque (let's be Vennemanians).

The form of the word is pointless in this debate, the point is the system : how you count. By saying quatre-vingts or firs, you imply 4x20. Only that matters. "Score" means "mark" in PGmc, and it's PIE too, and it is adapted to express 20.


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## berndf

Kentel said:


> with "score", I got it


I am not so sure:



Kentel said:


> The form of the word is pointless in this debate, the point is the system : how you count. By saying quatre-vingts or firs, you imply 4x20. Only that matters. "Score" means "mark" in PGmc, and it's PIE too, and it is adapted to express 20.


_Score _is not only a word but the base of a counting system. _Threescore _is another word for _sixty_, _fourscore _is another word for _eighty_ and _70_ can be pronounced _threescore and ten _(Bible) and _90 fourscore and ten_ (A.Lincoln). The 10 and the 20-based words were used side by side, like _octante, huitante_ and_ quatre-vingts_ in French.


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## CapnPrep

Kentel said:


> The form of the word is pointless in this debate, the point is the system : how you count.


That was _my_ point: How did they count in Gaulish, by tens or by twenties? They had a decimal form for "30"; for higher numbers, we have no idea, do we?


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## Kentel

berndf said:


> There is an uninterrupted history of 20-based counting in English that goes all the way to the early 20th century where the word _hundred_ is "defined" in the OED as _fivescore._



And what does it tell you about the origins of this 20 base counting system in English ? 

Back to the subject: we have stated that

1- Celtic has a full 20 base counting system (including 70,80 etc.)
2- Danish too
3- French has partially retained such a system

From where ? There are 3 hypothesis

1 - From Scandinavian through the Normans ? 
2 - From the Gaulish substratum ?
3 - From a pre-IE substratum ?

I would discard 1 because the influence of Old Norse on French is very poor (no more than 30 words), because Old Norse do not have (apparently) a complete set of 20 base numbers, and because it implies a sudden shift to a more complex system which looks completely unmotivated. 

I would also discard 3, because if it is pre-IE, it should have come to French through Gaulish. Hence it cannot be a direct inheritance

And I like 2 because it is the most simple explanation and the motivation is obvious (= tradition).

Understand me : I don't WANT it to be Celtic, I don't care really, I just don't see any other good explanation.


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## berndf

Kentel said:


> 3- French has partially retained such a system


By using the word "retained" your argument becomes circular.


Kentel said:


> I just don't see any other good explanation.


I assume you wrote this before reading #47 and #48. I (and, if I am not terribly mistaken, CapnPrep as well) can't see an advantage of any of the mentioned possibilities over the others (Celtic, Germanic, innovation, other substratum).


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## Kentel

CapnPrep said:


> That was _my_ point: How did they count in Gaulish, by tens or by twenties? They had a decimal form for "30"; for higher numbers, we have no idea, do we?



We do because all the Celtic languages use such a 20 base system, which implies that the older ones also had one. It maybe wrong, who knows, but it is the basic principle of linguistic reconstruction. 

The word for 30 (tricontis, with a Latin ending) implies indeed a 10 base system, but the word for 30 in all the Celtic languages is similar, which does not rule out the fact that Celtic languages have a 20 base system. 

Moreover, this word is found in a sentence fully written in Latin ("et ad cenam omnibus tricontis ponendam"), which could imply a borrowing from Latin. It's hard to tell because the form the word "tricont-" is clearly Celtic, so it would imply not a real borrowing but an adaptation. Honestly I don't know; I don't claim that it is Latin.


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## Kentel

berndf said:


> I am not so sure:
> _Score _is not only a word but the base of a counting system. _Threescore _is another word for _sixty_, _fourscore _is another word for _eighty_ and _70_ can be pronounced _threescore and ten _(Bible) and _90 fourscore and ten_ (A.Lincoln). The 10 and the 20-based words were used side by side, like _octante, huitante_ and_ quatre-vingts_ in French.



And so what ? English has a Celtic substratum too.

septante, octante etc, are Latin. I don't see the point.


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## Kentel

berndf said:


> By using the word "retained" your argument becomes circular.



No it's not. Unless you support the "innovation" hypothesis, but nobody does.


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## Cilquiestsuens

Kentel said:


> 1- Celtic has a full 20 base counting system (including 70,80 etc.)



By the way the vigesimal counting system in Breton often goes beyond hundred: c'hwec'h-ugent (six-twenty) = 120 ; seizh-ugent (seven-twenty) = 140 and even more....

But what about other Celtic languages, including their older versions? Do Irish / Gaelic / Welsh / Cornish have them all the exact same vigesimal features as Breton?


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## berndf

Kentel said:


> No it's not. Unless you support the "innovation" hypothesis, but nobody does.


Or a loan translation. Given the lack of solid information, nothing can prima facie be ruled out, not even innovation.


Kentel said:


> And so what ? English has a Celtic substratum too.


Your argument gets more and more circular. I give up.


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## Kentel

Cilquiestsuens said:


> But what about other Celtic languages, including their older versions? Do Irish / Gaelic / Welsh / Cornish have them all the exact same vigesimal features as Breton?



Not exactly, as you know, Breton has no vigesimal feature for 30 or for 50 (tregont and hanter-kant), while Cornish has deg warn ugens for 30 and deg ha dew ugens for 50; Scottish has also such a system (but not Irish); Welsh uses both systems for 30 and 50, but only the 20 base one for the others.

Theres is a good summary here http://www.omniglot.com/language/numbers/celtic.htm , where I saw that in Manx Gaelic too you have jeid as feed (10 and 20) for 30 and jeih as daeed for 50. 

Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Manx only have the complete set (as Basque, which, by the way, uses "hogei" for 20, ie and IE word).


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## Kentel

berndf said:


> Or a loan translation. Given the lack of solid information, nothing can prima facie be ruled out, not even innovation.
> Your argument gets more and more circular. I give up.



There is nothing circular, neither here nor in my previous answer. It was not my intention to discourage you. I only defend my point of view, but I don't claim I'm right : I favour the most realistic hypothesis, and I have explained why the Celtic one is the best here, and why the others are fragile. But yes, you're right, nothing can be ruled out. I appreciated this exchange whatsoever, thanks for that. Linguistics is a fascinating subject.


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## CapnPrep

Kentel said:


> We do because all the Celtic languages use such a  20 base system, which implies that the older ones also had one. It  maybe wrong, who knows, but it is the basic principle of linguistic  reconstruction.


The basic principles are for reconstructing  mother languages from daughter languages. You are trying to  reconstruct Gaulish from its "nieces" and "great-nieces", so you are  on much shakier ground.





Kentel said:


> Theres is a good summary here http://www.omniglot.com/language/numbers/celtic.htm , where I saw that in Manx Gaelic too you have jeid as feed (10 and 20) for 30 and jeih as daeed for 50.


This page only has information about modern languages. Old Irish was primarily decimal, although there are also many examples of counting by twenties (alongside rarer multiplicative groupings like "three fifties" for 150 or "three nines" for 27). Middle Welsh seems to have had a fully vigesimal system; I don't know if anything can be said about older Brythonic. With this meager evidence, I would be very reluctant to attempt any reconstruction of numeral syntax for proto-Insular, and I see no usable argument whatsoever for Continental Celtic.


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## berndf

Kentel said:


> I favour the most realistic hypothesis, and I have explained why the Celtic one is the best here...


The earliest attestations in the 12th century leave quite large gap to corroborate _any_ substratum theory. That is my reason for being so skeptical (beside that we know too little about continental Celtic to say that it had predominantly a 20 based counting system, as CapnPrep reiterated above).





CapnPrep said:


> The basic principles are for reconstructing mother languages from daughter languages. You are trying to reconstruct Gaulish from its "nieces" and "great-nieces", so you are on much shakier ground.


Exactly.


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## fdb

Kentel said:


> Celtic has a full 20 base counting system (including 70,80 etc.)



A ten-based (decimal) counting system expresses numbers as a sum of multiples of powers of ten. So, “three hundred and sixty-five” means:

3 x 102 + 6 x 101 + 5 x 100

A true (or "full") twenty-based (vigesimal) counting system would express them as a sum of multiples of powers of 20. This would mean that there are etymologically separate names for each of the numbers from 1 to 20. (I.e. they would not say things like “six-teen” but would have a word that has no etymological connection with “six” or “ten”). I cannot see that there is any language in the world that does this. Rather, all so-called vigesimal counting systems combine base 10 and base 20. Quatre-vingt-dix-huit translates as:

 4 x 201 + 1 x 101 + 8 x 100.

The French numbers from 60 to 79 do not contain any explicitly vigesimal element. “Soixante”  means (etymologically) “six tens”, not “three twenties”. At best one could analyse them as combining decimal and sexagesimal counting. Soixante-dix-huit would then translate as:

1 x 601 + 1 x 101 + 8 x 100

There is no twenty involved in this formulation.


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## Cilquiestsuens

fdb said:


> A ten-based (decimal) counting system expresses numbers as a sum of multiples of powers of ten. So, “three hundred and sixty-five” means:
> 
> 3 x 102 + 6 x 101 + 5 x 100
> 
> A true (or "full") twenty-based (vigesimal) counting system would express them as a sum of multiples of powers of 20. This would mean that there are etymologically separate names for each of the numbers from 1 to 20. (I.e. they would not say things like “six-teen” but would have a word that has no etymological connection with “six” or “ten”). I cannot see that there is any language in the world that does this. Rather, all so-called vigesimal counting systems combine base 10 and base 20. Quatre-vingt-dix-huit translates as:
> 
> 4 x 201 + 1 x 101 + 8 x 100.
> 
> The French numbers from 60 to 79 do not contain any explicitly vigesimal element. “Soixante”  means (etymologically) “six tens”, not “three twenties”. At best one could analyse them as combining decimal and sexagesimal counting. Soixante-dix-huit would then translate as:
> 
> 1 x 601 + 1 x 101 + 8 x 100
> 
> There is no twenty involved in this formulation.




I think this is a very interesting point although not directly relevant to the discussion here. The same could be said about the alleged substratic base 9 counting system of Indian languages. 

We all agree I think that every historical counting system is a base-10 one. It is simple common sense that people start counting on what they literally have at hand all the time.... their fingers.

The question might arise then : what made human beings create, form the base-10 system a (partially) vigesimal one? Does it facilitate / accelerate computing? Is it a development of societies which feel they need to count surplus of crop / cattle / work force / soldiers ??? I don't know if we will ever be able to answer this question but I am sure this is beyond the scope of this forum.


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## berndf

Cilquiestsuens said:


> I think this is a very interesting point although not directly relevant to the discussion here.


The relevance is that it reduces the likelihood of the French system to be a reflex of an original 20-based counting system. Even less than English where constructs like _twoscore and ten _existed but not _*deux-vingt-dix_ in French. This reduces the overall likelihood of this feature being due to a Celtic substrate.


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## Kentel

berndf said:


> This reduces the overall likelihood of this feature being due to a Celtic substrate.



I think that it is due to a Celtic substratum. 
You think that is IS NOT due to a Celtic substratum. All your arguments are headed toward the idea that IS NOT what I think, so it is purely destructive. You cannot built a constructive reasoning that way. 

So, what do you think exactly (apart from the fact that is is NOT Celtic) ?

Do you think it is Germanic ?
Do you think it is pre-IE ?
Do you think it is innovation ?

Whatever you think, everybody expects you to support your view with arguments, as I did. If you make this effort, and I sincerely hope you will, you will state that defending any of these three hypothesis is much more difficult than to support the Celtic one.


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## berndf

Kentel said:


> I think that it is due to a Celtic substratum.
> You think that is IS NOT due to a Celtic substratum. All your arguments are headed toward the idea that IS NOT what I think, so it is purely destructive. You cannot built a constructive reasoning that way.
> 
> So, what do you think exactly (apart from the fact that is is NOT Celtic) ?
> 
> Do you think it is Germanic ?
> Do you think it is pre-IE ?
> Do you think it is innovation ?
> 
> Whatever you think, everybody expects you to support your view with arguments, as I did. If you make this effort, and I sincerely hope you will, you will state that defending any of these three hypothesis is much more difficult than to support the Celtic one.


I, and if I am not mistaken Fdb and CapnPrep join me there, simply think that we have insufficient information to form an opinion which is more than pure guesswork.


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## Kentel

CapnPrep said:


> The basic principles are for reconstructing  mother languages from daughter languages. You are trying to  reconstruct Gaulish from its "nieces" and "great-nieces", so you are  on much shakier ground.



Then the fact that Gaulish has no daughters implies that it has to be ruled out in our discussion ? 

In most cases, the reconstruction of proto-Celtic matches perfectly well the documented Gaulish words and grammatical features. Gaulish has been deciphered on the basis of our knowledge of the other Celtic languages (which are not its daughters), and scholars are not afraid of reconstructing Gaulish words on the basis of Brittonic ones.  

Given the fact that almost all the Celtic languages (Welsh, Breton, Cornish, Manx, Scottish and Irish - but not Old Irish) do have a 20 base counting system, it would be rather odd to believe that Gaulish had a 10 base system. But you are free to believe what you want.


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## Kentel

berndf said:


> I, and if I am not mistaken Fdb and CapnPrep join me there, simply think that we have insufficient information to form an opinion which is more than pure guesswork.



Yes, I have noted that you are three against me  Is this supposed to be an argument ?

And what is your opinion, by the way (I mean, apart from the fact that I am wrong) ? I havn't heard much support on your behalf of the above-mentioned hypothesis - nor defense against my own objections to these hypothesis.


----------



## JeanDeSponde

Cilquiestsuens said:


> Getting back to the main topic, I had a few questions to start with about two facts I had taken so far for granted.
> 1. Is the partly vigesimal counting system of French attributed to Celtic influence?


The main topic was basically "the Latin etymology may often be wrong and a Celtic  source may often be better".
How is a supposed vigesimal counting in France related to this Celtic / Latin issue, as nobody pretended it has a latin origin...?

Anyway, a vigesimal oral system has existed in French indeed (e.g. _Hôpital des Quinze-Vingts_), along with a base-12 system (une douzaine d'oeufs ; une grosse = a gross = 12x12), but there is absolutely no proof that _quatre-vingts_ is related to it.
As Berndf said, _quatre-vingts_ was born circa XIIe, along with _soixante-dix_ which is clearly *not *vigesimal.
This mention of the 12th century is very interesting, as it is the moment when modern counting (positional zero, algorism vs. abacism) appeared in France, given to us by Arabs (see _Histoire universelle des chiffres_, by George Ifrah).
New names may well have appeared along with new technics; why cling to a Celtic substratum that would have miraculously re-appeared then...?

Back to the main topic:





Kentel said:


> There has been, in historical linguistics,a myth, which says that* a new language imposed by conquerors eradicates completely the language(s) spoken by the indigeneous population(s). *


This could look like a conspiracy theory ("official science is wrong"), unless you back up your claim with serious examples.
Who said that? Where? When?


----------



## Kentel

JeanDeSponde said:


> Anyway, a vigesimal oral system has existed in French indeed (e.g. _Hôpital des Quinze-Vingts_), along with a base-12 system (une douzaine d'oeufs ; une grosse = a gross = 12x12), but there is absolutely no proof that _quatre-vingts_ is related to it.
> As Berndf said, _quatre-vingts_ was born circa XIIe, along with _soixante-dix_ which is clearly *not *vigesimal.
> This mention of the 12th century is very interesting, as it is the moment when modern counting (positional zero, algorism vs. abacism) appeared in France, given to us by Arabs (see _Histoire universelle des chiffres_, by George Ifrah).
> New names may well have appeared along with new technics; why cling to a Celtic substratum that would have miraculously re-appeared then...?



berndf, you are four now 

Whatever, I don't cling to a Celtic substratum, if you have better arguments supporting another hypothesis, I will gladly hear them. I have already exposed mine.



JeanDeSponde said:


> Back to the main topic:This could look like a conspiracy theory ("official science is wrong"), unless you back up your claim with serious examples.
> Who said that? Where? When?



All the scholars supporting the invasionist model from Kossinna to Mallory, Sergent, Haudry, Dumézil, Gamkrelidze & Ivanov, Pictet, etc. There are two very informative papers written by the archaeolog Jean-Paul Demoule (Paris-I) about the ideological aspects of the IE conquest here and there.

It is in fact quite simple : almost no scholar considers the substratum hypothesis, the PIE mannerbund (which Alinei named the ironically the "warlike supermen") have conquered a zoo.


----------



## berndf

Kentel said:


> Whatever, I don't cling to a Celtic substratum, if you have better arguments supporting another hypothesis, I will gladly hear them.


Me too, me too! I wish I had one.


----------



## CapnPrep

Kentel said:


> In most cases, the reconstruction of proto-Celtic  matches perfectly well the documented Gaulish words and grammatical  features.


Erm, presumably the proposed reconstructions of  proto-Celtic are based on Gaulish attestations, whenever available. 


Kentel said:


> scholars  are not afraid of reconstructing Gaulish words on the basis of  Brittonic ones.


If robust correspondences can established on the  basis of attested cognates, then you can make conjectures about the form  of unattested cognates. As far as I can see, there just isn't enough attested material to  apply the comparative method to say anything about the syntax of large numerals in  Gaulish.


Kentel said:


> Whatever, I don't cling to a Celtic substratum, if you have better  arguments supporting another hypothesis, I will gladly hear them. I have  already exposed mine.


I can't speak for the others, but my role in this discussion is not to be "against you" and to support another hypothesis. You are the one making a claim; as a responsible, skeptical audience member, I am waiting to be convinced by solid evidence and sound arguments. It's not a matter of "believing what you want".


----------



## JeanDeSponde

Kentel said:


> ...about the ideological aspects of the IE conquest here and there.


Those texts are not about eradication of substratum _languages_ by conquerors: they are about disproving the existence of a unique, original Indo-European invador. That is, Demoule thinks that there is no such place as a "cradle of Indo-European civilization".
Where is Demoule mentioning your "myth"...?

As to your list of scholars (among which many are archeologists, not linguists), can you be more accurate re your "myth"?
Referring to Dumézil as a whole reminds me of Julia Kristeva referring to "Bourbaki" as a whole to prove her point about poetry and transfinite numbers...


----------



## fdb

I wonder if I could return to two points raised in the first of  Kentel’s valuable contributions to this discussion (no. 24). 



Kentel said:


> When the Romans  conquered Gaul, the same process certainly occured, as well as it  occurred in India when the Aryan population settled upon the Dravidian  one, as well as it occurred in England when the Germans settled in  Celtic speaking areas, and so on.



Nobody doubts that there are a very large number of Dravidian words in the Indo-Aryan languages, beginning with Vedic. This is recognised by everyone, not least by Mayrhofer in his etymological dictionary. On the other hand, the number of Celtic words in English is shockingly small. Does this not suggest that what happened historically in India is different from what happened in Britain?




Kentel said:


> Greek did not evolve because from  1700 BC to modern time, Greece has been (more or less) populated only by  greek-speaking populations. Therefore the slow evolution.



“Greek did not evolve” is of course a gross overstatement. As a point of fact: At the beginning of the 20th century the population of Greece comprised a very large number of Turks, Albanians, Vlach, Slavs (Bulgarians/Macedonians), and also a good number of Sephardic Jews and Dönme. The present (apparent) ethnic homogeneity of Greece is the outcome of recent (and for the most part brutal) historical events.


----------



## Ben Jamin

fdb said:


> “Greek did not evolve” is of course a gross overstatement. As a point of fact: At the beginning of the 20th century the population of Greece comprised a very large number of Turks, Albanians, Vlach, Slavs (Bulgarians/Macedonians), and also a good number of Sephardic Jews and Dönme. The present (apparent) ethnic homogeneity of Greece is the outcome of recent (and for the most part brutal) historical events.



But we can agree that Greek evolved slower than many other languages, especially the Germanic languages. This can be, at least partially explained by the influence of the written language on the spoken one. It seems that widespread literacy and reading of books written in earlier times slows down the pace of linguistic change. Periods of unrest, political upheavals, migrations, and breakdown of literacy speeds up linguistic change.


----------



## Kentel

fdb said:


> Nobody doubts that there are a very large number of Dravidian words in the Indo-Aryan languages, beginning with Vedic. This is recognised by everyone, not least by Mayrhofer in his etymological dictionary. On the other hand, the number of Celtic words in English is shockingly small.



The grammar of English is heavily influenced by the Celtic one. How much words are we talking about here ?


----------



## JeanDeSponde

The core of the initial claim:





> 1- Substrata  : my claim is, in a nutshell, that the influence of substrata is  undervalued.[...]
> There has been, in historical linguistics,a myth, which says that* a new language imposed by conquerors eradicates completely the language(s) spoken by the indigeneous population(s). *


is being completely put aside.
Either you fuel it, or you must admit that it is _your_ myth, that is, that you think that some conspiracy wants to hush-hush any prevalent Celtic substratum...

Edit - I just brushed through two books by Henriette Walter. She is positive about the importance of pre- [or non-] Latin roots in both French and English. 
_What are you talking about_...?


----------



## Kentel

JeanDeSponde said:


> The core of the initial claim:is being completely put aside.
> Either you fuel it, or you must admit that it is _your_ myth, and not a know truth...



I'm attacked from every side and by everybody in this discussion, and I try to answer everybody one by one. I didn't forget your remark and I'll answer it as fast as I can. Please be sympathetic.


----------



## JeanDeSponde

You are not being attacked: you are stating things that are not (yet) backed by any checkable reference...
You are being checked...!


----------



## fdb

Kentel said:


> How much words are we talking about here ?



How many? Can you list more than ten?


----------



## Kentel

fdb said:


> “Greek did not evolve” is of course a gross overstatement.



Ben Jamin has already answered to this remark, thus I'll only give you a few examples :

Mycenan Greek - Ancient Greek - Modern Greek (total : 3500 years)

horse : ipo -hippos - hippos
wind : anemo - anemos - anemos
desert : eremo - eremos - erimos
sword : gisipe (or gsiphe) - xiphos - xiphos
copper : k(h)ako - khalkos - khalkos
messenger : akelo - aggelos - aggelos

So, "gross overstatement" is a gross overstatement. I have other words in my bag if you wish.


----------



## Kentel

JeanDeSponde said:


> You are not being attacked: you are stating things that are not (yet) backed by any checkable reference...
> You are being checked...!



I know  I play the game, no problem. Since you didn't like my list of archaeologists nor Demoule, let's put it this way : have you read any book related to the IE invasion of Europe or any book about IE linguistics which says a single word about the indigeneous populations of Europe ? Not me.

Let's take an example : all the phonetic and semantic evolutions are examined without considering possible substratic influence. If p yields a f in Germanic and disappears in Celtic, nobody wonders why. It's just like that, a game of assimilations and dissimilations, it's the product of pure chance. Nobody thinks that, maybe, the indegeneous people of the Germanic homeland had the phoneme f (which does not exist in PIE), nobody thinks that, maybe, in the protoCeltic homeland they had initially no p, but an aspirated ph instead. Same for the lexicon : when a word has no etymology, it can mean only one thing : it is IE, but we havn't found the connection yet. Nobody thinks that, maybe, the word is not PIE at all and belongs to a substratum (take French tomber, tuer, trouver or English kill, dog, bird etc.). All the system is oriented toward PIE, PIE is the final explanation whatsoever, and if you assumer that maybe the indigeneous populations who began to speak the language of the newcomers (PIE) had specific words and articulatory habitudes, then you are a clown. Indigeneous populations were crushed, physically and/or culturally, and the impact of their language and culture is close to zero. As I said, IE conquered a zoo.

This is my "myth", if you want to put it like that : I think that linguistic evolution cannot be explained only by structuralist reasoning, where the system is its own and final explanation. I don't claim that the full system is wrong, it is certainly not, I think it lacks a critical factor. 

Is this ideological ? Maybe yes, maybe no; but Demoule's papers tend to demonstrate that it is. Read Haudry, if you can find his Que-sais-je second-hand in a bookshop (it has been censored).


----------



## Kentel

fdb said:


> How many? Can you list more than ten?



I havn't counted, I did the job for French and it took a great deal of time. But I'll do it for English too, be patient.


----------



## JeanDeSponde

Kentel said:


> Read Haudry, if you can find his Que-sais-je second-hand in a bookshop (it has been censored).


_National Front_ ideas* are indeed frowned upon in most democratic countries — is this why you think that _your _"theories" are frowned upon...? 
Back to basics.





> There has been, in historical linguistics,a myth, which says that* a new language imposed by conquerors eradicates completely the language(s) spoken by the indigeneous population(s). *


Did Latin eradicate Celtic substratum in Britain?...
Did Danish eradicate Latin substratum?...
Did Norman eradicate Danish substratum after William?...
You are *not* giving any root to this "myth", which is contrary to anything I have read yet. You could as well say "there is a _current_ myth that says that Earth is flat".





> I think that linguistic evolution cannot be explained only by  structuralist reasoning, where the system is its own and final  explanation.


I certainly do _not _believe in structuralist reasoning —I'm a post-René_Girard not-philosopher.
I think that 1/ you have proved where you come from (see *), and 2/ you have proved nothing else (example of "historical linguistics,a myth" still missing).

The conspiracy theory is stronger and stronger — so distant to my right that it's more and more blurred...


* _Haudry_ — "son absurdité vient de ce qu'il n'obéit pas à  une problématique d'ordre rationnel et scientifique, mais repose sur une  idéologie politique contemporaine : c'est un ouvrage d'extrême droite.  Il ressortit de ce que l'on appelle au XXe siècle le fascisme (sous sa forme intellectuelle, cela va de soi)" — _Bernard Sergent_

_Edit_ —





JeanDeSponde said:


> I'm not a philologist (by far). I'm a (hard) scientist. When opponents  to Darwin say, "There is no proof that an eye could naturally evolve  from some light-sensitive cell", I can just say "where are you speaking  from...?"


I'm happy I was right then: _"where were you speaking from..._"


----------



## CapnPrep

Kentel said:


> Read Haudry, if you can find his Que-sais-je second-hand in a bookshop (it has been censored).


What do you mean, "censored"?  There's a copy in my local public library, and at least 5 copies in my university library. I guess the Ministry forgot to burn them? Or did you just mean it's out of print? That is also inaccurate, since (good news!) you can buy a revised and expanded edition from Les Éditions de la Forêt, which also publishes _Le Carnet de chants de Terre et Peuple_…


----------



## fdb

Kentel said:


> Ben Jamin has already answered to this remark, thus I'll only give you a few examples :
> 
> Mycenan Greek - Ancient Greek - Modern Greek (total : 3500 years)
> 
> horse : ipo -hippos - hippos
> wind : anemo - anemos - anemos
> desert : eremo - eremos - erimos
> sword : gisipe (or gsiphe) - xiphos - xiphos
> copper : k(h)ako - khalkos - khalkos
> messenger : akelo - aggelos - aggelos
> 
> So, "gross overstatement" is a gross overstatement. I have other words in my bag if you wish.



Sadly, your modern Greek examples are virtually all wrong (if we are talking about phonology and not spelling). E.g. AG hippos > MG ipos; AG ksiphos > MG ksifos .....


----------



## berndf

fdb said:


> Sadly, your modern Greek examples are virtually all wrong (if we are talking about phonology and not spelling). E.g. AG hippos > MG ipos; AG ksiphos > MG ksifos .....


And do you agree with the Mycenean version? I thought Mycenean did not yet feature the kw>t/pp shift.


----------



## fdb

berndf said:


> And do you agree with the Mycenean version? I thought Mycenean did not yet feature the kw>t/pp shift.



The correct transliteration is i-qo, presumably for /ikʷos/. So it should be /ikʷos/ > /hippos/ > /ipos/, rather a big change, I think.


----------



## berndf

fdb said:


> The correct transliteration is i-qo.



That is what I thought.


----------



## Kentel

JeanDeSponde said:


> _National Front_ ideas* are indeed frowned upon in most democratic countries — is this why you think that _your _"theories" are frowned upon...?



Did I give the impression that I supported Haudry's theories ? 



JeanDeSponde said:


> Back to basics.Did Latin eradicate Celtic substratum in Britain?...
> Did Danish eradicate Latin substratum?...
> Did Norman eradicate Danish substratum after William?...



No, and this is precisely what I mean : substrata matters.




JeanDeSponde said:


> You are *not* giving any root to this "myth", which is contrary to anything I have read yet.



So you certainly didn't read Dumézil (among almost all the others). I have already asked you to give a reference of a book about IE or PIE taking into account the impact of pre-IE populations, or only mentioning them. 






JeanDeSponde said:


> The conspiracy theory is stronger and stronger — so distant to my right that it's more and more blurred...



Which conspiracy ? Directed against who ? I'm lost...




JeanDeSponde said:


> * _Haudry_ — "son absurdité vient de ce qu'il n'obéit pas à  une problématique d'ordre rationnel et scientifique, mais repose sur une  idéologie politique contemporaine : c'est un ouvrage d'extrême droite.  Il ressortit de ce que l'on appelle au XXe siècle le fascisme (sous sa forme intellectuelle, cela va de soi)" — _Bernard Sergent_



That's perfectly true. 



JeanDeSponde said:


> _Edit_ —I'm happy I was right then: _"where were you speaking from..._"



I'm not sure I understand this one, can you be more explicit ?


----------



## Kentel

fdb said:


> Sadly, your modern Greek examples are virtually all wrong (if we are talking about phonology and not spelling). E.g. AG hippos > MG ipos; AG ksiphos > MG ksifos .....



Good for you show off. You obviously don't understand what I mean, or don't care, or both. Please concentrate, and if you have questions feel free to ask, I'll explain: the evolution if Greek during a time span of 3500 years is extremely slow, and is almost nothing in comparison with the evolution of French or English during 1000 years. Your story about Albanian immigrants etc is fascinating but completely anecdotical here; Albanians are not a substratum, they havn't conquered Greece so far.

This precise example illustrates perfectly well what I mean: Mycenaean gsiphe, ancient Greek ksiphos, modern ksifos. 3500 years. No comments.



fdb said:


> The correct transliteration is i-qo, presumably for /ikʷos/. So it  should be /ikʷos/ > /hippos/ > /ipos/, rather a big change, I  think.



You think wrong. 3500 years from iqo (if you want) to ipos... I've written a book about historical phonetics of French, you can yet download it on my website (not for long though), read it and you'll learn what is a real deep phonetic evolution, i comparison to which your iqo/ipos is a joke. The evolution of a labiovelar into a labial stop occurred also in Brittonic in a very short time, no wonder here.


----------



## Kentel

CapnPrep said:


> What do you mean, "censored"?  There's a copy in my local public library, and at least 5 copies in my university library. I guess the Ministry forgot to burn them? Or did you just mean it's out of print? That is also inaccurate, since (good news!) you can buy a revised and expanded edition from Les Éditions de la Forêt, which also publishes _Le Carnet de chants de Terre et Peuple_…



I had heard that it had been "retiré de la vente", I don't know really and I don't care. It's an instructive reading because it shows the ideological implications of the Indo-Aryan model. That's all. If you want to read something serious about the Indo-Europeans I thinks it's better to read Renfrew of Mallory.


----------



## fdb

Kentel said:


> Mycenaean gsiphe



qi-si-pe-e (dual).


----------



## Kentel

JeanDeSponde said:


> * _Haudry_ — "son absurdité vient de ce qu'il n'obéit pas à  une problématique d'ordre rationnel et scientifique, mais repose sur une  idéologie politique contemporaine : c'est un ouvrage d'extrême droite.  Il ressortit de ce que l'on appelle au XXe siècle le fascisme (sous sa forme intellectuelle, cela va de soi)" — _Bernard Sergent_



By the way, the book has a preface written by Dumézil. I hope you begin to foresee the problem...

Supporting the pre-IE substratum hypothesis, as I do, is in complete contradiction with the idea of the mannerbund (Dumézil, Haudry etc) of warlike horsemen invading Europe and submitting populations of stupid peasants honouring a mother goddess. The simple idea that this substratum could have had the slightest influence on the language and the culture of the heroes is merely a blaspheme. You see the point ? My conception of the question is radically opposed to that (= to the one of the far right).


----------



## CapnPrep

Kentel said:


> have you read any book related to the IE invasion of Europe or any book about IE linguistics which says a single word about the indigeneous populations of Europe ?


First of all, the original topic of this thread (which was probably already too broad) was the Gaulish substrate in French, and as we have seen, even though everyone agrees that there is some Gaulish substrate in French, claims about specific words and structures can be difficult or impossible to prove at this time depth given the evidence at hand. The problem is multiplied if you change the question to pre-IE substrate effects. I subscribe fully to the following remarks from Fortson's introductory book:


> The fact that there are so many gaps in our knowledge about the prehistory of the branches of PIE has also provided ample room for speculation about the causes of the more significant structural innovations undergone by particular branches. Many scholars have been attracted to the notion that some of these innovations are due not to the usual processes of language-internal change, but to influence from languages spoken by the original non-IE-speaking populations of the territories into which IE speakers migrated. These languages are called _substrate_ languages.
> 
> When dealing with vocabulary, this claim is normally uncontroversial: all would agree, for instance, that terms for local flora and fauna were borrowed from indigenous non-IE languages. In some cases, if enough such words can be plausibly identified we can dimly espy elements of phonology and morphology of the substrate language […] (Of course, this does not mean that we can attribute willy-nilly any word without a decent IE etymology to a substrate language.) But matters are not so straightforward with regard to structural changes to the grammatical system. It is certainly possible that substrate influence might be the source of some of them. But with very few exceptions, we know nothing about the pre-IE languages in the relevant regions, and so the claim of substrate influence, being untestable, is not very useful — it simply replaces one unknown with another. (p. 12)


I think this summarizes the mainstream position, which is not an ideological stance that dismisses substrate hypotheses out of hand, but a reluctance to spend a lot of time considering hypotheses that cannot be proven about things that cannot be known.


----------



## Kentel

CapnPrep said:


> First of all, the original topic of this thread (which was probably already too broad) was the Gaulish substrate in French, and as we have seen, even though everyone agrees that there is some Gaulish substrate in French, claims about specific words and structures can be difficult or impossible to prove at this time depth given the evidence at hand. The problem is multiplied if you change the question to pre-IE substrate effects. I subscribe fully to the following remarks from Fortson's introductory book:



I try to answer to all objections whatsoever, even if they are not directly related to the main topic of the thread; sorry for that.

Your comment sounds shokingly unscientific : everybody agrees to say that there is a substratic influence, let's not try to find out what and how. We've got already good books dealing with the unattested language (PIE) of unattested people, let's go on connecting words to PIE stems by all possible means, including the most absurd, and let's enjoy the folklore of blond haired warriors conquering Europe although everything (archaeology, genetics, etc) proves that it never happened. All that is perfectly realistic, coherent and devoid of ideological implications, as History has proved.

<...>



CapnPrep said:


> I think this summarizes the mainstream position,


certainly not 

<...>


----------



## CapnPrep

Kentel said:


> Your comment sounds shokingly unscientific : everybody agrees to say that there is a substratic influence, let's not try to find out what and how. We've got already good books dealing with the unattested language (PIE) of unattested people, let's go on connecting words to PIE stems by all possible means, including the most absurd, and let's enjoy the folklore of blond haired warriors conquering Europe although everything (archaeology, genetics, etc) proves that it never happened.


Enough with the caricatures. Your predecessors were not all ignoramuses with an Aryan agenda, and you are not the first one to say "let's try to find out". People, including many non-fascists, have been trying to find out about the Gaulish substrate in French for hundreds of years. There is no doubt more to discover, but a consequence of the scientific approach is that the data and methods available at any given time put limits on our knowledge, and beyond that there is only unscientific speculation. For your sake I hope you will find new data and new methods that will push back these limits, but for the moment I haven't seen any.


----------



## rbrunner

CapnPrep said:


> Your predecessors were not all ignoramuses with an Aryan agenda, and you are not the first one to say "let's try to find out". People, including many non-fascists, have been trying to find out about the Gaulish substrate in French for hundreds of years.



This search seems mainstream enough that there is a whole chapter dedicated to it in the Wikipedia article about the history of French:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_French#Roman_Gaul_.28Gallia.29

This chapter doesn't look too bad to me; at least I could not see any Aryans with political agendas there, and there are some documented substrat influences.


----------



## Kentel

rbrunner said:


> This chapter doesn't look too bad to me; at least I could not see any Aryans with political agendas there, and there are some documented substrat influences.



For information, I got the article "indo-europeans" almost completely re-written on the French wikipedia for racist propaganda; it's certainly in the history of the paper.


----------



## Kentel

CapnPrep said:


> Enough with the caricatures. Your predecessors  were not all ignoramuses with an Aryan agenda, and you are not the first  one to say "let's try to find out". People, including many  non-fascists, have been trying to find out about the Gaulish substrate  in French for hundreds of years. There is no doubt more to discover, but  a consequence of the scientific approach is that the data and methods  available at any give son time put limits on our knowledge, and beyond  that there is only unscientific speculation. For your sake I hope you  will find new data and new methods that will push back these limits, but  for the moment I haven't seen any.



Read better then : there is a list of words which I demonstrated are  Gaulish at the beginning of this thread (#27). These results were  published in a peer-reviewed and highly ranked academic journal (the  Revue Romane, published by Benjamins - and included in the  Philadelphia's list). I have many others, published or accepted for  publication or in course of writing, many other results about specific  words and gramatical features, about methodological problems etc, which results I  would gladly have shared with you, but none of you was the less  interested in that , and none of you has shown the faintest trace of  intellectual curiosity. You were all too busy to hunt me down.

I'm  used to exchange views on linguistic fora, I was open to debate, to  critics of all kinds, and I have answered to all of them, although they  were very negative and expressed with a most contempting tone  altogether, including the ones of the moderator. I just didn't realise  that your goal was, as you admitt yourself, to demonstrate that my whole  research was pointless and based upon erroneous premisses (or, as fdb  tried to do, that I was uncompetent, or, as JeandeSponde implied, that I  am a crypto-fascist).  

Therefore, I think that this discussion  has reached its end as far as I am concerned. I'm glad I received some  private messages of support during this debate, and I thank warmly the  people who did that. As for the rest, I won't be the fox in your hunt  any longer. 

That's all folks.


----------



## CapnPrep

Kentel said:


> I'm  used to exchange views on linguistic fora, I was open to debate, to  critics of all kinds, and I have answered to all of them, although they  were very negative and expressed with a most contempting tone  altogether


It seems to me that you can give as good as you get ("Good for you show off […] Please concentrate", "Read better", etc.), so you can drop the persecution complex… I have to say, being rather familiar with this forum, that you actually started out with quite a lot of good will in this discussion, and despite what you just said about our lack of intellectual curiosity, I think you had a good chance of reaching a receptive audience here. As you must know, you have chosen an uphill battle in your field, and you are going to run into much more forceful resistance from your colleagues in more formal circumstances. I hope you learn to how to face criticism without losing your cool as you have here, and how to exchange with skeptics who are potentially interested in your work, and whose opinions can help you refine and improve your ideas. I wish you the best of luck.


----------



## JeanDeSponde

Kentel said:


> Read better then : there is a list of words which I demonstrated are  Gaulish at the beginning of this thread (#27).


In your #27, you didn't say "demonstrate", but "propose":





Kentel said:


> Once you have invalidated and etymological  process (echoism here), then many words are left without etymologies,  and there you  can propose something new - which I did for the following  words :
> [list of proposals]


Maybe this is why there is so much misunderstanding: you take for demonstrated what has only been proposed so far.


----------



## Angelo di fuoco

fdb said:


> Italian and Portuguese tempo, Spanish tiempo also mean “weather”. *Russian время is “time” and “weather”, and similarly in other Slavic languages*. Modern Greek καιρός again has both meanings.


No. "Время" is only "time", "weather" is "погода", which has "год" (year) in it - and there are similar or related words in both Russian and other Slavic languages (defective "погод*и*ть", which is used only in the imperative - "to wait a little", "година" meaning "hour", "невзгода" - usually in the plural - meaning "a hard time"). "Вёдро" (rare) for "clear, warm weather" is related to German "Wetter" & English "weather".


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## berndf

Angelo di fuoco said:


> No. "Время" is only "time", "weather" is "погода", which has "год" (year) in it - and there are similar or related words in both Russian and other Slavic languages (defective "погод*и*ть", which is used only in the imperative - "to wait a little", "година" meaning "hour", "невзгода" - usually in the plural - meaning "a hard time"). "Вёдро" (rare) for "clear, warm weather" is related to German "Wetter" & English "weather".


But I think there are cognates of _время _that have weather as secondary meaning: _vreme_ in Serbian/Croatian and in Romanian.


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## Angelo di fuoco

In Romanian this meaning appears to have developed due to the polysemic nature of the Romance vocabulary (tempo/temps/tiempo meaning both weather & time), not because it was the original meaning of the Slavic loanword vreme. In Serbian/Croatian I would suppose the meaning of some Romance substrate.


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## berndf

Angelo di fuoco said:


> In Romanian this meaning appears to have developed due to the polysemic nature of the Romance vocabulary (tempo/temps/tiempo meaning both weather & time), not because it was the original meaning of the Slavic loanword vreme. In Serbian/Croatian I would suppose the meaning of some Romance substrate.


Possible. But I wouldn't shoot from the hip there.


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## Angelo di fuoco

Kentel said:


> Polish :
> 
> 1 = jeden (classic) but also "raz", which is more common in many situations.



"Raz" means "once", "one time", the actual etymological meaning is "a blow", comme in the French "coup", Italian "colpo", Spanish "golpe" - and particularly Eastern Catalan "cop" (un cop means "one time", but in Valencian "un colp" with the etymological l means "one blow"). Cf. German "auf einen Schlag" & Polish "razem" (together).


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## Angelo di fuoco

berndf said:


> Possible. But I wouldn't shoot from the hip there.



I'm not saying there's no etymological or semantical relation between the words for time & weather in the Slavic languages, but most use different words, often even with different stems.


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## Angelo di fuoco

Roel~ said:


> Out of all the languages I know with a postponed article, Rumanian has this feature, Turkish in a certain way (araba (car) - arabası (the car) ), Basque too. Does this mean that in Scandinavia most likely a language related to Turkish/Basque/original language of Rumanians was spoken or a language which was in it's turn influenced by one of them?


I don't know about Basque, but sı in arabası (su in other vocalic contexts) denotes a relation to the preceding noun (baba arabası = "dad's car"), not that the word is definite or indefinite. I think it's somewhat similar to the Status Constructus (genitive substitute) in Hebrew.


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## CapnPrep

Angelo di fuoco said:


> I don't know about Basque, but sı in arabası (su in other vocalic contexts) denotes a relation to the preceding noun (baba arabası = "dad's car"), not that the word is definite or indefinite.


I'm not sure if Roel~ meant to cite this form. I think he probably meant _araba*yı*_, with the accusative suffix _-(y)I_, not the 3rd person possessed suffix _-(s)I_. And _-(y)I_ is definitely a case ending, not a postposed definite article. It is used with pronouns, for example (_on*u *_"him/her/it", _ben*i*_ "me"), and in some cases it can be added to noun phrases introduced by the indefinite article _bir_.

And as you said, _araba*sı*_ also does not involve a postposed definite article. Turkish does not have a definite article of any kind.

Now maybe someone can explain to me how this relates to the Gaulish substrate in French…


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