The Accents of Celtic
New Light on the Older and Oldest Stages
Patrizia de Bernardo Stempel
- English
- PDF
- Über iOS und Android verfügbar
The Accents of Celtic
New Light on the Older and Oldest Stages
Patrizia de Bernardo Stempel
Über dieses Buch
The key to the phonetic development of a given word across time lies in its accentuation. As the Old Celtic remains do not indicate their accent, it has to be deduced from their sound-changes. This book investigates for the first time in depth 14 Celtic phenomena resulting from the weakening of unstressed syllables (vocalic assimilations and reductions up to syncope, degeminations, 'w'-loss, nasal effacement, metathesis of liquids) and the strengthening of stressed ones (vocalic epenthesis and diphthongizations, geminations of consonants). The stress-patterns emerging from them are corroborated by the originally Celtic toponymy in today's non-Celtic-speaking countries and allow us to reconstruct the Celtic subfamily of languages by drawing a much simpler accentual model which also finds typological support. With its diachronic discussion of more than 3, 600 words the book represents, moreover, a big help in the understanding of Celtic lexicon and onomastics.