Brythonic

Cette Nouvelle grammaire bretonne du dialecte de Vannes a été rédigée afin de décrire les bases de la grammaire du breton vannetais standard. Jusqu’à ce jour, les apprenants qui s’intéressent au breton vannetais devaient se référer à la fois à des grammaires vannetaises vieilles de plusieurs décennies, et à des grammaires modernes ne décrivant que le breton normalisé dit « KLT » (basé sur le « finistérien » comme disent les vannetisants).

Le présent ouvrage étudie le vannetais standard, langue littéraire en usage dans le Morbihan depuis plusieurs siècles. Afin de jeter un pont entre tradition et modernité, l’auteur a fait le choix d’utiliser conjointement l’orthographe unifiée du breton, désormais majoritaire, et l’orthographe traditionnelle vannetaise, plus familière pour les bretonnants de naissance et dans laquelle la majeure partie de la littérature vannetaise a été écrite.

Nous espérons que cette grammaire, déclinée en 341 paragraphes et illustrée de nombreux exemples d’emploi puisés notamment chez L. Herrieu, A. Guillevic & P. Le Goff, J.-M. Héneu ou encore J. Larboulette… contribuera à la pérennité du breton vannetais.

(Commande ici / Order here : http://www.editions-label-ln.com/?p=1049 )

""""This article provides phonetic, lexical and grammatical
evidence that Basque is an Indo-European language. It
provides a brief history of previous research into the
origins of Basque; a short description of the genesis of this
article; a description of the methodology adopted for the
present research; an overview of Michelena’s internal
reconstruction of Pre-Basque; 23 sets of chronologically
arranged sound laws linking Proto-Indo-European to Pre-
Basque; Indo-European etymologies for 75% of the Basque
native basic lexicon, with systematic cross-references to
regular sound laws; Indo-European etymologies of some
Basque bound morphemes, including case markers; a
discussion of the findings; and Indo-European etymologies
of 40 additional, non-basic lexical items.""""

Breton, Cornish and Welsh are thought to have originated in a language similar to the Gaulish Language in Continental Europe, known as Common Brittonic or Ancient British. We have little direct evidence of this Brittonic Language in England, that gave rise to Welsh and Cornish and Breton. The Bath 'curse tablet' is the only written example of Ancient British. The language is also known in place-names and in some personal names.

Unusually, the place-names don't preserve much of the language's grammar, and seem to date to a time when quite ordinary nouns had more specific or even religious meanings. An example of an Ancient British word is abonā for a river, likely with the stress on the final syllable. This is the origin of the name Avon, the name of several rivers in England. This implies that the word had some more important meaning than just being any river, this may be reflected in the grammar of the word as the ending-nā is probably later, so 'a river of abounding water' or similar? Modern Brythonic languages are very different from the Gaulish and Ancient British languages, and it often isn't possible to trace a development in Brythonic back to Gaulish. Similarly, a lot of the vocabulary isn't the same, whereas Gaulish tends towards IE roots similar to the Latin forms, such as-cue/-pe 'and', Brythonic has

Despite being dormant during the nineteenth century, the Cornish language has been recently recognised by the British Government as a living regional language after a long period of revival.
The first part of this paper discusses the history of traditional Cornish and the reasons for its decline and dismissal. The second part offers an overview of the revival movement since its beginnings in 1904 and analyses the current situation of the language in all possible domains.

The article discusses the gender of suffixes deriving abstract nouns of the Brittonic languages Welsh, Breton and Cornish against the theoretical background of functional gender theories. These theories assume that gender plays a role in the classification of the nominal lexicon, i.e. it classifies nouns according to the feature [±particularized] thus expressing nominal aspect. The effects of this classification may be observed in abstract nouns in Modern High German, but the feature is assumed to be ultimatively inherited from Proto-Indo-European.
Although all Brittonic languages display remarkable similarities with regard to their nominal morphology, the gender of suffixes and the restructuring which each language experienced varies considerably between them. The association of feminine (and neuter) gender with abstractness was probably already lost in Proto-Brittonic. Abstract nouns are predominantly masculine in Welsh and Cornish, while the higher proportion of feminine patterns in Breton is largely due to French influence. Further, Breton points to the emergence of a functional gender system within some parts of the lexicon.

Intensifiers and reflexives have been studied as features both in areal linguistics and in the context of substratum hypotheses. While typical SAE languages differentiate between intensifiers and reflexives, English, Welsh and Irish
use complex intensifiers for both functions. This article discusses the two strategies with regard to their diachronic developments, starting with PIE. Complex intensifiers
are first recorded in Old British and emerge only later in English and Irish. These complex intensifiers are then increasingly used as reflexives, constituting an instance of areal divergence from SAE between the late Middle Ages
and the early modern period. Breton, on the other hand, maintains its intensifier – reflexive differentiation due to areal convergence.

This revised version mostly expands and corrects the discussion of the succession and family relationships of the early Anglian kings of Bernicia; the emendations have a marginal bearing only on the general proposition regarding the dating of the siege. Contradictory evidence in the oldest sources has led to the assumption that the siege of Lindisfarne, during which Urien, King of Rheged, was murdered, took place in the late 590s. So too the Battle of Alt Clud Ford is normally assigned a date from 574 to c590. This paper reassesses the sources and proposes a date in the late 540s for both events, resolving, inter alia, problems regarding the time frame for the lives of "king" Arthur and his contemporaries.

This paper explores the history of the Middle Welsh preterite impersonal -pwyt in which -p- has been unexplained until now. By looking at the expected development of the preterite impersonal I argue that -pwyt was actually borrowed from the perfect paradigm and subsequently remodelled to fit in with the preterite paradigm.
This paper was presented at the 7th Colloquium of the Societas Celto-Slavica in Bangor, and the 34th Harvard Celtic Colloquium.

This article provides phonetic, lexical and grammatical
evidence that Basque is an Indo-European language. It
provides a brief history of previous research into the
origins of Basque; a short description of the genesis of this
article; a description of the methodology adopted for the
present research; an overview of Michelena’s internal
reconstruction of Pre-Basque; 23 sets of chronologically
arranged sound laws linking Proto-Indo-European to Pre-
Basque; Indo-European etymologies for 75% of the Basque
native basic lexicon, with systematic cross-references to
regular sound laws; Indo-European etymologies of some
Basque bound morphemes, including case markers; a
discussion of the findings; and Indo-European etymologies
of 40 additional, non-basic lexical items

My article  "Evidence for Basque as an Indo-European Language" was published in the Journal of Indo-European Studies (volume 41) as a discussion paper, i.e., it was followed by other specialists' comments, and by my reply to such criticisms. To provide a more complete picture of my research on this topic, I provide my reply to criticisms as well.

I argue that despite their traditional verb-first vs. verb second partition, Welsh and Breton both instantiate a ban on verb-first and I present an analysis of these two languages as fundamentally verb second. In this view, so-called verb first orders
prototypically illustrated by Welsh result from inconspicuous strategies to fill in the preverbal position, whereas traditional verb second prototypically illustrated by Breton results from conspicuous strategies to fill in the preverbal position. I show that both conspicuous and inconspicuous verb second orders are present in both Welsh and Breton. The difference in word order between Welsh and Breton is reduced to (i) a lexical parameter, that is availability of a free preverbal expletive particle in Welsh, and (ii) a syntactic parameter: Breton allows for the creation of expletives by short movement, a parameter shared with Icelandic and other languages instantiating stylistic fronting.

A description of the Middle Cornish manuscript found amongst the Puleston Papers by John Mackechnie in 1949, now Add. MS. 46397 in the British Library. The manuscript is a sixteenth-century translation into Cornish of thirteen homilies published by Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London in 1555 forming the latter part of his A profitable and necessary doctrine, with certayne homelyes adioyned therevnto. (Only one of these originals was his own, the majority by John Harpesfeld, Archdeacon of London and two by Oliver Pendilton.) An analysis is made of the historical context in which the translation was made, the likely provenance and dating of the manuscript and the extent of collaboration by co-translators with the principal translator John Tregear. The replacement of the expected thirteenth homily by a translation of an unknown English original on the same subject is also discussed. The quality of the translation and the effects of this upon the syntax and vocabulary of the Cornish homilies is described, including a discussion of the extent to which the macaronic character of the text is deliberate. The manuscript is examined as evidence for linguistic change in Middle Cornish, addressing two major areas: the morphology of personal pronouns, verb forms and conjugated prepositions; the major phonological features of the Cornish in the manuscript, principally the loss of vowel quality in unstressed syllables and the incidence of the sound-change s/j as an effect of palatalisation.

"We address the syntax and parametric variation underlying the verb ‘have’ from the empirical domain of Breton diachronic and dialectal variation. We introduce the Celtic agreement system characterized by Complementarity Effects and show why Breton
‘have’ is special among the Celtic language and at the same time unique among Breton verbs. We propose syntactic tests for decomposing the structure of ‘have’. With these tools in hand, we show that ‘have’ across Breton dialects appears to trace an ordered path in UG parameter space from a strictly analytic 'mihi est' to a fully lexicalized ‘have’. We develop the predictions our proposal makes internally to each dialect, and list predictions to be checked in future data collection."

A  comprehensive Bibliography (over 1,000 items) which is fully searchable on tags. Books, book sections, articles, websites, webpages, and some arts resources though little fiction, Can be used to take citations or make your own bibliography. Annotated. Extends to the full Mabinogion, but mainly focused on the Four Branches of the Mabinogi.

The Bibliography can now be seen on my own website www.mabinogistudy.com/bibliog

Abstract: I argue that despite their traditional verb-first vs. verb second partition, Welsh and Breton both instantiate a ban on verb-first and I present an analysis of these two languages as fundamentally verb second. In this view, so-called verb first orders prototypically illustrated by Welsh result from inconspicuous strategies to fill in the preverbal position, whereas traditional verb second prototypically illustrated by Breton results from conspicuous strategies to fill in the preverbal position. I show that both conspicuous and inconspicuous verb second orders are present in both Welsh and Breton. The difference in word order between Welsh and Breton is reduced to (i) a lexical parameter, that is availability of a free preverbal expletive particle in Welsh, and (ii) a syntactic parameter: Breton allows for the creation of expletives by short movement, a parameter shared with Icelandic and other languages instantiating stylistic fronting.

We address the syntax and parametric variation underlying the verb 'have' from the empirical domain of Breton diachronic and dialectal variation. We introduce the Celtic agreement system characterized by Complementarity Effects and show why Breton 'have' is special among the Celtic language and at the same time unique among Breton verbs. We propose syntactic tests for decomposing the structure of 'have'. With these tools in hand, we show that 'have' across Breton dialects appears to trace an ordered path in UG parameter space from a strictly analytic mihi est to a fully lexicalized 'have'. We develop the predictions our proposal makes internally to each dialect, and list predictions to be checked in future data collection.

This thesis seeks to address a small number of highly significant, unresolved issues in the consonantal system of the Cornish language, providing an analysis of the relevant sound changes during the crucial formative periods of their development. These studies draw upon the extant records of Old, Middle and Late Cornish and employ the methods of comparative historical phonology to reconstruct the most likely sequence of sound changes based upon the variant orthography of the various documents and other remnants of the language. The comparative element of the work relies upon the reconstruction of the phonological system of the language with reference to the attested languages most closely related to it. In this study, this necessarily focuses most closely upon the other extant Brythonic languages (Welsh and Breton), with occasional reference to the Goidelic languages. This process also includes non-Celtic languages where relevant: notably Latin, English and French, from which a great number of words were borrowed into Cornish. Specifically, the thesis comprises the following principal areas of study: (1) pre-occlusion in Middle and Late Cornish, the phenomenon by which n, nn became dn and by which m, mm became bm in certain phonetic environments; (2) the confusion of initial b and m in certain words in Middle and Late Cornish; (3) rare confusions of s and th in medial and final positions, principally in late Middle Cornish; and (4) an analysis of the progression of sound changes by which Old Cornish d, t became represented as Middle Cornish s, g and other spellings.